The Foreign Service Journal, April 2005

W hat would you do if your entire household effects shipment (“HHE” in State Department parlance) was dropped in the sea? Like most peo- ple, I never really worried about that possibility — until it happened to me in the summer of 2003. Eighteen months later, the after- math of that experience is finally over, and I want to share some of the lessons I learned from it. First, the gruesome details. I transferred in July 2003 from Libreville, Gabon, to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. As with everyone else leaving post, my HHE was packed in Libreville by the embassy’s contract mover. It was scheduled to be shipped “post-to-post” — without going through the department’s logistics center in Europe — a cou- ple of days after I departed. The General Services Officer in Libreville and the director of the moving company both assured me that the shipment would be in Malaysia by the time I got there six weeks later. They were wrong. What I know about what hap- pened I’ve pieced together from information gathered for me by the FSN shipping clerk in Libreville. My shipment was loaded in a con- tainer in mid-July and put on a freighter bound for the port of Douala, Cameroon, a few hundred miles up the African coast. At Douala, the container was trans- shipped to another freighter, which set sail for Pointe Noire, in the Republic of the Congo, a few hun- dred miles south of Libreville. There, for reasons no one has ever been able to explain, the container with my HHE was transshipped again. As it was being transferred at Pointe Noire, the cable suspending the container from the crane broke. The container fell to the edge of the ship’s deck and broke open, and about three-quarters of my HHE fell into the harbor. The rest scat- tered out onto the deck of the freighter. I learned of the “mishap,” as the mover called it, by e-mail on the August afternoon that I departed the U.S. for Malaysia. I received two partial shipments during my first couple of months in Kuala Lumpur. The first one — what I think of as the “dry” shipment — included all the boxes from the original container that fell onto the deck of the ship. Many had been damaged or destroyed by the force of the impact. The second — the “wet” shipment — arrived in October after weeks of pressure from me and Embassy Libreville. It was a mass of sodden, rotting goo — items that had been fished from the harbor and loaded into a container without being dried. Not surprising- ly, nearly all of the things in the sec- ond shipment were ruined, though a few items were salvageable. Rough- ly a third of the boxes in my original HHE shipment never arrived at all, and are probably still sitting on the bottom of the harbor in Pointe Noire. A representative from the depart- ment’s Claims Office told the GSO in Kuala Lumpur that mine was the largest loss sustained by a depart- ment employee in 2003. Whether true or not, it took me four months of steady effort to assemble a claim that came to 200 pages and more than $36,000 in damage and loss. That’s when the really unpleasant stuff began. My insurer, USAA, completed its processing of my claim in three months, and sent me a check for about $20,000. I then argued with USAA for another four months, and managed to get another $8,000 out of them. The Claims Office kept promising me speedy processing, but ultimately took near- ly 11 months to do its work — and then sent me a check for the prince- ly sum of $550. Ironically, I was “lucky.” I was paid nearly 80 percent of my original Cause and (Household) Effects B Y T HOMAS F. D AUGHTON A P R I L 2 0 0 5 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 15 FS K NOW -H OW You can’t prevent your household effects from being lost or damaged, but you can take steps in advance to minimize your losses.