The Foreign Service Journal, June 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JUNE 2020 13 extended a hold on summer transfers until at least the end of June, leaving hundreds of Foreign Service families to wonder when they might depart for their next assignments. By the beginning of April, the State Department had evacuated 6,000 U.S. diplomats and family members since the start of the outbreak, about half of its overseas presence, according to an April 1 Wall Street Journal report. The Foreign Service community— overseas and stateside, American and local staff—has not been able to avoid the coronavirus. As of May 12, the State Department reported that five employees had died from COVID-19, including two in the United States and three overseas. Their names have not been released. The department also reported 111 current coronavirus cases among State Department employees in the United States, and 160 overseas, while 221 peo- ple had recovered overseas. For people recovering in the United States, that data is not being tracked as of May 12. U.S. Ambassador to Burkina Faso Andrew Young, the first U.S. ambassador to learn he had the virus, “was sealed in an isolation chamber and loaded into an evacuation flight” out of Ouagadou- gou on March 25, The New York Times reported on April 4. By April 10, Emba ssy Ouagadougou tweeted that Amb. Young had fully recovered. “My treatment is not the same treat- ment that your average Burkinabe will receive in the coming challenges, because the situation is going to get more difficult in the couple of weeks ahead of us,” Amb. Young told the Times . “So I carry that.” In early May, most State Department employees in the Washington, D.C., area continued to work from home and wondered when they would be allowed to return to their offices. Returning Home from Senegal in the Midst of a Pandemic D an Honig, an assistant professor of international development at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is one of thousands of Americans whom the State Department helped return home from overseas during the COVID-19 pandemic. On April 7, Honig tweeted the following story (edited for length and style, and used with permis- sion from the author). My family and I took an @StateDept evacuation flight from Senegal to the U.S. I’d like to say a few things about that, focusing on 1) the people who work for State (wonderful) and 2) the impression it left me about the coordi- nated U.S. airport response to COVID- 19 (disturbing). First …my family and I were and remain fine. Like, I imagine, many of my fellow passengers, we took the flight over worries about Senegal’s closed borders and what might happen if things got bad there and we couldn’t get back to America for some time. … On April 3, we joined 150 or so other Americans … at Dakar’s very empty airport. The repurposed cargo plane that we entered that morning was operated by the U.S. Department of State’s Opera- tional Medicine team. We all wore masks, the evacuation team PPE. After everyone received a medical check, the [rep from State] addressed us all from the front of the plane—he had to shout, as cargo planes don’t come with speakers. “Listen up! This isn’t a normal flight, and we’re not flight attendants—we’re medical professionals. Our job is to get you home safe. Please clean up after yourselves—we only have a few hours in the U.S. before we take off again; we need every minute we can get.” “How many days you been doing this—flying back and forth evacuating people?” a passenger asked. “Six. Liberia yesterday, somewhere else day before that, another place tomorrow,” the man replied. “Do you get overtime for this?” another passenger asked. The man laughed. “We’re govern- ment employees. No. This is our job.” He paused for a moment. “This is why I signed up for this job. I’m proud to do this—I’m honored to help y’all get home.” Then something remarkable hap- pened—someone started clapping. And then a plane full of people joined in. We were applauding this individual, and his sacrifice, and his help to us. But I was applauding something else, too—and I bet I wasn’t the only one. I was applauding a government that managed to have people like this man working for it, and the hope it gave me DANHONIG An employee of the State Department’s Operational Medicine team assists Americans on a flight home from Senegal.