Week 56: Our New Post--Jakarta

This week I received word on my new assignment, a job in the political section at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia. We are very excited about this assignment, and we will be arriving there about this time next year, hopefully not too many days after the beginning of the next school year.

The bidding process to get this job was a little harrowing for us since we really wanted to be sure to get posted somewhere that had a high quality school that would be able to serve the needs of all of our children. I also wanted to get a job that would give me a different kind of Foreign Service experience, and hopefully prepare me to bid for mission-wide leadership positions in the future. In addition, since one of our children has Asperger's syndrome, we had to have a response from the school that stated that could accommodate him.

For most entry-level officers looking towards their second tour, bidding involves being given a selection of posts and then narrowing down that list to a ranked number of choices where they would be willing to serve. For the late summer bidding group, we started with a list of about 254 positions put together by career development officers (CDOs). This is a group of FSOs whose have the job of actually making the assignments and filling positions. For most of the people in my group, they had to create a ranked list of 30 jobs that met the criteria available to that officer, mostly based on timing, such as, expected date of departure from current job, expected date of arrival at the new post, timing of training in between and home leave. Since my family has a child with special needs, we were required to do some extra work to put a list together, therefore we were told to only create a list of 15 positions.

The other critical factor used in making job assignments for ELOs is "equity". In other words, people who were currently serving in "high" equity posts, such as living in areas of the world considered very difficult or  dangerous, were given priority over those with "low" equity. Brasília is considered a low equity post.

In putting together a bid list, we were also asked to write a bidding strategy and briefly describe the primary goals and concerns one took into consideration when putting that list together. For example, if someone had not yet served the required consular tour, then all of the bids must be on consular positions. Or if the needed language requirement had not yet been met, then language designated positions were needed. For me, the primary strategy was to find positions in a different area or with different types of consular work, and with a good high school program with AP courses. Not all posts have high schools, and many international schools only have IB (international baccalaureate) programs. The problem with IB is that to graduate with an IB diploma, the student must do the last two years consecutively at the same school, and my oldest son is doing his Junior year now.

Rebecca really enjoys figuring out these types of logic puzzles, so she got right to work creating our bid list. Based on timing issues, the list got quickly narrowed down to 60 positions. By eliminating Western Hemisphere jobs, the list narrowed again to about 30. When we began looking closely at schools, we ended up with a list of about 20 that looked like they would be able to provide the needed services. We then got to work searching for contact information and sending out e-mails to schools. It took several more hours of researching and contacting schools before we came up with a final list of 15, which we were instructed to submit with the high equity group. We felt that we had put together a well-thought-out list representing different types of jobs in various regions of the world, from those considered "easy" to difficult.

Then I got a message from my CDO stating that he was leaving for his new job, and I would be getting a temporary CDO during the bid process. I immediately contacted my new CDO, and waited for a reply, which didn't come until after the high equity assignments were given. An updated list of positions was posted, and we discovered that only four of our original list remained. Of that list, only one of the schools had responded to our e-mails. Even our back-up posts had been assigned. We were devastated thinking that all our work had been for naught.

Then we sat back down at looked at the remaining posts. I decided to resend e-mails to different persons than the designated primary contact. We also took a closer look at what it would mean to go to a language designated post and determined that we really could not do six months to a year in DC learning another language at this time. It really is challenging to find temporary, furnished housing for eight people, enroll kids in schools, and quite possibly have to live apart for a period of time. This narrowed our list down to three posts.

Then the day before the final list was due, one those posts was removed from the list. We were down to Chennai, India, and Jakarta. I wrote a longer description on why Jakarta would work best (no language training, good school, different kind of job), and sent the final list to my CDO and hoped that the list was sufficient.

My friends have asked, "so what posts were available?" The original list was quite varied with posts in nearly every part of the world. The U.S. has embassies and/or consulates in nearly every country in the world, and there are positions for service in the USA as well. Capitol cities and many major business centers have U.S. representation, and that was what was on the list. My original list had Paris, London, Brussels, Seoul and Rome, and also Chennai, Jakarta, Harare, Nairobi, and Dhaka. We also considered but didn't end up including New Delhi, Ho Chi Minh City, Phnom Penh, and Stockholm. Others we just couldn't consider due to timing or school issues: Pretoria, Jerusalem, Athens, Cairo, Istanbul, Ulaanbatur, Kathmandu, Kingston, Accra, Tijuana, Buenos Aires, Praia, etc. In other words, a U.S. Foreign Service Officer is expected to be worldwide available, and the possibilities of service are vast and challenging. I think that this will be an interesting career.