The Foreign Service Journal, May 2014

34 MAY 2014 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL L A O S The Thank You Card By Joseph De Maria Hometown: Lakewood, N.J. I was the sole consular officer in Vientiane in the late 1990s. At the time, Laotians who had been admitted to the United States as refugees in the 1970s and 1980s had established themselves there and were petitioning for relatives, often elderly parents, to immigrate. I adjudicated hundreds of such cases. One day, when I opened my mail at the office, there was a “thank you” card with about 10 signatures, some of adults and some of young children. It simply said, “Thank you for sending us our grandparents.” M E X I C O Three Generations By Manav Jain, Consular Officer Hometown: Villa Park, Calif. During my first tour, at Embassy Mexico City in 2003, a Fili- pino man came in to notarize his recently departed father’s mili- tary service documents, which indicated that he had fought on the U.S. side during World War II. In reviewing the paperwork, I realized that his father was potentially a U.S. citizen. Congress had granted U.S. citizenship to certain Filipinos who fought alongside the United States in World War II. On confirming the regulations and qualifications, we post- humously made his father a U.S. citizen. Because the father spent time in the U.S. after the war, the man himself became a U.S. citizen from birth, which in turn granted his own son U.S. citizenship. We created three generations of Americans that day. G H A N A Accra’s Infrastructure Upgrade By Heather Byrnes Hometown: Anchorage, Alaska Among my best Foreign Service memories is the day I heard that a U.S. company had been awarded the tender for a $595 million project to revamp the water and sanitation infrastructure in Ghana’s capital, Accra. This would boost U.S. exports, lead to about 3,000 American jobs and provide a much-needed fix to Accra’s annual flooding and resulting cholera outbreaks. I served for four years in Ghana as commercial counselor, accompanied by my husband and three children. Although we loved the country, it wasn’t an easy tour: I contracted typhoid and encephalitis. But it was all worth it when I heard the news of the water project. B E L G I U M The Secretary’s Entourage By Ted Wilkinson Hometown: Washington, D.C. In June 1973, Secretary of State William Rogers visited Copen- hagen, and then continued on to Brussels to attend a NATOmin- isterial meeting. He and his Washington entourage occupied most of the 20-odd seats for the U.S. delegation at the NATOmeeting. I was in the last seat, as a very junior notetaker, when Rogers passed a note to Ambassador Rumsfeld, seated next to him. The note travelled with puzzled glances all the way down the 20 seats to me. It read: “What did the Dane say yesterday?” I did the obvious—called Embassy Copenhagen for a reply, and then sent a follow-up cable query. The reply came in the next morning, with all the possible answers the embassy could come up with. What I relished was the slug line on the cable: “For Secretary Rogers and Ted Wilkinson.” U Z B E K I S T A N Teaching English By George Wilcox Hometown: Tucson, Ariz. In 1996, working at Embassy Tashkent as the first United States Information Agency Regional English Language Officer for Central Asia and the Caucasus, I organized a national English teachers’ conference for Uzbeki- stan, focusing on business appli- cations. During the conference I told everyone our office was too small to organize more confer- ences; but we could help them, if they wanted to form a national association and organize such conferences themselves. Within six months, with our office serving as the primary catalyst, they had formed their