Two Things I Love About A-100

When is the last time you got thrown into a large group of people and were pretty much required to get to know them all and form a cohesive group? For me, it was my Peace Corps training group in the early '90s, and there wasn't nearly as much emphasis on creating a group, since we were headed to one-off two-year posts. I'm still in touch with a good number of them, but our careers have all diverged. This group will be colleagues until we quit or retire, and we'll benefit from the network of people scattered around the globe for information and job referrals. It finally feels like it's starting to gel; we've moved from learning one another's names and histories to developing stronger bonds (dare I say friendships?) with individuals and gathering in groups to analyze our larger group.

And the bonding continues apace. A chunk of folks went off the Outer Banks (North Carolina) for the long weekend. A huge number of the remaining went out for Korean barbecue on Friday night. And we had an American-style barbecue on Saturday night, where we met some of the members of the Foreign Service Specialists group, whose A-100 orientation overlaps ours. Met a diplomatic security agent candidate (their term of art, which I don't understand exactly, but it has to do with the requirement for lots of training before they start serving overseas) and an information technology specialist, who is also from Hawaii. 

The other thing that makes me grin on a regular basis is walking around the Foreign Service Institute and hearing conversations in so many languages, including many I can't identify. They don't discriminate against "boutique" languages, those spoken in just one or two countries. The instructors are all native speakers, so I've been delighted to hear West African-accented French. The woman who gave me my French test a few weeks ago was from Senegal. In fact, of all the crazy coincidences, she'd worked on the same project I did during my internship (although she was long gone by the time I was there).

OK, a third thing. I'm a learning junkie, and this job appears to be... trying to come up with a way to finish this sentence that doesn't completely glorify drug addiction and am failing. Anyway, I'll be learning on a steep curve for a long time. If I don't OD, I'll be flying high for a long time.