The Foreign Service Journal, June 2003

to each problem or com- plaint. I then called the appropriate office in the Administration Bureau to obtain further background. If I felt that the AFSA member was not being treated fairly under the reg- ulations, I pleaded on his or her behalf. Sometimes, but not always, I did this in the form of a letter on AFSA letterhead. As I gained more experi- ence, I started to question some of the regulations themselves. I found that the civil servants working in the “A” Bureau were gener- ally receptive and willing to talk about the issues. I was never rejected because I spoke on behalf of AFSA. This was true even though they were under no obliga- tion to take care of me, or even return my calls. There was nothing structured. It was all a matter of developing personal relationships. Here are some of the main issues that I handled dur- ing my time on the committee: Kindergarten Allowances. A good example of my questioning of the regulations involved the overseas edu- cational allowance for pre-school, essentially kinder- garten. In the early 1970s, I received mail from many AFSA members in Western Europe who were paying $1,500 to $2,000 out-of-pocket to send their children to private kindergartens in Paris, London, etc. That was a lot of money in those days. The regulation covering overseas educational allowances stipulated that pre-school was not covered. I inquired as to the basis for this regulation. The educa- tional allowance people explained to me that the legisla- tion directed the department to provide American citizens serving abroad the same facilities they enjoyed at home in the U.S. Surveys conducted by what was then the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in all 50 states deter- mined that only a minority of them provided free public school kindergarten. Therefore, the State Department was barred from covering kinder- garten overseas under the edu- cational allowance. I asked to see the data from the surveys and discovered that the latest information was dated 1955, the year I entered the Foreign Service. I then checked the most recent HEW data and found that as of 1968, most states were provid- ing free public school kindergarten. When I presented this to the allowance people, they acknowledged that a revision of the regulations would be appropriate. The bureaucracy had never bothered to do a new survey because nobody had complained. At some point after that, kindergarten started to be covered. This experience further convinced me that a union was needed to prod the bureaucracy to do its job. Shipping Allowance Distortions. On the other hand, I encountered an injustice in the household effects shipping allowance that I was not able to correct on my own. From complaint letters, I found that most single employees in the Foreign Service Specialist cat- egory, with 20 or more years of service (and accumu- lated personal effects to match), had smaller overseas shipping allowances than junior, married FSOs with less than five years of service. When I argued for a change, I was told that nothing could be done, as F O C U S 36 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U N E 2 0 0 3 Career Ambassador Herman J. “Hank” Cohen, who entered the Foreign Service in 1955, was a labor-report- ing officer at four African posts. He also served as ambas- sador to Senegal and the Gambia, and assistant secretary for African affairs, among many other positions. Since retiring from the Foreign Service in 1993, he has worked as senior adviser to the Global Coalition for Africa and is the author of Intervening in Africa: Superpower Peacekeeping in a Troubled Continent (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). He currently teaches at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and does consulting work for U.S. business in Africa. Herman J. Cohen, 1977. Cohen with the prime minister of Mozambique, 2000.