42 SEPTEMBER 2023 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL SINGLE PARENTS Serving Tamara Shie joined the Foreign Service in July 2011. A political-coned officer, she has served in Ciudad Juárez, Shanghai, Lilongwe, and Conakry, and currently works domestically in the Afghan Special Immigrant Visa Unit. She is single mom to an 11-year-old daughter and is the founder and administrator of the Single Parents in the Foreign Service (SPiFS) group. As single parents become a significant demographic in the U.S., it is not surprising that their number is rising in the Foreign Service. BY TAMARA SHIE A s I prepared to head out to one of my early overseas assignments, I received a puzzling email. It concerned a housing issue at my upcoming post. I read it over several times, not quite believing I had read it correctly: “We are sorry about this, but there is no way we could have anticipated this. We have never had this kind of situation.” What was the situation? That I am a single parent. In 2011 I joined the Foreign Service as a political officer and a pregnant, soon-to-be single parent. I certainly did not anticipate being both a single parent and a diplomat would be easy, and here I was taking on both at the same time; but it has been both more rewarding than I could ever have predicted and, at times, quite a bit stranger. Some Challenges When I joined, I did not know of any other single parent serving, so in 2015 when I met a single mother specialist online we formed Single Parents in the Foreign Service (SPiFS), an affinity and support group on Facebook for single parents serving in any of the foreign affairs agencies—including the State Department Foreign Service, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Commerce Department’s Foreign Commercial Service, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service—and professionals in regular overseas positions with the Peace Corps and the Millennium Challenge Corporation. FOCUS ON FS FAMILIES AT WORK
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