AFSA NEWS 60 JULY-AUGUST 2026 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL A Lifetime of Service AFSA’s General Counsel Leaves Lasting Legacy When Sharon L. Papp interviewed for the position of legal counsel at the American Foreign Service Association in 1992, she was wearing a puzzle ring she had picked up years earlier in Saudi Arabia. AFSA State Vice President Joe Melrose noticed it and asked where she had gotten it. The conversation that followed, about a childhood spent in Dhahran among a community of expatriate kids who still call themselves the “Aramco Brats,” turned out to be, in Sharon’s telling, part of the reason she got the job. It is a fitting origin story for someone who would go on to spend nearly 34 years quietly shaping the legal architecture that protects members of the Foreign Service. The small details matter. The accidents of biography matter. And nothing—not a puzzle ring, not a stray comment in a job interview, not a nearly-forgotten file in an offsite archive—is ever quite as insignificant as it seems. Sharon was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, but the family did not stay there long. When she was 2 years old, her parents took jobs with the Arabian American Oil Company and moved the family to Dhahran, where they would remain for 18 years. Her mother taught physical education in the Aramco schools. Sharon attended class there through ninth grade before heading to The COURTESY OF STEVE KASHKETT AFSA leadership’s first meeting with Secretary Clinton in March 2009, in her office, after she became Secretary of State. From left: Sharon Papp, AFSA State Vice President Steve Kashkett, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, AFSA President John Naland, and AFSA State Vice President Francisco Zamora. Hun School in Princeton, New Jersey, returning to Saudi Arabia for every holiday. Her childhood was tightly knit and worldly. Family road trips included an overland drive from Rotterdam to Saudi Arabia in a newly purchased car, a journey that nearly ended in disaster when the family got lost in the Iraqi desert and was rescued by a passing Mack truck driver who happened along on his biweekly route. Vacations took the family to Hong Kong, Japan, Thailand, and Hungary, the country of her parents’ heritage. It was the kind of upbringing that taught a person to think internationally. What it did not give her, curiously, was much exposure to the Foreign Service itself. The U.S. consulate in Dhahran had a restaurant where the family was occasionally invited to dine, but Sharon did not know any diplomats personally. That came later. The Path to Law Sharon attended Vanderbilt University in Nashville, drawn south in part by a memorably brutal New Jersey blizzard during her boarding school years. She graduated with a double major in English, with a focus on 18th- and 19th-century British novels, and psychology. Two experiences during this period pushed her toward the law. The first was watching a professor she admired denied tenure and lose a subsequent Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) sex discrimination case. The second was closer to home: After 15 years teaching in the Aramco schools, her mother learned that the company classified married women as “casual” employees on one-year contracts, ineligible for pensions. Lillian Papp filed her own EEO complaint. Sharon enrolled at The George Washington University Law School, gravitating toward employment and labor law. The connection to her mother’s case proved consequential. During an interview for a summer law clerk position at a small, plaintiff-side EEO firm, she mentioned her childhood in Saudi Arabia. The partner interviewing her replied that the firm was representing a Saudi Arabia client named Lillian Papp. “That’s my mother,” Sharon said. She got the job. That summer clerkship became formative. The firm represented hotel and motel Sharon Papp
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