Author: Den Hoopingarner

On Monday and Tuesday this week, I attended the “Security Overseas Seminar,” during which invited speakers took turns telling us about all the scary things that can happen to you overseas: surveillance, spying, carjacking, sexual assault, chemical weapons, and bombs. The final presentation was from a clinical psychologist. Her topic was how to bounce back from trauma. At times it felt like the presentations alone were trauma.

Wednesday was a one-day class on emergency medical trauma. Among other things, I learned what a sucking chest wound is. I think that, in general, it’s best to avoid sucking chest wounds.

Now that they have scared the life out of us, we might take precautions when overseas, and be safer. I guess that’s the idea.

No, that isn’t a typo. I won an Ozcar, not an Oscar.

Consular officers spend most of their time adjudicating visa applications. There are dozens of different kinds of visas, different visas for different purposes of travel. Foreign students apply for an F1 visa. Tourists apply for a B2 visa. Professional athletes come in on a P visa, unless they are amateur athletes, in which case they come in on a B1 visa. Rock stars come in on an O visa, and their crew comes in on O3 visas.

And on and on. Do you think it’s confusing? Me, too.

As part of our consular training, we did role plays to help us learn how to process visa applications. We took turns playing consular officer and applicant. When we adjudicate visas, we have to ensure that the type of visa that the applicant applied for is the appropriate fit for the purpose of their travel.

When it was our turn to play the applicant, there were costumes that we could put on to help us get into the part.

I got a little too into the dress-up part.

It was a good learning experience for the people playing the consular officer. For the applicants, it was a lot of fun. For every applicant role, there was a back story that we had to give to the officer. We were all citizens of the country of Z. The names of the people in Z tend to be Z-dominated: John Zmith, Zippy Jonez, Zeremiah Zmiller, etc.

Sometimes it was a straightforward application: parents want to take their kids to Disneyworld. Sometimes it was underhanded: a person wanted to go to the U.S. on a tourist visa, but he really intended to work illegally once he got there. Other times it was complex: an opera star wanted to travel to the U.S. to perform, then go to Canada to perform, then return to the U.S. to rest and relax in a friend’s home. The two purposes of travel are different, so that person needs to get two visas. Of course, the applicants don’t know that they need two different visas. It’s our job to get the person’s story, and then determine the appropriate visa (or deny the visa application if the purpose of travel isn’t legal).

Yesterday was the last day of consular training. At the graduation “ceremony,” the instructors handed out “Ozcars” for the best performances in the various role plays (visa application, prison visit, etc). I won the Ozcar for the best visa application role play. I won a fabulous certificate, and the right to wear the purple robe of honor for five minutes.

Now that the two big training courses are complete, I have a few more weeks of shorter training sessions. Estimated time of departure from D.C. is April 24.

 

When the brown stuff hits the fan abroad, the safety of U.S. citizens in that country becomes the priority of the American embassy. We don’t have a budget to buy you a plane ticket home, we don’t have the space to let you stay in the embassy, and we don’t have guns to protect you. What we do have is smart, dedicated people who know the local language, legal system, and culture. We also have a great communications network to help you locate your family, so you can arrange your transportation to safety.

I just finished the last module of the consular services training program. This module was called “special citizen services.” The “special” includes helping citizens get to safety when disaster hits, visiting citizens in the hospital and in jail, and communicating with family when a citizen dies overseas. That last one is tough. Can I make a request of everyone? When you travel overseas, please don’t die. Not only is it hard on the Foreign Service officers, who have to identify the body, and locate and notify the next of kin, but it is ungodly expensive for you to ship a body back to the U.S. And your family has to pay for it. The State Department has no budget for that.

We had a big simulation exercise in class yesterday, practicing how to coordinate our efforts when a disaster hits. You would be surprised how complex it can be. A “go team” of Foreign Service officers locates U.S. citizens who have been involved in a disaster, and try to facilitate communication with family and friends back home. In the case of a large disaster involving many people, just locating U.S. citizens is time-consuming. Until we find them, we can’t begin to help with communication. In addition, the Privacy Act of 1974 prevents us from releasing information about U.S. citizens who may have been hurt, kidnapped, arrested, hospitalized, etc without permission explicit. If we don’t have a written waiver, we can’t even tell family members about the well-being of a U.S. citizen. That can be frustrating for worried people trying to get news of their family member overseas.

I want to help people, and I hope that in the event that I have to work on a disaster team, that I am able to do some good. But please, do your part. When you travel overseas, PLEASE register with the State Department, so that if we have to contact your family, we can save some time. Go to http://travel.state.gov/ and enroll in the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program program.

And please, please, please, don’t die overseas.

…but when you go to another country, you are subject to the laws of that country. Apparently, consular officers often have to break that news to U.S. citizens abroad. The breaking of this news often happens when the U.S. citizen is sitting in a foreign jail cell.

“Get me out of here,” they often say to the visiting consular officer. That isn’t going to happen.

This week is the final week of my consular training. This week’s topic is the “special services” that we will perform for U.S. citizens abroad. Unfortunately, the times when U.S. citizens are most likely to interact with their embassies abroad is when they get into trouble. The U.S. embassy is sort of like the diplomatic emergency room for U.S. citizens.

Today in class we learned about prison visits. The instructor told us that when incarcerated U.S. citizens see a consular officer from the embassy visit them in jail, their first request is commonly “get me out of here.” Of course, remembering the first sentence of this blog post, you know that this does not happen. Regardless of what some people might think, diplomats really don’t have the power to spring people from foreign jails.

What we can do is to make sure that they are healthy, safe, fed, that any medical issues are being addressed, and that their rights are respected. We are also conduits for communication with their family. We can tell prisoners about the local legal system, and give them names of lawyers, but of course we are not lawyers ourselves, and can’t give legal advise.

I have some experience in trying to help incarcerated people. My experience was as an interpreter for Chinese nationals in the U.S. The prisoners were often disoriented, confused, and didn’t have a clear understanding of their situation. Jails smell like despair. People who have been arrested and who are sitting in a jail cell are living in a nightmare.

I can remember talking with one Chinese guy right after he was arrested, when he was in court for his initial hearing of the charges in front of a judge. Before the judge entered the courtroom, I tried to build some rapport with him, and show some human kindness. His first question to me was: “where am I?” He had been arrested in one city, spent the previous night in a jail in another city, was appearing in a third city, and was going to be bussed to yet another city to spend that night in another jail.

He wanted me to call his sister in New York and let her know where he was. I cleared it with the D.A. and his court-appointed lawyer, and then made the call. I didn’t have any obligation to do it, but I could do it, and it seemed like the human thing to do, so I made the call. The fact that I thought he was guilty didn’t mean he wasn’t entitled to some human decency.

Even when working with people who were clearly guilty, I always sympathized with their circumstances.  Regardless of the bad decisions that people make that get them arrested, being in jail is a scary experience. If I do prison visits when posted abroad, I’m sure that I will feel the same sympathy for the people in jail, and will try to do what I can to help them.

But I can’t get them out of jail, so if you’re ever arrested when abroad, don’t even ask.