The Foreign Service Journal, October 2021

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | OCTOBER 2021 73 AFSA NEWS Diplomats at Work Event Working in the Arctic: A U.S. Diplomat’s Experience In June 2020, American diplomats reopened the U.S. consulate in Nuuk, Greenland, 67 years after it was closed. With the Arctic emerging as a geopoliti- cal hot spot, strengthening the U.S. presence there is a foreign policy priority. On July 15, AFSA’s Diplomats at Work pro- gram hosted Eavan Cully, the public affairs officer at U.S. Consulate Nuuk, in an online event attended by 160 people. She discussed her experience working to reopen a long-shuttered consulate in a city that is becoming a center for Arctic issues. Cully discussed what life and work in Greenland are like for a young Ameri- can diplomat. She shared pictures of her journeys around the island, including a nine-day hike on the Arctic Circle Trail. She also fielded questions from the audience. Cully joined the Foreign Service in 2015 and has served in Vancouver and Beijing, and in the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs in Washington, D.C. She arrived in Nuuk in July 2020. Much of her first year involved traveling the country and building up relationships with residents. “Greenland’s wonder- ful. It’s an amazing place,” she said. “As an American, if you’ve ever flown to Europe, you’ve probably flown over Greenland, and maybe on a clear day you’ve been able to see some of the ice. But to actually land here is a com- pletely different experience.” A part of the Kingdom of Denmark, Greenland has a population of 56,000 across an island about twice the size of Alaska, she said. Nuuk has 19,000 residents. “It feels like a mini-European city, just with smaller amounts of everything,” she added. Greenland has four high schools, one in each of the largest towns on the island. Children from smaller settlements must move to one of the towns to go to high school (each of which has dormitories), she said. Greenland’s one university graduates fewer than 100 students per year. Fishing represents about a third of the island’s economy and about 95 percent of its exports, she added. While the major language is Danish, about 40 percent of the population speaks Greenlandic, with English coming in a distant third, Cully said. She spends much of her time promoting Eng- lish language and exchange programs. Cully discussed the rela- tionship between the consul- ate and the U.S. embassy in Denmark and the history of U.S. diplomatic involvement in Greenland. The original consulate in Nuuk opened in 1940 before closing in 1953, she said, adding that employees back then bought the consulate building from the Sears Roebuck catalog and built it themselves. While that building still stands, the new consulate is in a different building. The consulate has three Foreign Service officers (two from State and one from USAID) and three local staffers. Cully called it a “once-in- a-lifetime opportunity” to open a consulate, even amid a pandemic. Fortunately, she said, very few people in Greenland have fallen ill with COVID-19. Diplomats at Work is a new virtual series aimed at introducing audiences to the Foreign Service through sto- rytelling. AFSA hosts mem- bers of the Foreign Service to share their stories of life and work in the Foreign Service. The audience for the series is university and com- munity college students from around the country as well as professionals in various industries who are interested in learning more about the Foreign Service. We are planning a full and exciting fall program and will share details soon. If you are not yet on our distribution list, please email events@ afsa.org. Don’t forget to look for us on Twitter and Facebook for the latest FSJ articles and events! A recording of the event is available at youtube.com/ AFSAtube. We encourage you to share the link with people who might be interested! n Public Affairs Officer Eavan Cully joined AFSA from Greenland on July 15 for a discussion of working in the Arctic. SCREENCAPTURE