Entre Un Mundo y Otro

Mentally these last few weeks are turning out to be a strange endeavor. I've moved many times in my life, once with State Department help, most of the time on my own. But with the exception of going abroad for limited periods of time, I've always had a period of transition, usually by driving, with which to mentally prepare and get myself in the proper headspace for the new place.

This time is different.

Allow me to explain. Because I cannot allow more than three calendar days between my current federal job and A-100 (to keep the benefits that I've already accrued) I will be having my last day of work next Friday, flying to DC next Saturday, and starting A-100 the following Monday. This gives me exactly one day to get reoriented to the time-zone change (I'll be starting work at what feels like 6 AM for me) and a very different way of living from Ciudad Juarez. Some are the changes will be good, like the ability to walk, bike, and just generally live without a car. Some will be not so good, like the fact that I'll be away from my spouse for who knows how long. But it very much will be different.

So I'm trying techniques to get myself ready, like envisioning my life in my new apartment and planning my commute to work. The only problem with this is that at the same time I'm trying to remain pretty fully engaged here in CJ. It's a jarring dissonance that everyone has in the Foreign Service, and I think it's one of the reasons that officers are mandated weeks and weeks of home leave before their transition from one post to another. It's almost as if Congress realized that people moving all over the world are going to tend to be workaholics and might just need to be told to take a few weeks to relax and transition.

But the first move, the move to join the service, is not like that. And so while I'm wondering about my future classmates and my route to work in two weeks, I'm also Fourth of July, one last Mexico trip, and CJ despedida (farewell) planning. And if you've ever worked a Fourth of July party in the Foreign Service, it's no joke. Not to mention the necessity of training my replacement in EVERYTHING I KNOW. So, my future classmates, if I seem a bit distracted those first few days of class, I apologize. My head (and my heart) may still be in Juarez. 

Just an Ordinary Day

The big impending move is starting to get a little more real. The other day I received my travel authorization, which set in motion a whole bunch of moving parts. Now there's a giant pile that I can only describe as "stuff" in my house that will be packed up and shipped out next week. Yesterday I made decisions on plane tickets and arranged for a ride from the airport next month. And every day I receive new emails of forms to fill out and return to Washington to make the transition smooth.

Yet there's still quite a lot to do here as well. We're trying to figure out car maintenance issues before I go. I'm working on transition documents that should theoretically teach my replacement at work everything that I've learned over the past year. There are favorite restaurants to visit, fun events/parties to go to, and souvenirs to purchase (perhaps to go into that giant pile of "stuff" to ship. And lets not forget that it's Fourth of July season, which means that everyone at the consulate is going a little bit nuts to make sure that the event goes well.

The thing that makes this whole move a little bittersweet is that I'm starting to get closer with a couple of people who are going to be remaining at post. When I first got the invite to an orientation class, my initial reaction was one of jubilation. This was my ticket out of a place that I've never fully taken to. And don't get me wrong, I'm still really, really excited. But it's starting to sink in that I really will truly miss the combination of people here. There are many things about the physical environment in Juarez that I don't like, but the people, locals and foreign service, are what make this place great. And I'm a bit sad to be leaving this community.

On the other hand, this move gives me the opportunity to develop a network of my own. And I'm extremely excited to return to a place that I've lived multiple times in my life and I love. So sad + excitement = bittersweet. Ultimately I think it's a good thing that there's going to be so much going on over the next few weeks that I'm not going to have too much time to brood over it.

La Ultima Ves

The last month is always the worst. When the time draws near to leaving a place that I've lived for an extended period of time, there's a couple of warring instincts that alway arise within me. First, there's the strong sense of denial; the feeling that there's no reason to rush and that inertia will carry us through the end.  There's also that ambivalent feeling on whether to invest time and energy on new friends, new experiences, and new plans in the current place. And then there's the temptation to start saying goodbye.

I had planned on delaying the farewells to people until the last possible moment. But really, what is the last possible moment when you only see some people once a month or less. How does one say to a friend, a tailor, a shopkeeper, a favorite waiter at a restaurant: I'm leaving, and I don't know if I will ever see you again. So this will be the month of farewells. I will be constantly wondering if this will be the last time that I eat at my favorite burrito stand or see a movie at the VIP theater.  

Though I haven't scheduled my pack-out yet, I'm already planning my last weeks here. Going to see a few last baseball games since they only cost 50 pesos. Planning a trip to go see those New Mexico wineries that people always said I should go to. And I have to go the tailor to get my suits ready for training. There are last minute souvenirs to get, and farewell dinners to plan. 

This is the career we've chosen. Every two or three years we're going to be leaving a new place. There's no getting around the summers of goodbyes. But for every goodbye, there's a hello. For that, I am thankful. And hopefully, some of those goodbyes are going to be hasta la proxima ves, not adios.

Albu-quirky

One thing that the spouse and I had a major hard time when we first came here is getting out of the bubble of America that the consulate community provides here in Juarez. It's only going to be natural to  invite people in a similar situation out for dinner or a drink after work. And that could, in turn, stretch to  an activity for the rest of the evening (watching movies, starting a group based on a 8 year old Korean drama, crossfit, etc.).  And all that hanging out with your coworkers and their families sometimes leads to a feeling of being trapped under the weight of office gossip and shop talk. There's only so many times one can discuss how immigration reform may or may not affect our jobs, and at this point we've pretty much exhausted all but the most extreme visa interview stories. So about two or three months after arriving here, the spouse and I made a pact to devote a portion of our salary specifically to get us out of the area and satisfy our itch to travel (a small part of why we joined the Foreign Service to begin with).

With the security situation being what it is, we're pretty limited in where we can go in Mexico. Basically, if we want to go anywhere outside of Juarez, we have to fly. But wait, you say, isn't El Paso right across the border? So in theory shouldn't you have flights to both countries and endless possibilities? Two cities mean twice the fun, right!? Survey says: not so much. If El Paso and Juarez could merge their populations and fully integrate their economies (more than they already are) perhaps there could be one large airport that could serve as a hub for both countries and drive down flight costs. In reality, each city is an isolated outpost pretty much in the middle of nowhere in both countries. So flight options are limited and much, much more expensive than we thought before coming here. As a consequence of this we've tended to alternate our flying adventures with more targeted driving long weekends to various parts of the Southwestern U.S. But we typically wait for long weekends as, once again, El Paso is REALLY isolated. For instance, the nearest town of any size outside of the Juarez/El Paso/Las Cruces, NM area is Albuquerque - more than 5 hours of driving away. Coming from the East Coast, where one could drive from DC to NY in less than 4 hours (and hit Baltimore and Philadelphia, not to mention numerous beaches, our friends and family in NJ, and issue-specific locations like Atlantic City on the way), this isolation is a bit disheartening. 

Side note, this issue may veer into a special sub-category of problems that the spouse and I label "diplomat problems." Little things that make us un-empathetic that crop up in conversations, because the only people that understand are the people who work with us. "Problems" like  "oh the maid that I'm paying to clean my government-provided house that is too big for me to clean by myself is drinking all of my orange juice" or "the waiters at the VIP movie theater that most people here can't afford take SOOO long to bring my drinks to my lazy-boy during the movie (that I'm seeing before people in the U.S. because international releases!)." In a way, the spouse and I feel a bit chagrined to complain about our lives here. Many are not as blessed as we are. We can afford to get out of town once a month. We can hire a maid to clean our free house (which is why we can afford to do these things...) that is realistically too big for us to maintain, not in a location we would choose on our own, and completely not in keeping with our pre-Foreign Service lifestyle. Et cetera, et cetera. 

But even though these problems are not the same as those that people living paycheck to paycheck have, they still have a real effect on our mental health. And so, to stay sane, the spouse and I go on vacations where we can experience things that we really, really can't in the CJ/El Paso area. Things like walkable city streets, museums, humidity, shopping (really, we once drove 3 hours out of our way while on a trip to Tucson to go to the Ikea in Tempe), mass transportation, biking, and so forth. So spouse and I headed to Albuquerque last weekend to celebrate Mexican Mother's Day (a friday holiday here) by walking around the town, going suit shopping for the upcoming A-100, going to museums, and generally celebrating the fact that we were not in Juarez. Highlights of the trip included seeing the Adam West Batmobile, walking to brunch(es), and  reading about the history of dinosaurs, computers, and El Camino Real (which sounds like the Casino Royal... but is NOT). Also, attending/mocking the concert of a one-woman synthesizer hipster "band" with swaying scowling apathetic hipsters who were pretending to hate the Enya and Radiohead monstrosity of "music" being produced but in reality loving every second of it. Albuquerque is unashamedly quirky, and for that we love it.