The Foreign Service Journal, April 2016

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2016 15 and beat me over my head. I thought they were going to kill me. They took me away.”These are the stirring words of the play’s main character, Neda, as she pleads for asylum from a country where her village has been pillaged, her loved ones murdered, and her own emotional and physical well-being severely violated. The country setting is never revealed in this 75-minute drama, an intentional omission to underscore how truly wide- spread this phenomenon is. According to the play’s writer and director, Luigi Laraia, Neda represents the one-in- three-women who experience physical or sexual abuse in their lifetime. “I wanted to create a stage produc- tion that was ferociously real, to the point of being unbearable, just as gender violence is,” says Laraia. Hats off to Laraia and his cast, local D.C. actors Richard Tanenbaum, Karen Lawrence and Sean Gabbert, for doing just that. The play picked up steam in 2015 and has now been performed at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, George Mason University’s Center for the Study of Gender and Conflict, a Vital Voices event, Washington, D.C.’s Capital Fringe Fest 2015, the United Nations in New York, the Kenyatta Inter- national Convention Centre and the U.N. headquarters for Africa in Nairobi and the Frauenmu- seum (Women’s Museum) in Bonn. Its most recent showing was onMarch 31 at the HarrisTheater in Fairfax, Virginia. With a panel discussion after each performance, “Neda Wants to Die” has proven a useful tool for inspiring open and frank discussion about gender- based violence. —Maria C. Livingston, Director of Professional Policy Issues State Ranks Second in Customer Satisfaction Survey T he results are in for the annual American Customer Satisfaction Index, and Americans are less satis- fied with the services their government provides for the third consecutive year. The federal government scored 63.9 on a customer satisfaction scale of 0 to 100, a nine-year low. Despite the overall negative rating, there was improvement in several spe- cific areas. One was “clarity and acces- sibility of information conveyed by the government,” and another was “efficiency of services provided.” As far as the individual departments are concerned, Interior received the highest rating, with 75, while the depart- ments of Veterans Affairs, Justice and Treasury received the lowest, at 60, 59 and 55, respectively. With a score of 71, the State Depart- ment came in second out of 13 depart- ments rated, followed by the departments of Defense and Homeland Security. n — Shannon Mizzi, Editorial Assistant “Neda Wants to Die” cast members, from left: Karen Lawrence, Sean Gabbert and Richard Tanenbaum. COURTESYOFLUIGILARAIA