Foreign Service

A year has gone by now, and even though I still can’t talk about it without choking up, I can write about it. This happened when I was a consular officer in Bangladesh.

The Rohingya are an ethnic minority in Burma. Because of religious violence against them, one million of them have fled into Bangladesh. This is a festering humanitarian crisis. Bangladesh is a poor country that is barely able to feed its own people. The addition of a million additional people in need of basic life support is a burden that the country can’t endure. Humanitarian aid is keeping them alive, but no one has been able to offer a workable solution yet.

The issue of refugee resettlement is political and emotional. If I were a refugee, I’d want to return to my home country. But that isn’t always possible. In the case of the Rohingya, the government of Burma refuses to acknowledge their citizenship. They are literally stateless.

The United States, like many countries, allows reunification of refugee families if one member of the family has resettled legally in their country. I was able to help a Rohingya refugee join her husband in America.

It might surprise you to know that the United States isn’t even in the top ten among countries that accept refugees. Would you believe that Iran and Ethiopia each accept more than ten times the number of refugees that the United States does?

Even though there’s a legal mechanism to resettle refugees in the United States, there are all kinds of legal and bureaucratic obstacles. The Rohingya crisis created some political obstacles as well, which I don’t want to try to explain, since I barely understood them at the time, and still don’t. Long story short, we had to get the Bangladesh government to agree to allow this one refugee to exit the country and get on an airplane to the United States. Getting one person out took more than a year. It took emails, phone calls, Congressional inquiries, in-person meetings with local government officials, security checks, medical examinations. The United Nations was involved, of course. I learned a lot from the experience, but all through the process, we were communicating with this young woman, and that put a human face on the process. This was a human being, and we were trying to help her get out of hell, and to build a new life.

Finally the day came when all the pieces came together. We had the entry visa, the medical and security clearances, coordination with the local authorities, and the airline. Even though everyone involved had given their approval, there was no guarantee that there wouldn’t be complications. I and a local staff member went to the airport with her, to help her navigate all of the steps. We went six hours before the flight was scheduled to leave. We got special airport passes that let us go through security, and right up to the boarding gate. I wanted to see her get on the airplane, and watch it take off, before I could relax.

Airlines in general don’t know what to do with refugees’ resettlement paperwork. Stateless refugees don’t have passports. The U.S. government uses a special form, but it isn’t the passport and visa that the airline is required to verify. Luckily, I had a good relationship with the airline, after working closely with them on the evacuation flights earlier in the year. I had given them the heads-up that this was happening. Still, the people working the airline counter hadn’t been informed. We explained the situation, but they had to double-check with their supervisors, because they’d never encountered a case like this. I think it helped to have an American officer there to explain the situation and assure the airline that she had permission to enter the United States. The check-in process proceeded.

Her luggage was overweight.

There was a $65 charge for the excess baggage.

Stateless refugees don’t have credit cards.

I was sure as hell not going to let a $65 luggage charge derail the 18 months of work to get that far along. Without hesitation, I whipped out my credit card and covered that charge. This was not an authorized expense, and I will never see that money again. But it was a very, very tiny price to pay to make sure that we could see this though, and reunite this woman with her husband.

The next step was passport control. That required another side trip to the airport police office, and several long phone calls with the higher-ups. I had my phone out, ready to call my contacts in the foreign ministry in case they needed to remind the airport authorities that she had permission to leave without a passport. But eventually they got it worked out. Seeing them stamp her paperwork was a huge relief. A stamp on the paperwork meant that the political obstacle was overcome.

Waiting in the departure lounge until boarding time and wheels-up was a stressful experience. Boarding the plane required another passport check, which required the gate agent to be aware of this special situation. But finally, she was allowed onto the plane, and I waited until wheels-up before leaving the airport.

This was the first time that a Rohingya refugee was allowed to be resettled to the United States in years. The process was an enormous lift, that took international and interagency coordination. My diplomatic skills were put to the test. It was a long, long day in the airport. For me, though, it was worth it. We didn’t just help a person that day, we changed her life.

The next steps are hers, and they will be hard. She now has to learn yet another language, adapt to a new culture, and accept the fact that she will probably never see her home country again. She isn’t a refugee any more, but she’s still an exile. But there’s no doubt in my mind that her life will be better. Because of what I and my team did. I am as proud of the work we finished that day as anything that I’ve done as a Foreign Service officer, and maybe as a human being.

OK, I think we’re really done this time.

This was the fifth time that we put people on planes, but we’re calling this one flight 4.1.

Ominous Airline was contractually bound to give us 365 seats on our previous flight.  They failed to do so.  After they off-boarded 20-some people on their flight, they were obligated to come back and pick them up. Which meant yet another trip to the airport in a hazmat suit.

We didn’t have as many people this time, and they had been checked in already for the prior flight.  So we didn’t need as many people this time, and we didn’t have to be at the airport as long. In fact, the plane left early this time. The fact that Ominous Airline didn’t use their own plane this time might have something to do with the efficiency.

I like how, from this angle, the U.S. flag looks like a necktie. Bonus points for anyone who can identify that yellow thing in my hand.

Although hundreds of people have since contacted us asking for help leaving the country, I think we’re done now. The state of the outbreak here is serious. The Embassy’s medical officer is more and more vocal that these airport adventures are dangerous for everyone, both passengers and Embassy personnel. We should not be exposing our people to the virus. I don’t disagree. I had a bit of a sore throat and a cough a few days after the flight, and even though it passed quickly, and I had no fever, it was still a scare.

I had to self-isolate at home for a week. Now I’m ready to get back to work.

An insightful quote from one of the officers at post. She made this observation as we were preparing for our fourth and probably final charter flight out of Dhaka. In some strange way, we have been victims of our own success.

We did a good job of filling the planes the first three times around (we set the world-wide record for percentage of seats filled on our flights). I guess the Department figured that we were efficient enough to justify a fourth flight.

We were successful in evacuating over 900 people over our first three flights. And the demand for additional flights continued. The Ambassador decided that we would continue. As long as there were Americans who wanted out, and as long as the State Department would subsidize the flights, we would try to get Americans back to America.

Of course, while we have been evacuating Americans, the pandemic situation in Bangladesh has been intensifying. This is the most densely-populated country in the world, and the local healthcare infrastructure is woefully unprepared to treat an outbreak. We were ordered to wear PPE at the airport.

We had spent several days building out flight manifest, negotiating with the charter airline, which we jokingly named “Ominous Air.” We thought that was funny at the time. Later on, we discovered the meaning of the word “irony.”

The day started out normally enough. A huge crowd of people showed up at the airport, with way too much luggage. We did our check-in process. We even managed to fill the plane, this time to 100% capacity.

That’s when things went off the rails.

Ominous Air informed us that we had to off-board 16 people because of a problem with the emergency exit doors. We re-did the passeger manifest, keeping vulnerable people (elderly, health problems, etc) on the plane. People were paged and told that the couldn’t travel. Then the off-board number grew to 36. Then it went down to 28. In the end, we had to de-plane 27 people. We did all of the work, from the passenger manifest to contacting the passengers. Ominous Air contracted with a local ground support team that was supposed to do that. Then why did we do it? Good question. We’re still asking ourselves that.

Then we had to get the luggage from these 27 unlucky people off the plane. Ominous Air didn’t have a computerized luggage tracking system, and the ground service company didn’t seem to want to look at luggage tags and identify suitcases. We we did it. Why? Excellent question. Two of my coworkers and I crawled into the guts of the plane to look for the luggage.

The plane finally took off seven hours late. Many passengers were grumpy (to put it mildly). The emails and phone calls from family members poured in overnight, asking for landing times, wanting information about the status of the flight. This is a real public-relations mess. Our credibility has taken a serious hit.

I guess we aren’t good at this anymore. So maybe it will end now?

The charter flights continue. The State Department is still encouraging American citizens to return to the United States. Here in Dhaka, we are still chartering airplanes to get people home. This week was our third go-round. This time, we told ourselves, it would be smooth. We knew what we were doing this time. We learned from our mistakes. We can prevent problems, anticipate any complications, and it will all run like clockwork.

We developed a new registration system, we made phone calls, answered emails, sent out information. We confirmed people for the flight.

Then the Bangladesh government extended the government shutdown, and declared a curfew. People kept getting sick. The police set up roadblocks to discourage people from going out.

On Game Day, we got (temporarily) locked out of the airport.

In the airport, I was walking back and forth between two ends of the departure lobby. On one side of the building we checked in confirmed passengers, and on the other side, we checked in the standby passengers. I filled my daily exercise quota just from covering that distance several times.

I’m forcing myself to look on the bright side of the day. We created some really amazing consular success stories. One PhD student has been stranded in Bangladesh with his infant daughter. He needed to renew his student visa before he could return to the United States, but his passport was locked up in the offices of our courier company. All businesses are closed by the government shutdown order, including our courier service. We coordinated with the company to open the office especially for the student so that he could collect his passport. Then he brought it to the Embassy, where I issued the visa, our locally-engaged staff printed it, and he whisked off to the airport.

A married couple has some health issues and needed to get to the United States. Problem was, only one of them is a U.S. citizen. So we opened the visa window for the non-citizen spouse, issued a visa, and printed it the morning of the flight.

Some people drove eight-plus hours from remote parts of the country to get to the capital city airport. An hour before the airline’s check-in counter closed, a couple rushed into the airport. They said that police road blocks and checkpoints meant that it took them three hours to get to the airport.

But I also had a huge disappointment. Our email inbox on Game Day had several notifications that people cancelled. Understandable. People are getting sick, others are being warned away by their families in the United States. But a lot of people just didn’t show up for the flight. Instead of a full flight, which I was hoping for, we sent the plane off with 30 empty seats. I received that news after having walked round the airport all morning, then standing at the airline check-in desk for over two hours, reviewing every passport. The news, that we would be so far from full, was hard to take. I was so visibly upset that the DCM (deputy chief of mission, #2 officer in the Embassy), who was monitoring the situation, asked if I needed to take a break.

Even after the flight was fully booked, people had been calling us, begging and crying to get on the flight. We told them: come to the airport, we can out them on standby, maybe, just maybe, we can put you on the plane. Our standby list grew to 92 people. Surely, I felt, we would fill every one of the 358 seats on the plane. But we failed.

Still, we filled to 92% capacity, which set a new record for charter flights that embassies and consulates around the world are organizing. And the silver lining to the large number of no-shows is that every single person who came to the airport got on the plane. That’s not nothing.

This is really meaningful work. The safety of U.S. citizens is our #1 priority. I love working closely with the dedicated officers and LE staff. But after a month of 12- to16-hour days, we are all physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted.

We learned a lot from the first time we did a charter flight. So when we did the second one yesterday (after many days of preparation), it went a lot smoother. Many problems, headaches, and much heartburn. But in the end we got 321 322 people out.

Again, everyone from the Embassy came down to the Consular section to help out. Once again, we spent days calling people, building a passenger list.

We partnered with an airline, and on Game Day, we worked side-by-side to get people checked in and on the plane.

At literally the last hour, one of our General Services guys drove to a lady’s house, picked her up, and delivered her to the airport. That boosted our total passenger list from 321 people to 322.

We always say that American citizens are our #1 priority. We proved that again this week. Every Foreign Service officer has to do a Consular tour for two years, regardless of their chosen area of specialization (political, economic, management, public diplomacy). So everyone has Consular experience. I’m so grateful to my colleagues in the other sections of the Embassy who gave us a week of their time to work on this effort. When an emergency happens, we’re all Consular officers.