The Foreign Service Journal, December 2019

98 DECEMBER 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL LOCAL LENS Please submit your favor- ite, recent photograph to be considered for Local Lens. Images must be high resolution (at least 300 dpi at 8” x 10”, or 1 MB or larger) and must not be in print elsewhere. Include a short description of the scene/event, as well as your name, brief biodata and the type of camera used. Send to locallens@ afsa.org . W ell dressed for the weather, this cat stands watch over the red-carpet entrance to its farm home in the far northern county of Maramures, along the Ukrainian border. The region, renowned for proudly maintaining Romanian rural traditions, is home to the world’s tallest wooden churches, the colorful Merry Cemetery and Elie Wiesel’s Memorial House. We visited the area in December 2016 during the winter festival, which draws residents from surrounding villages together for celebrations of local food, music, clothing and farm life. n BY CAITLIN HARTFORD n ROMANIA Caitlin Hartford is a consular-coned FSO who is passionate about photographing and writing about rural life and landscapes. Accompanied by her husband, Tim, and their cats, she has found amazing opportunities to discover—and photograph—countless small towns during Foreign Service assignments in Romania, Mexico and Colombia. She took this photograph with a Nikon Coolpix S9400.