Learning My Job

Since A100 ended in October I've spent the last 8 weeks training for my new job as a vice consul in U.S. Embassy Santo Domingo. The first couple of weeks were composed of area studies where I was able to better familiarize myself with the history of Latin America and specifically Hispaniola, the island that the Dominican Republic shares with Haiti. It was great being able to take that time to learn the history as it very much informs the current environment on the island, and that'll help me better do my job.

Those of you who are not familiar with the State Department will be unfamiliar with what consular work entails. The Bureau of Consular Affairs says its mission is "to protect the lives and interests of American citizens abroad and to strengthen the security of United States' borders through the vigilant adjudication of visas and passports." That means our work is a lot more than just visa interviews. For example, if you have a baby overseas, we provide the documents that certify the kid is American.  If you lose your passport, we'll print you a new one. If you find yourself destitute overseas, call us, we can get you home. If you happen to get arrested overseas, we'll come visit you and make sure you get treated fairly. If you happen to die overseas, we call your family and notify them and help make arrangements for your body. This is heavy and serious work. Most Americans will never meet a consular officer, but if you do, it's likely at a very important and sensitive time in your life. All of this is our priority; service to our fellow Americans takes precedence always. But we also have a national security function as well. The citizens of most nations are required to obtain a visa to visit the U.S. All of these people must come into one of our missions to be interviewed. The security and background vetting that each applicant goes through is impressive. Every law enforcement and counterterrorism database you can think of is cross-referenced with our applicant's information. Facial recognition software and fingerprints are also used and crosschecked against any face or finger that has ever come before any of our systems. All of this information is then provided to us for our interviews.

You may wonder why I'm going into such detail on this point. That is because the work of visa officers is in the news lately since someone who entered the country on a visa went into a building in California and killed a lot of people a few weeks back. This has brought scrutiny to our work not seen since 9/11. This means a lot of ignorant people now have opinions about things they know nothing about. Being ignorant is not a crime, mind you. The amount of things I know is a drop in the ocean when compared to the amount of things I don't. What I have a problem with, however, is people talking about things as if they're an authority on the subject when, in fact,  they have no idea what we do. As of one week ago, I have completed the training all consular officers get before being sent abroad to do the work in the field. And I can tell you that I am impressed with the seriousness with which the security of the country is taken. Any American who got to see what we do to vet applicants would be heartened by the process. That said, we can't read minds. Until she went into that disability center in San Bernardino and shot all those people, the woman here on that K-1 visa was a law abiding citizen. There was no reason to refuse her visa. If someone with the exact same background applies tomorrow, they'll get a visa too. I get why this is disconcerting, but these are the risks you take when you have an open society. We've decided that letting people visit and immigrate to the U.S. is better than closing them out. (The research backs that up, mind you.) If you close our borders, nobody will kill Americans except other Americans. And we're very good at killing each other. So, that wouldn't make us any safer when you think about it.

Ok, rant over.

The training was really well done. The Consular Affairs Bureau is one of our better financed bureaus (being the only fee-collecting branch of the Department helps) so they have fun toys to make the learning environment conducive for maximum absorption. The course, colloquially known as ConGen,  is six weeks long and is broken into four modules: Nonimmigrant visas, Immigrant visas, American Citizen Services, and Special Citizen Services. The course starts with reading the law, then thinking about how it applies in case studies, then, the fun part, role playing. The CA bureau has a fake visa interview room with about 20 windows for us to practice interviewing. So, we take turns playing officers and applicants. The instructors have typed up roles for the applicants complete with fake-backgrounds in our systems for us to investigate. In my very first role-play, I issued a visa to someone who was in our system as being suspected of terrorism. Whoops! I was actually quite shaken by the experience. There is a big red light on the screen and I just ignored it. I was heartened later, however, when I learned that in the real-world, while you can tell the system to issue that visa, you can't actually print it until that little terrorism business is cleared up. You'll be pleased to know, I didn't miss another hit in the system for the rest of training. Lesson learned. The first 5 weeks of the training proceeded basically the same way with slightly different subject matter. The final week, however, things turned suddenly morbid. This is the Special Citizen Services week where we practice jail visits, death notifications and crisis management. In addition to the visa section, the CA bureau has also furnished a jail for our training environment. You practice talking to jail administration and talking to the prisoners, some of whom are being abused by the government. Then for the death calls, we have to break the news to people that they've lost a loved on and then walk them through the logistics of dealing with the remains shortly thereafter. Grim stuff for sure. In years past, students in this course were taken to the local morgue to get experience around dead bodies. The reality is that in consular work, you will be exposed to death. You'd like to avoid the first time being on the job, but I was told they had to discontinue that program since the morgues couldn't handle to volume of students.  The final simulation of the training is a crisis management exercise in which a bus has been hit by a mudslide or a plane has crashed (depending on what group you were in) and you had to manage finding out who was there, what needs to happen inside the embassy, and how to communicate with worried relatives calling you. It's a well-conceived project. We were running around trying to solve all these problems with very limited information. Although the crisis was artificial,  I think they did a good job simulating what these things look like in the real world.

And with that, ConGen was over. The course ends with a little graduation in which awards are handed out. There are class valedictorians awarded, those who scored 100% on each test, and then what they call the Z'Oscars are handed out. See, while you're in ConGen you're practicing adjudicating our cases in a fictional country called Z. The capital is Zug, its citizens are Zian, its neighbors are X and Y... you get the point. So, naturally. the awards had to have a Z-theme. There were awards given out for best acting in a visa roleplay, passport roleplay, jail visit, etc. I had my heart set on that visa-roleplay award (I really went all in on some of my characters), but it was not meant to be. I was surprised, however, to be awarded the "Most likely to run for President of Z" award. I'm not sure if that means my colleagues think I'm an attention whore or if they think that I'm smart and capable of managing complex and important issues. I'm going to assume the latter since it makes me feel better.

As you'll see below, all the Z'Oscar winners took a photo after the award ceremony. The national color of Z is purple, so we were encouraged to wear it in some fashion on graduation day. We were also donned with fun dress-up items as were were given our awards, hence the fancy clothing.

The President of Z gets a crown, apparently. I could get used to that...

After the Christmas holiday I will crank up a new course for the next six months: Spanish. It was my minor as an undergraduate, so I'm not starting from zero, but classroom Spanish is a lot different than conducting visa interviews in it all day long. It'll be a new and fun challenge. I've got 6 months to gain fluency. Should be a fun ride. As always, I'll keep you posted.