The Foreign Service Journal, April 2010

A P R I L 2 0 1 0 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 29 Outside the airport, it was even more grueling. We had to make split-second decisions on who was permitted to be evacuated. You would think that this would be sim- ple. However, after seeing families pass their American-citizen children down the line in an attempt to have ineligible relatives evacuated, it quickly became clear that we had no choice but to block out the emotional pain and be firm with them. When a typical family of four arrived, the conversation would go like this: Conoff: Monsieur, you have two American-citizen chil- dren. Only one of the parents may accompany the chil- dren. You must decide now who is going and who will be left behind. Parent: But we all have to go! We have nowhere to go. Our house is destroyed. We have no food, no water, noth- ing. We will die here. Conoff: I’m sorry, but we are only allowed to permit one escort per group. You must decide now be- cause there are thousands more waiting to be evacuated behind you. Then they cry, yell and quickly separate. You would look past their shoulder and see 3,000 more fami- lies waiting to have the same 10-sec- ond conversation. It was a horrible feeling to break up families like that. Fed up with the mass chaos on the tarmac, one night we entered the defunct terminal (ducking through the hole where the baggage conveyor belt exited) and gath- ered all of the stanchions, chairs, tables and podiums we could find to set up a system of waiting isles and a few more checkpoints. Meanwhile, reinforcements were arriving daily. The communications team set up laptops with iridium satel- lites, allowing us to e-mail the manifests instead of writing F O C U S We had to make split-second decisions on who was permitted to be evacuated.