The Foreign Service Journal, April 2022

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2022 49 smiling faces against the back- drop of war-inflicted misery. Peru, by comparison, offered a completely differ- ent experience. Jeannette’s photos reveal outings with girlfriends—in pants!—to the mountains of Peru and Bolivia with roadside pit-stop picnics with watermelons and scenes of iconic Catholic churches. She can be found in a crowd of Andean women, double- braids down their backs and clad in traditional hats, ponchos and layered skirts, or floating to shore on a caballito de totora (or “little reed horse”), a reed balsa fishing boat in Lake Titicaca. When she flew to Cusco, she writes of “the most thrilling plane ride I’ve ever taken,” where she had to use oxygen bags during the flight because the planes were not adequately pressurized at more than 10,000 feet in those days. Many travelers to Cusco will empathize with her coming down with soroche , having “severe pains in stomach, headache and a strong desire to die.” After acclimatizing, her travels took her to remote villages of Puno, Pisac and San Salvador, witnessing indigenous dance, dress and ways of life that the modern traveler struggles to expe- rience authentically. She writes enthusiastically of being chased after mass by men in “large fur hats” who exploded “some kind of dynamite without being too careful where they threw it,” much to the amusement of the locals. When Jeannette reached Machu Picchu, taking in the terraces and temples, the American profes- sor Hiram Bingham, who had rediscovered and introduced the site to North Americans in 1911, was still alive and giving lectures at Yale. One can only dream of seeing Machu Picchu without today’s throngs of tourists scattered over its grounds. Although she had requested transfer to Spanish- or French- speaking Europe or Africa, the State Department sent Jeannette to Cairo. In 1952 she boarded a ship in New York after her home leave, cruised to Alexandria and continued to Cairo in the same year as Gamal Abdel Nasser’s revolution, the dethroning of the Muhammad Ali dynasty and the end of British rule over Egypt. She lived with a colleague in an apartment near the embassy, located in Zamalek, with dining room furniture that on first glance has a striking resemblance to tables and chairs still issued today. Jeannette joined the Gezira Club, a famous sporting club frequented by today’s embassy community, and played golf on her weekends. She saw mummies, marveled at Saqqara’s pyra- mids, endured back pain from camel rides and befriended the Marine Security Guards. Her photos show her standing by the Nile, walking alongside men in galabeyas (Egyptian kaftans) in front of massive pharaonic statues in Luxor. They could easily be modern photos altered with popular filters. Notes from the Field In typical Foreign Service fashion, Jeannette visited friends from the diplomatic corps posted to interesting places. From Cairo, she traveled to nearby ancient cities of Damascus, Beirut, Jerusalem, Jericho and Bethlehem, places most Americans had only heard about in church or history books. She flew into Beirut from Port Said in 1953, having to fly over the Mediterranean instead of taking the land route through the Sinai because “Arabs and Jews are still feuding,” and the Egyptians would not have let her return. In another “thrilling” plane ride, she feared they “would never find the airstrip among the mountains in Beirut.” Leaving Lebanon’s cedars, she drove via a modern highway to Damascus while passing the “historic ruins of Solomon and the Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans, Arabs, Crusaders and Tartar hordes.” Damascus, to Jeannette, was modern and clean despite being one of the oldest cities in the world. She was struck by the Umayyad Mosque because of its significance to both Christians and Muslims. The mosque contained the tomb of the head of Saint John the Baptist and was also where “Moslems stand around and pray like we would,” waiting for the “end of the world.” She noted that Muslims also believed that “the Prophet Mohamed [Peace Be Upon Him] will come ... for first judgment Jeannette Lafrance on the way to her assignment in Egypt in 1952. COURTESYOFTHELAFRANCEFAMILY