The Foreign Service Journal, May 2023

58 MAY 2023 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL participation in Expo 2020 Dubai “made possible by the gener- osity of the Emirati government.” Our new ambassador in the UAE, John Rakolta Jr., and Senior Official for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Michelle Giuda had delivered. Now it was our turn. The team had less than nine months to produce a pavilion that would be ready on opening day, Oct. 20, 2020. A Ticking Clock, and COVID-19 Ambassador Rakolta was the right man to have in Abu Dhabi at the right time. A builder by profession, he was used to getting it done on time and on budget. Back in Washington, Secretary Pompeo had asked State Department Counselor and then Senior Official for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs T. Ulrich Brechbühl to drive the project home. I moved to Dubai on temporary duty and was permanently assigned as the deputy commissioner general. Through biweekly video conferences and agile project management software, Ambassador Rakolta and Counselor Brechbühl tracked the project’s accelerated timetable. In March 2020, they (Ambassador Rakolta now dual-hatted as the com- missioner general) poured the pavilion’s first concrete. They engaged with and reassured the UAE business community, which had grown a bit frustrated by the “will-we-won’t-we” nature of U.S. participation. (The Consul General’s 2018 event to unveil the now-discarded design from the now-discarded first partner was still fresh in their minds.) We were all moving as fast as we could, but would we make it on time? On March 13, 2020, COVID-19 struck. Flights between the United States and the rest of the world were halted, and the UAE went into a restrictive at-home lockdown. BIE members convened virtually and voted to postpone the global mega event by one year; Expo 2020 Dubai would now open on Oct. 1, 2021, and with the same name. We, and the rest of the world, would have to figure out how to safely construct and operate the pavilion during a global pandemic, but at least we had some extra time to figure it out. On Nov. 19, 2020, Counselor Brechbühl returned to the UAE with an interagency delegation for a pavilion handover ceremony and celebration in front of Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest build- ing. Although we were one of the last countries to start construc- tion of our 40,000-square-foot building, we were one of the first to finish the shell and core. It was now time for our exhibit designers to fabricate and install the 20,000-square-foot exhibition. During 2021, alongside exhibit fabrication and installation, our pavilion operator was hiring employees and identifying contractors to staff the pavilion and its retail, food and beverage, and event teams. My colleagues in Washington and Dubai, espe- cially Maya Ndao-Fall, were working with our cultural partner, Global Ties USA, to select the youth ambassadors who had been nominated by local chapters as pavilion guides (see the dispatch from Caitlyn Phung, “Expo 2020 Dubai: A Youth Ambassador’s Perspective, ” in the March 2022 FSJ ) and the cultural acts that would perform at the USA Pavilion. Our foreign commercial and agricultural teams were busy recruiting cities, states, companies, and associations to join trade delegations to visit the UAE during the expo in the midst of a global pandemic. All of us were trying to answer the question: “Was it and would it be safe to travel?” We brought in colleagues from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention fromMuscat and Riyadh, along with our regional medical officer from Abu Dhabi, to create COVID guidelines for operations and events. We recognized that we could never completely ensure visitor and staff safety, but we could mitigate risk through vaccinations and testing protocols, capacity limits, and social behavior and communications. We would continuously reassess the COVID guidelines and kept the pavilion open throughout the six-month event for visitors, only temporarily suspending indoor and outdoor representational events during the January 2022 Omicron spike. The COVID guidelines we developed would serve as a model for the U.S. Mission to the UAE’s own representational events, as well as a benchmark for other international participants. I’m still amazed that we were able to do as much as we did, without any Youth Ambassadors with (front, from left) Pavilion Director Kevin Solon, Consul General Meghan Gregonis, Commissioner General Bob Clark, Chargé d’Affaires a.i. Sean Murphy, Deputy Commissioner General Matthew Asada; (back, from left) Jim Core, Maya Ndao-Fall, Deputy Pavilion Director Sawyer Franz, and Youth Ambassador Project Manager Shannon McNaught. USAPAVILIONEXPO2020DUBAI