The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2013

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2013 11 tor Ben Affleck talked about the Foreign Service at the Oscars. I understand that he did so in response to a question from AFSA News Editor Donna Ayerst. I received notes afterward from people who saw that exchange. It seems we get a lot more attention when a movie star talks about what we do. Great job! Susan Reichle USAID FSO Washington, D.C. Language-Designated Positions Regarding AFSA State VP Daniel Hirsch’s May AFSA News column, “All Overseas Positions Should Be Lan- guage-Designated,” I would note that not all Foreign Service staff are created equal. While we may have excellent skills as couriers and nurses and office managers, we may not have that spark that enables us to obtain a 2/2 in Uzbek, Ukrainian, Polish or Mongolian, or even Russian. Moreover, classifying each posi- tion as language-designated locks an employee into a linguistic region. Will you ever get out of Lusophone countries once you speak Portuguese? While I do not disagree that we should expand the number of language- designated positions, I think a sweeping change applying to all positions would be as bad as, if not worse than, the cur- rent system. Llywelyn C. Graeme III Office Management Specialist Embassy Kyiv n