bout de papier, Vol. 4, No. 4 (1986) — Winter 1986 // Hiver 1986, pp. 4–5
As if putting on the storm windows and making the garage fit to hold the car again weren’t enough, the foreign service family faces another seasonal task in late autumn. The formerly spontaneous realization that another posting wouldn’t be a bad thing after all has been replaced by a friendly reminder from your stream management that it is the time of year to lay up acorns against the future by way of a chat with the assignment officer.
It is part of the uncertainty that we live with, this inexorable contemplation of where we might be a year from now. On one level it is a mere natter of domestic management. Should we renovate now or wait until we’re back from posting? Should we enroll in that course or put it off on the likelihood that we’re going who knows where? On another, potentially more destructive, level it is an uprooting, a process that causes us to curtail the roots that we are sending down, to begin to draw back from the commitments that we make to the Ottawa community. If there is something ominous for us in this, imagine the effect on our families.
I must confess, there is still something of a thrill in it for me to scan the list of post openings, to imagine the challenge of a new assignment, to contemplate release from the tasks that have begun to seem routine. On second glance though, the list begins to look pretty thin. On third reading the realization of just how little is available, how tight the fit, dawns hard
Where does that leave us? Desperate as the first flakes fall? I fear that for more and more of us the answer is yes. Fewer opportunities for assignment and many of those in places increasingly remote from any apparent connection to the real interests of this country let alone healthy for your children; fewer opportunities for advancement in a career whose paths are blocked by too many officers not much older than ourselves in a shrinking resource base and by the threat of an unprecedented, vice; fewer opportunities for secondment outside the service; fewer opportunities even, for that discredited old siren, job enrichment.
Bleak enough? It’s the sort of thing I hear often enough from colleagues. On the face of it, the health of the service, and not just among the junior grades, is in a sorry state. But what are we to do about it, individually and as an Association?
I am not going to sermonize. It won’t all come right with faith and good works. We are, for better or worse, trapped in a demographic bubble. I do think, nonetheless, that we can get healthier even if only by taking the first step of acknowledging that the malaise I describe above is real. Ironically, we can also help ourselves, and the service, by also examining the peculiar phenomenon that most of us like our work, like it so much that we stick to it with legendary longsuffering.
If the health of the service is as poor as we think it is then the means of renovation are also largely in our own hands. We should be willing to take risks ourselves and, if we believe that the fault lies in the current career system, be prepared to face the risks of a more demanding, more competitive process. (Are we, I wonder, ready to demand a system that is more rigorous in applying the sanctions of probation or more honest in exposing poor performance?) Individually, we should be ready not only to seize opportunities but to create opportunities whereby our considerable investment of time and experience can be realized and exploited. Some of these opportunities may be outside the service. (Perhaps the Association should be looking at ways to help our members find the best path out.) Together, we should be working with our colleagues, both up the line and among the support groups, to fashion a career and conditions package that fits the sort of work we do and the life that we lead in the foreign service of this country. Together we should be doing more to tell the people of this country about who we are and what we do for them. Much can be done, both in contract negotiations and in the review of the Foreign Service Directives, to keep the environment healthy.
Individually and collectively, and I think that this is the essential part, whatever we imagine our future to be in the service, we must demand excellence of ourselves and of the department. The most destructive course in dark times is to abandon what we know to be good from generations of working at it. The Association was created to answer a procedural need for a cause a succession of our colleagues has cared about the service. The current executive committee is no less concerned. We look to your support in the months ahead, not moral support, not dues, but actual help in preparing for negotiations and helping to shape our professional environment. The Association can only carry the group so far. If something is wrong with the service, the renovation starts and succeeds when each of us shakes off this autumnal gloom.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 4, No. 4 (1986) — Winter 1986 // Hiver 1986, pp. 4–5. Read the rest of this issue →
