Red Cross

I had a full day of training at the Red Cross yesterday. I'm planning to volunteer as part of the Disaster Action Team (DAT), which involves driving out to local disasters (usually fires, but sometimes floods or tornadoes) and offering Red Cross services and comfort to those affected. The scheduling is a little weird, so it's going to be difficult to manage, but I think I'll be able to do a weekend shift once a month. I'm always on the lookout for interesting volunteer opportunities, and this one has the added bonus of giving me some experience working with people in crisis situations. If I apply to the consular cone of the foreign service, one of my duties will be assisting Americans abroad, so I think the skills I learn will be transferrable. Plus, the Red Cross is such an amazing organization; it's an honor just to be a part of it.

I feel like my biggest weakness right now is a lack of meaningful professional experience, so getting this kind of directly applicable experience is key. There's no way for me to do visa interviews at my current teaching job (or any other job out there, for that matter), but I have plenty of exposure to different cultures, and I use Spanish daily, so it's still somewhat relevant. What I feel I need the most is some leadership experience. I've never been much of a "joiner," so I've never been able to work my way into a leadership role. I manage and lead children every day, but I don't know if that will be taken into consideration. Time will tell.

As we get closer to buying our house, I'm starting to feel more comfortable here in Dallas. Our new neighborhood is cute, full of young families and gay couples who spend their days biking to art lessons and locally-sourced organic restaurants. And I'm not really exaggerating. Michael and I have good jobs and are making good financial decisions and building a stable and safe future for ourselves; the foreign service would interrupt that in some ways. There are definite drawbacks to joining.

I still want this, but I'm happy to find contentment in case it doesn't happen. I don't want to be miserable and hanging on to a dream; I want to have my dream and be happy at the same time.

Shuffling Forward

I finished A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East last week. It was over 600 pages long, and I learned quite a bit, though more about British Imperial policy than about how the people of the Middle East actually viewed the tremendous changes foisted upon them. Overall, I feel like the book gave me a solid understanding of some historical events that have always been murky for me.

I also finished The Instant Economist, which maintained its objectivity to the very end and really impressed me. I feel like I still need some work when it comes to my understanding of economics, but this book was a great primer.

The next book I picked up, though, isn't on the foreign service reading list. I'm reading a book by Suze Orman about money: how to manage it, how to invest it, how to plan for retirement. We're still moving forward with the process of buying that duplex in Oak Cliff, so I feel like I need to have a better grip on what we're actually doing. I finally received my first paycheck from the school district, so I want to make sure I'm putting my money to good use. We're trying to live budget-consciously right now since we expect a lot of upcoming expenses.

I'm also listening to The Economist, audio version, on my commute, but I can't seem to get through everything over the course of a week; there's just too much information. And that's even when I skip the "Britain" section (and a few others). I listen to the BBC Global podcast every night while I cook dinner, and I feel like that's sufficient to keep my relatively up-to-date on what's going on in the world.

My resolve is still very strong, though I'm starting to feel a bit impatient. I'd love to just sign up for the next available test date and have a go at it, but I know that I'm not ready to move forward with the process right now. I want to improve my Spanish and get some more experience related to the 13 dimensions before I bother taking the next step. There's also a government shutdown right now, and I don't expect that there will be much hiring for the next year or so, which means starting the process now is even more of a long-shot than usual. It's best to bide my time.

We just moved to Dallas a few months ago, so I'm trying to enjoy my life here and not get too wrapped up in my schemes for the future. I have a great partner, a good job, and a lot of interesting things to keep me busy. I wish I had a little more free time (this job is a killer!), but I believe I'm managing well, all things considered. I'm shuffling forward.

A House

One thing I promised myself when I restarted this foreign service quest was that I would try to live my life normally, as if my dream job would never materialize. The process is such a long one, especially if you are blocked at any of the stops along the way, and there are so many stops: the test, the QEP, the oral assessment, the background check, and then the register. Even if you sail through each one, the process will still take a year or more to complete. So, I'm trying hard not to make decisions based on the possibility that I'll enter the foreign service one day and everything will change.

And that explains why we're currently in the process of buying a house. To be honest, buying a house right now is crazy even when you take the foreign service out of the equation. We just moved back to Dallas about three months ago, and we're in a one-year lease at our current place. I haven't even received a full paycheck yet, and we're still paying off the debts we accumulated from living in the Rio Grande Valley without steady work for several months, and then the cost of moving up here. The timing couldn't be worse, really, but Michael spends so much time on real estate websites that I guess it was inevitable that we should buy something at the first opportunity.

In short, we decided to find an income property because it allows us to buy in an area we otherwise wouldn't be able to afford, while also making a lot of sense for us financially. After looking at a few places, our agent, who's the partner of one of Michael's friends from high school, showed us a place that never even made it on the market before we snatched it up: a duplex with two 3-bed, 2-bath units in Winnetka Heights, a nationally-registered historic district in Oak Cliff. Oak Cliff is an area just south of downtown that's been undergoing tremendous changes over the past few years, and it's actually the area where we lived when we first moved to Dallas together. We've always wanted to buy there, and I feel like this property is going to be a fantastic investment. And since the bottom unit is already being rented out, it's generating enough income to cover the bulk of the monthly mortgage payments.

We've had to borrow a lot of money from my parents to cover the down payment, and we're definitely going to be scraping by for a while, especially if our current landlord refuses to let us sublet or we have difficulty finding a willing sublet-er. Things could be rough until next July. In the long run, though, I think we're going to be much better off after making this purchase than we were before. Even if I manage to make it into the foreign service in the next couple of years, this property can pay for itself while we're abroad. In fact, it could even generate some extra income for us, especially if Oak Cliff continues to develop the way it has been for the past few years.

Our closing date is October 31st, and according to the rules of the FHA loan, we have 60 days after that to occupy the premises, which means we'll be moving again sometime in November or December. Things have calmed down somewhat at work, and the holiday season is full of time off for teachers, so I think we'll be able to manage this transition without going crazy.

So Busy

I haven't been this busy since graduate school, and it's been a difficult adjustment. I've been waking up at 4:30 or 5:00 every morning to get to the school early enough to make copies, plan lessons, and take care of the dozens of e-mails and administrative demands before my classes start. I leave work around 4:00, which is great, but I just come home to cook dinner and do more lesson planning until bedtime, which has tended toward 8:30 or 9:00 lately. The past two weeks have felt like two months!

As a result, I've had to cut some things out of my life. The first to go was the gym, not so much because I couldn't find an hour to work out a few times a week, but because I'm supposed to be eating a lot and couldn't find the time to cook all the additional food. I've also stopped studying Spanish at home (and I quit my conversation class for other reasons), although I feel like this is mitigated a bit since I have to speak Spanish at work every day. I have some really low beginner ESL students, so I often have to translate for them, and it's made me much more confident about my Spanish than anything else since my last trip to Guatemala. I've also been reading some of the Spanish-language books from my classroom's literacy cart during our independent reading time. It isn't much, but I've learned a few new words here and there. I've also picked up a little more French out of necessity, since I have some students from the Congo and Senegal who are still very new to English.

I expect the workload to increase in the next few weeks because I'm going to be the school's LPAC (Language Proficiency Assessment Committee) chair, which everyone says is very time-consuming. I'm not sure where the time will come from, but I'll find a way to make it work.

In spite of the crazy workload, though, I have to say that I love my job. More specifically, I love my students, and the reason I'm working so hard is because I don't want to let them down. Currently, I have kids from the Congo, Nepal, Egypt, Sudan, Senegal, Honduras, Mexico, El Salvador, Ghana, Ethiopia, Korea, Iraq, and Pakistan, and they're all just awesome. I love learning about their families and cultural traditions, and I love teaching them new words and new ways to use language. It feels good to be useful. And I'm also hoping that this kind of international exposure will help me with my foreign service application, of course!

On that front, I'm still plodding through the recommended reading list. My long commute means more time for "reading" thanks to audiobooks, and I finished Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking last week. I thought it was interesting and can see how it would be useful on the job (any job, really), but it doesn't interest me as much as the book about the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire that I'm reading every night before bed on my Kindle (also from the reading list). World history has always been my thing.

After Blink, I started listening to The Instant Economist, which is a basic introduction to economics. My college economics course was very a long time ago, and it was also a terrible class where I learned nothing. I took it at a rural extension of a small-town central Texas community college while I was still in high school, and the only economics professor they could find was a farmer with a heart of gold who didn't seem to have a clue what he was doing. I made an "A" in the class, and to this day I can't tell you one thing that he taught us about economics. Nice guy, bad teacher.

I've been wanting to learn about the subject for a while now, but I've had a lot of trouble finding books that didn't have a major ideological slant. Personally, I believe in a strong free market for most goods and services, with the exception of a few basic necessities, such as health care and utilities. I think mixed economies do the best job of balancing public and private interests. And I feel like my views are very practical and centrist, but most of the popular primer books on economics out there were rabidly libertarian, and Ayn Rand makes me want to throw up, so...they weren't an option. The Instant Economist aims to be more level-headed, though, and while I can't say I agree with everything it says 100%, most of the arguments seem reasonable and are viewed objectively from multiple perspectives. A lot of the information also isn't new to me, so I guess I either learned something in that college economics course or have just absorbed the information through reading the news.

I haven't given up on my goals, and my current job is satisfying, so I'd say things are going quite well right now. I just have to keep going!

Spanish Classes

One of my life goals is to become fluent in Spanish. I've been taking Spanish classes since the 7th grade, and I have an undergraduate minor in the language. I also studied intensively in Guatemala for seven weeks several years ago, and I had to pass a Spanish translation exam as part of the exit criteria for my Master's program. I've read a few full-length books in Spanish, in addition to plenty of short stories and news articles. I've also traveled to Mexico twice and Costa Rica once, and I live in a place where Spanish is not uncommon. Yet somehow, I'm still not "fluent."

I feel like I can read more or less fluently, and I don't do a terrible job understanding spoken academic Spanish, but throw in some regionalisms or speak at a quick pace, and I'm lost. I've been watching Masterchef España, and although I don't have any trouble following along with the program, I can't honestly say that I understand more than 60-70% of what's being said, and sometimes that number is much lower. When it comes to actually speaking Spanish, I stumble a lot and make mistakes. While I feel like I'm capable of communicating any idea I need to (as long as the vocabulary isn't too technical), that communication will be really messy and difficult.

I find this to be tremendously frustrating. I've devoted hours upon hours to studying Spanish, both formally in classes and at home on my own. I use Memrise to improve my vocabulary (1000+ words and phrases added to my vocabulary at this point), I read Spanish when I can, and I try to watch Spanish-language TV shows. I've become more aggressive with my learning in the past year or so, and I've noticed some considerable improvements, but I still feel like that vague goal of achieving fluency is still very far away.

That's why I signed up for Spanish conversation classes at a Spanish school down the street a few weeks ago. But I went to my second class yesterday, and I've decided I won't be going back. The classes costs $136 per month with two hours of instruction per week, which I think is reasonable but is still a major expense for me. I would be willing to pay that if I thought the classes would make a difference, but I don't think they will. Most of the other students are stuck at about the level I am, and the instructor doesn't seem to have any plan for helping us to progress. I was basically paying to hang out with a native Spanish speaker and talk about whatever topic came up, with his attention divided between four or five other students. It wasn't working.

I don't want the structure of a traditional classroom because I don't want to spend all of my time going over grammar I've already covered or doing reading assignments that I could do on my own at home, but I also need some kind of plan. I need an instructor who will introduce a common vocabulary we can use and build upon, with a range of topics we can discuss. I also need someone to correct my mistakes, which this instructor didn't do. I can speak Spanish at home for free; I was paying for someone to help me improve, and I wasn't getting that.

My plan for Spanish now is to continue what I've been doing, building my vocabulary and working on the grammar little by little with the plan to go back to Guatemala next summer. In Guatemala, I can pay for one-on-one tutoring for four to five hours per day, and I'll be immersed in Spanish everywhere I go. That seems like the only practical way to build my speaking skills, so that's what I'm going to rely on. Thank goodness I'm a teacher and have the time off to make this possible. Whether I ever have the opportunity to take the foreign service language test or not, I'm going to do everything I can to master this language!

The Red Cross, Waiting for the School Year to Begin

Last week, I attended the Red Cross new volunteer orientation, and today I was contacted by one of their coordinators about the positions I expressed an interest in. First off, let me just say that getting started as a volunteer with the Red Cross is not a quick process; you can't just show up at your local chapter and start handing out juice boxes to disaster victims. I'm going to have to complete at least two more 3-hour classes and fill out a lot more paperwork before I can begin doing anything at all. And that's what I like about the Red Cross. I think I'm going to be able to gain some real job knowledge and do meaningful things with them because they require a lot of training and a serious commitment.

I don't have much information yet about the international casework position, but I did hear from the disaster action team leader today, and he gave me a general overview of how the shifts work. I'm limited to the weekend shift because of my job, but I'm also worried because the weekend shift starts Friday night and lasts until Monday at 7:00am. If you're called to a disaster site, the call can take several hours to complete, which wouldn't allow me a lot of time to get to work by 8:00, especially considering my long commute. I'm guessing I can get a substitute if that happens; it likely wouldn't be more than once a month, and only if something happened in that Monday morning timeframe. We'll see how it goes.

I'm really excited about being part of a disaster team, and some of the duties sound like they could relate to what consular officers do in American citizen services, so I think volunteering will help me toward my career goals while also giving me an opportunity to help in my community. The only problem is that I have to wait a month until the next training opportunity, so it's business as usual until then.

On the job front, I went to my first department meeting yesterday at the school where I'll be teaching, and I had the opportunity to see my classroom. It was nicer than I expected, and I'm really looking forward to seeing it full of middle schoolers working hard to fill their little heads with new language skills (if there's any room left with all the hormones pulsing in there). I know that it won't be as smooth or simple as the image I have in my mind, but I need to focus on positive thoughts before the full reality of the situation sets in. Two more weeks to go. It seems like all I do anymore is wait!

Reading List, Volunteering, Spanish

I finished Americans in Waiting last night, so that's another book to check off the Foreign Service reading list. Since I'm interested in the consular cone, it's especially important that I understand immigration issues, and I know that I learned a lot from this book. The legalese weighed me down in parts, but overall it was an easy read and very useful. I'm going to be teaching middle school ESL this year, so immigration policy has a huge impact on the lives of my students and their families, and this book helped me understand those issues better.

After finishing Americans in Waiting, I immediately started reading A Peace to End All Peace: The Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East. It's a page-turner so far, and I'm not being sarcastic! It's much longer than the last couple of books I've read, though, so it will probably take a while to finish this one.

Aside from my reading, I've spent most of this week attending the Learn2Inspire academy, which is a week of summer professional development for teachers in my district. I used my commute to listen to the BBC Global podcast and PRI's America Abroad podcast, and I think it was a great use of my time.
The academy itself was interesting, and I'm excited to start teaching later this month, even if it's going to cut into my study time. I also picked up a couple of teaching books that I want to read before classes start, but I think they'll be quick reads and shouldn't interfere too much with my foreign service reading.

After one of the sessions on Wednesday, I drove to the medical district for the Red Cross new volunteer orientation. The presenter and most of the other volunteers were all retirees, which is what I usually find when I do volunteer work. It would be nice to meet some people my age, but I don't think that's ever going to happen for me; my friends tend toward the geriatric. The orientation included information about some of the different work they have available, and I marked that I was most interested in doing international case work, which involves trying to reunite families that have been separated by natural disasters, war, or other catastrophic events. I'm not sure exactly how to go about that, but they offer training. It sounds like it would involve making a lot of phone calls to refugee camps and hospitals abroad. I also marked an interest in being part of a disaster action team, which would mean being on-call at certain times of the day and night and going out to disaster areas (mostly fires, they said) to check up on victims and offer them whatever services they might need that the Red Cross can offer. Ideally, I'd like to do both of those jobs. There might also be an opportunity to give presentations about international humanitarian law, which sounds really fun, but it wasn't listed on our job sheet, so I added it at the bottom of the form just in case it becomes available. The Red Cross is a fantastic organization, and I'm really looking forward to volunteering with them and taking some more of their classes. I'm still waiting on their volunteer coordinator to call me and discuss the possibilities in greater depth, so hopefully that will happen soon.

In addition to all of that, I just signed up for an advanced Spanish conversation class that meets Saturday mornings. Tomorrow will be my first day. I'm not entirely sure that I'm an "advanced" Spanish speaker, but I figure I can bring myself to that level with some practice, and I'm up for the challenge. I've taken advanced grammar and composition and advanced speaking classes at university before, and I've read a couple of Spanish-language novels in the past few months, so I don't expect to be completely out of my league, but we'll see. The school is less than half a mile from where I live, which was one of the deciding factors when I chose it: it doesn't get much better than that, especially if I have to be there at 9 AM on a Saturday.

Meanwhile, I'm plugging away with my vocabulary work on Memrise.com, and I just started developing a grammar course for myself on that site. I'm not sure how well grammar will work with the way the site is designed, but just entering the information is a form of studying, so it can't be a total loss. I'm working my way through an "essential Spanish grammar review" document that I found online, and it's going well so far. I can recognize everything without much trouble, it's just a matter of using it in speech. That's where I struggle, and that's what I'm hoping to improve with this Saturday class.

I know I'm going to become incredibly busy once the school year starts, and some of these projects might have to fall to the wayside, but right now I feel full of energy and ready to tackle all of this head-on. Hasta la victoria, siempre!

My Story

This blog is about my path to joining the U.S. Foreign Service. I'm using it primarily as a motivation tool, to hold myself accountable when I struggle to continue, and to document my success along the way.

I'm 27 years old. I live with my same-sex partner in Texas, and I'm about to start my first year as a public school teacher next month. I'm excited about my new job, but I've also recently found a renewed interest in pursuing a goal I've been toying with since high school. Entering the Foreign Service is extremely competitive, and I know that it can take years to achieve this dream even for people who are very well-qualified, so I expect this blog will exist for quite a while. I'm trying to set short-term goals that are as clear as possible so I don't lose my way.

Right now, I'm working through the suggested reading list. I finished Don Oberdorfer's The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History while I was living in Korea last year, and I just finished John Pomfret's Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China last week. I'm currently in the second chapter of Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States by Hiroshi Motomura.  My focus right now is entirely on passing the initial stage of the application process: the Foreign Service Officer Test (FSOT), which I plan to take shortly before or after next summer (about one year from now).

The reason I'm waiting a year before officially starting the process is because I'm planning to study Spanish in Guatemala next summer in hopes of gaining some language points down the line. I have an undergraduate minor in Spanish, I've studied Spanish in Guatemala before, and I had to pass a translation exam as part of my graduate degree, so I'm not a beginner by any means– but neither am I fluent. I feel like a couple of months of intensive study in Guatemala– combined with my daily vocabulary sessions and the Spanish newspaper and novel reading that I've been doing– will go a long way toward reaching that goal.

So what else am I doing to prepare myself besides working on my language skills and working my way through the reading list? I'm going to have a fairly long commute to and from work each day, so I'm going to use that time to listen to podcasts about current events and foreign policy analysis. Many people have recommended reading The New York Times or The Economist on a daily basis, but I don't think I'll be able to fit that into my schedule. I'm assuming podcasts will be just as effective.

I also intend to study certain subject areas online, especially economics. I don't have much of a background at all in economics, and my U.S. history has a few weak areas, so I hope to make use of some of the great lectures available online to fill in these gaps in my knowledge. The official reading list mentions several hefty college textbooks, and I tried last year to read Nation of Nations all the way through, but I started to wonder how efficient I was being with my time. The FSOT is often described as being "a mile wide and an inch deep," so I'm hoping I can use other resources to get an overview of the information I'm missing without having to make the significant time commitment to reading textbooks.

Finally, I'm going to start a portfolio of my experiences that relate to the 13 dimensions the State Department looks for in a foreign service officer. As a public school teacher, I think I'll have some opportunities to take on leadership roles, collaborate in a team, manage and motivate people (students, at least), and make touch decisions. Since I'm an ESL teacher specifically, there will also be plenty of opportunities to work across cultures and possibly use my Spanish skills. I've taught ESL abroad before, so some of those experiences might overlap, but the more examples I have to pull from, the better.

Just in case that isn't enough, though, I'm also planning to start volunteering with the American Red Cross. I come from a family where volunteering is an important part of our lives, and I think the Red Cross would be a great opportunity to gain some training and skills in crisis management and leadership. I want to enter the foreign service in the consular cone, so I'm hoping to have some experiences that could relate to some of those duties, such as assisting Americans abroad. I also read something about an opportunity to volunteer as an international case manager with the Red Cross, though I'm not sure exactly what that's about yet. I have a new volunteer orientation next week, so I'll find out more then.

So, that's my plan. Foreign service dreams aside, this is going to be a very hectic year for me, so I'm hoping this blog will allow me to stay on track. Even if I manage to make it past the very challenging FSOT, I'll still have plenty of hoops to jump through, so I'm going to need all the help I can get!