So, at the end of each tour or training one very unpleasant situation
comes in – the company comes and packs your 5000 lbs of crap and you are left
with 2 suitcases per family member, each filled up with exactly 50 lbs of
personally very important crap and you live out of those for the next one month
until you land in either your next post or in training in Washington. After
each tour overseas, foreign service officers must take a vacation in the good
old U.S. for a minimum of 4 and a maximum of 6 weeks. It is called “home leave”
and is mandatory. Imagine – we get a 6 week MANDATORY vacation. Mmmmm, hello, I
love my job! Now, many people do not like this since the State Department only
pays for the ticket back home and home leave has to be in the U.S. Hawaii
counts, Cancun does not. The government does not pay for your lodging
during home leave. As you can imagine, unless you own an unrented house in the
U.S., the idea of spending a month living with your relatives, or renting an
overly expensive villa on the beach or an RV, or in a hotel, all the while
living out of suitcases is not appealing to the thrifty folks of the Foreign
Service. But it must be done.
The idea is that United States diplomats should go back home
once in a while to re-acquaint themselves with their core customers and
constituency and remember who they work for – the U.S. I guess someone
important in the Department was watching Apocalypse Now one dark,
Washingtonian autumn night, saw Marlon Brando go rogue after spending one too
many days in rural Vietnam and decided that U.S. diplomats need to come back
home every now and then. I agree. Except for the suitcases part. Here is why.
On August 1 we bid a tearful goodbye to beloved Bangladesh. Fat
Cat made a graceful exit the previous night, and so the Diplomat, Son and I
headed over to Bulgaria for a little private vacation with Mom before returning
to the U.S. for home leave. As our stuff was packed about a week before that,
by then we had been living out of our suitcases in a way already. Each of us was
equipped with two large suitcases and one hand luggage. It took a large van to
take us to the airport. After 10 days in Bulgaria, the Diplomat flew to
California to see his Sister and her family. After one more week, I left
Bulgaria and flew to New York where I met with him. We were both dragging our
respective 2 suitcases each. Son was having a good time with Grandma, his 2 suitcases
partially unpacked for a month. In New York, thanks to the incredible
generosity of good friends of ours, we stayed for a couple of weeks in a
gorgeous apartment in Brooklyn. The suitcases were still not unpacked – we just
pulled random crap out of them and wore whatever we found. It made looking for
small items inside real fun. Then, on August 31, the Diplomat drove our newly
acquired car to Virginia, I flew down on the U.S. Airways shuttle to Reagan
Airport and Son and Mom arrived later that night on a United codeshare flight
from Bulgaria. It merits noting that their plane landed at 7.30 pm and they
came out almost two and a half hours later!!!! Two and a half hours, people –
what in the world is happening on that passport control line?? It did not help
my state of nerves that after the Diplomat and I had been waiting at the
airport for them for about one and half hours and were just being convinced
that my Mom had been taken to secondary and detained or something, I got a
phone call from a formal sounding officer, who asked me nonchalantly whether I
was waiting for someone that night at the airport. My stomach turned. Turns out
Mom did not have the address of the place we were going to stay at and they
needed it for the entry form. Sheesh.
We spent the next two days at our favorite American auntie’s
place in Maryland for the Labor Day weekend (suitcases not even brought into
the rooms) and then we finally moved into our current digs in Virginia, where
we are going to spend the next 6 months studying the incredibly confusing
language of Portuguese. Due to the lack of enough hangers, my suitcases
remained unpacked for 3 more days until I finally made the obligatory pilgrimage
trips for returning Americans to Costco and Bed, Bath and Beyond and supplied
the apartment with vital housing essentials. Suitcases unpacked. Phew! It is
nice to finally find the underwear you are actually looking for. Other than
that, home leave was great.
Going to the suitcases during home leave (and any travel
with multiple stops, really) is daunting, much like going to the mattresses is
for the mafia during their wars. You rarely get to unpack anything during each
stop since it is such an effort to stuff back everything inside (each suitcase
magically ends being heavier and heavier each time!). Your clothes are always
wrinkled , at times smell musty (especially if it was raining at the airport
when your luggage was offloaded) and you end up using only the topmost clothes
day after day after day. It does not help that you have packed 4 tennis rackets
there as well so every time you try to look for a small elusive item like a bottle
of Iboprufen which seems to move all over the packed suitcase with surprising
alacrity for an inanimate object, you curse the stupid rackets and take them
out and then put them back in, along with the 6 pairs of shoes you were
convinced you will wear in New York City (which you did not).
We have been back for about a week now in Washington, DC and
already had a week of language training. It felt good to walk on campus,
wearing clean, ironed clothes.
