The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2005

riculum, feedback, and in the final weeks of study, the opportunity for some to learn at an “ulpan”— the intensive Hebrew courses set up throughout Israel for new immigrants. While bickering among the teachers continues, eating up significant amounts of class time, the students report arriving at post comfortable in the language and, as a result, able to function more effec- tively at their jobs. I am sad that it took so much effort to produce a response and am especially disheartened that student complaints were dismissed for so long. But I am pleased that the dissent eventually brought change. This is what taxpayers and the Foreign Service deserve from FSI. Carol Volk Economic Bureau Washington, D.C. u My Two Cents on Area Studies I am a JO, a member of the 120th A-100 class, and I have a comment to make about the two-week area stud- ies (Near East/North Africa) that I attended. Unfortun- ately, there was next to nothing on Turkey or Iran. Dr. Bechtold did a wonderful job teaching and coordinating the course, but I really felt I should have been in anoth- er class because of that omission. I believe that course encompasses far too many coun- tries and should be divided up. I guess had I been in the language program, I would have gotten more on Turkey, so I know that the information is there — it just needs to be in the two-week course. That’s my two cents. Linda Fenton Embassy Ankara u Nursing a Career & Family: Winds of Change The other day a simple sign on a bathroom stall brought me up short. Nursing station, the sign read. This was no plush bathroom at Neiman Marcus, mind you, but a bathroom at the Foreign Service Institute, the training entity for the conservative U.S. Department of State. Suddenly, it was 1981 again. The occasion: the dreaded oral exams for admission into the Foreign Service. I had left my nine-month-old son at home, trusting he could do without his mother’s milk for 24 hours. It turned out that I was perhaps more distract- ed without my baby than had I brought him. Every time I had a 15-minute break in that grueling full day’s examination, I was in the bathroom trying to express milk from my inexplicably engorged breasts, rather than mentally composing myself for the next segment. Two years later, I had finally made it into the Foreign Service, and was commuting between Rosslyn, Va., site of the orientation training for new FSOs, and Madison, N.J., where then-husband Duane, 3-year-old Carl, and barely-1-year-old Peter were keeping the home fires burning. On this particular day, examiners had just finished testing my rusty Russian language skills, and I had 15 minutes to prepare for the exam for my even rustier French. Only I wasn’t getting my lin- guistic ducks in a row: I was half laughing and half cry- ing in a bathroom stall over a serious case of déjà vu and the pain of engorged breasts. Fast forward to 1990. I was an old hand at mother- hood and at the Foreign Service. Son John, indepen- dent at age 1, was now nursing almost solely for com- fort. I figured my family could rough it without me while my work took me to Moscow for a week. Unbelievably, it happened again, and worse than ever. My case history could once have served as a con- vincing argument against women in the Foreign Service — for their own good, of course. It wasn’t until 1972 that female FSOs were allowed to remain in the Service after marriage. The law changed more easily than the culture, and I doubt many of my colleagues — male or female — would have felt any sympathy at the difficulties I experienced nurturing career and family simultaneously. Seeing that sign in the bathroom at FSI, however, almost two decades later, I felt the winds of change, or a tiny breeze of it. The culture has matured. The word nursing is in the State Department lexicon. It is acknowledged in at least some corners of that institution that when the lights go off in the office, people do indeed still have a life. Elizabeth L. Cobb Embassy Kiev u Doing Their Best in a Tough Environment I attended FSI from January to June 2004. Coming from an academic background, I wasn’t surprised at the 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 LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 5