When you are first hired by the Foreign Service, you are
invited to join the American Foreign Service Association or AFSA. It seemed
like a good idea at the time so I joined and, thereafter, the princely sum of
$11.65 was deducted from each paycheck to pay my dues. And, since that first
day I have remained, thanks to these automatic deductions from my paycheck, a
member in good standing of this professional association. I receive from them a
magazine published monthly (more or less) and a newsletter published
irregularly. Oh, and it also turns out that AFSA is a union and I am,
therefore, a dues-paying union man. Woody Guthrie, Upton Sinclair, John L.
Lewis, Wobblies and me! Why is this of interest? Well…..
Recently, I discovered that I have a difference of
opinion with the Department of State. As differences of opinion in labor
history go, this one doesn’t quite rank up there with the bloody battles of the
steel workers or the coal miners in the early 1900’s but it has offered me a
lesson or two on the grievance process as practiced by diplomats. As Will
Rogers once said, “Diplomacy is the art of saying, ‘Nice doggy’ until you can
find a rock!”
It all began back in 2011 when I received my assignment
to become the Management Officer in Embassy Port Moresby; an embassy designated
as a Hard-To-Fill post. In order to encourage competent and qualified bidders
to serve at our Hard-To-Fill posts, the Department offers a Service Needs
Differential payment as an incentive. To qualify for the SND payment, an
officer must serve at the HTF post for three years. A two year assignment would
have left me with an awkward eleven month gap until my mandatory retirement
date in August 2014, so I volunteered for a three year tour. At the end of my
first year at post I received the SND payment for that year. At the end of my
second year at post I received the SND payment for that year. Then this year
the Department of State said, “Hey, wait a minute! You’re going to miss serving
the required time at post and don’t qualify for the SND payments.”
Due to my mandatory retirement date I will actually miss
serving the full three years at post by three days. Even with mandatory
retirement I would still have been at post long enough to qualify if I hadn’t
been required to attend a mandatory training course and then a mandatory
conference. In my opinion, missing the full three years by three days due to a
series of mandatory events might qualify me for a waiver and allow me to
receive the third year’s payment. Post’s front office agreed, the Bureau’s
management agreed, my Human Resources rep agreed. Unfortunately, the panel of
people deciding on the waiver did not agree. They determined that I would not
have to repay the first two SND payments I’d already received but would not
receive the third. Because diplomacy is the art of letting someone else have
your way, I decided to, diplomatically, express my disagreement with the
panel’s decision and I appealed my case to the Director General.
The DG gave my appeal due consideration, shook his head
and said, “Nope!” Ok. Churchill once said, “Diplomacy is the art of telling
people to go to Hell in such a way that they ask for directions.” After asking for directions I sat at my desk
pondering my next move. (I’m not ashamed to admit that the directions were somewhat
confusing so I didn’t go.) My options seemed to be to A) give up, B) fire off
an email filled with righteous indignation steeped in a tone of incredulity, or
C) whine privately to the few semi-sympathetic friends who still listen to me. Then
I remembered AFSA and the dues I’ve been coughing up since 2007. Silence in the
Union Hall, Brother Gemmell has the floor and wishes to air his grievance! More
accurately, since AFSA doesn’t actually have a Union Hall, I crafted a polite
email asking for their advice and opinion and sent it off. As the Brits used to
say, “Down tools, mates, we’re off until they see us right!”
AFSA, my union, has to date chosen to ignore this
obviously complex and thorny issue. But I expect to hear from them any day now
and I’m preparing the picket signs in advance. Brothers and sisters, to the
barricades!!
Sorcery and Turtles
I took some time off to tour parts of PNG that I haven’t
had an opportunity to see yet. I flew up to Mt. Hagen in the highlands and
visited some villages around that city, then traveled by road to Goroka on the
Highlands Highway. The Highlands Highway, the longest stretch of ‘improved’
road in the country, is a pitted, pot-holed, decaying two lane goat track that demands
a somewhat naïve conviction that you won’t be swept away or squashed by the
frequent landslides that occur along its path. Oh, and a four-wheel drive
vehicle is mandatory.
Somewhere between Mt. Hagen and Goroka, the driver pulled
off the majestic Highlands Highway and drove down a rutted dirt footpath to a
small village. I assumed that this planned stop was going to be a sing-sing, a
performance in which the tribe dresses in their traditional costumes and hops
up and down while chanting and beating on drums. Sing-sings are really
interesting when dozens of tribes get together and strut their stuff in
friendly competition. They’re not quite as fascinating when one lone tribe hops
up and down by themselves in their own village. So, I prepared to be a good
sport and just hoped that the ‘performance’ wouldn’t last too long and we could
be on our way.
Instead of a sing-sing, the tribe performed a play in
pantomime. I sat on a log bench and my guide stood behind me describing in
great and vivid detail exactly what I was seeing. The story involved a ghost
who lived in a cave in the region and who stole, killed and presumably ate
children. The ghost looked like the misbegotten love-child of a bear and an
enormous rat. The villagers were painted like skeletons and the cave was a
brush covered cubby-hole. The acting was decent, the plot was interesting and
my guide’s interpretation was unnecessary but enthusiastic. “Do you see,” he
whispered in my ear, “the ghost is coming out of his cave!” Yep, here he comes.
In the end, the villagers kill the ghost by cutting off its tail.
This play, the guide assured me after the performance, is
a reenactment of real events. If we had time he could show me the cave in which
the ghost lived before the villagers managed to kill it. After the ghost was
killed, it moved to another valley and the villagers even know the location of
its new cave. That, you’d assume, would be the end of that. The ghost is now
another village’s problem. Unfortunately, the evil spirit of the dead and
relocated ghost stills drifts around in the hills and periodically enters the
body of some wretched villager, usually an elderly woman without family to
defend her, who then naturally becomes a sorcerer. Sorcerers are frowned upon,
blamed for everything bad that happens and brutally slain. This is a tough
country in which to be an old lady.
Outside of Goroka I visited two other villages. In the
first I watched a courtship dance and in the second saw a performance by the
Asaro Mudmen. In the courtship dance, the couples sit on the ground in a line
with their legs stretched out straight in front of them. They sit boy-girl-boy-girl
with the girls facing in one direction and the boys in the other and begin to
sing and chant as they sway left and right against each other. This can go on
for hours and, apparently, by the end you know if your intended is sitting next
to you or not. My guide met his own wife this way. Online dating can’t compete
with sitting on the bug infested ground next to a prospective spouse, chanting
a monotonous nonsensical phrase throughout a hot afternoon while rubbing
shoulders and stealing quick glances into each other’s eyes. You may very well
agree to marry your neighbor just to get away from the ants!
The Asaro Mudmen of Goroka are among the most well known
and photographed of the PNG tribes. Their performance was a slow motion demonstration
of the battles they have fought with neighboring tribes. Because their tribe
was smaller than most of their neighbors and had fewer warriors, the Mudmen
began to cover themselves in white mud and wear frightening clay helmets to
make their enemies think they were ghosts. They would dig holes and wait in them
for the approaching tribe, then rise out of the ground in slow motion and the
battle would be over before it had even begun. Now, of course, all their
neighbors have caught on to their trick so the Mudmen tend to entertain
tourists and sell their clay helmets for 250 kina a pop! Tribal warfare is
still pretty common in the highlands but the Mudmen are more or less like
everyone else and fight it out with bush knives, bows & arrows and spears. There
used to be some fairly well defined rules to tribal warfare that resulted in a
lot of shouting and martial display but few if any casualties. Now, however,
guns are becoming more common and warfare in the highlands is beginning to
resemble warfare everywhere else except, of course, for the white mud and the
clay helmets.
Everywhere I went in the highlands and every village I
visited treated me to a muu-muu. In Hawaii it would be called a luau and it
would probably taste much better. Here a muu-muu is prepared by digging a pit
and lining it with rocks that have been heated in a fire. The food is wrapped
in banana leaves, placed in the pit and then covered with additional banana
leaves and random vegetation. After some period of time the food is judged to
be ‘cooked’ and is dug up and served. In every case the food consisted of bland
dry sweet potatoes and small dried out bananas. After all the work that went
into preparing the meal, the rocks would have had more flavor.
Leaving the highland’s ghosts, sorcerers and muu-muus
behind I flew out to Kavieng on New Ireland to do some diving. From Kavieng I
took a 20 minute boat ride out to Lissenung Island and moved into one of the
four units that make up that resort. The next morning I began a series of dives
that covered the next eight days. There is a subtle and generally unspoken
competition among divers to be the last to surface (the rule here is that you
must still be alive, drowning automatically disqualifies you). It’s a zen
thing. Be calm under water, be at peace, find your center, all that crap. A
full tank of air holds about 3,000 psi. I’ll use 1,000 psi while I’m adjusting
my mask! If there were a prize for surfacing first I’d have a mantle full of
trophies.
The dive instructor could tell that it was bothering me
so he gave me some invaluable advice. “Smoke cigarettes. They destroy your lung
capacity and you inhale less air with every breath,” he said and took a mighty
drag on his cigarette. I guess I’ll stick to cigars, but they don’t seem to be
helping. The following day on three dives I came up first, first and in a
remarkable display of consistency, first. I also have a knack for missing the
good stuff even when it’s pointed out to me. My dive buddy was pointing at a
bit of coral on one dive. I looked at it pretty closely and nodded that I saw
it. It was a nice piece of coral on a solid wall of coral. After we surfaced
everyone was excited at having seen a large moray eel. My buddy said, “We saw
it too!” Uh, yeah. It’s almost a skill to be able to miss a giant moray eel on
a coral wall when your dive buddy is virtually touching its head to help you
spot it.
The woman who owns the Lissenung Island Resort goes out to
neighboring islands and digs up turtle nests to rebury the eggs on Lissenung.
She does this to save the eggs from the locals who dig up the nests to eat the
eggs. While I was there two of the nests hatched and dozens of green and
hawksbill turtles made it to the sea. It was quite an experience seeing them
explode out of the sand and scrabble their way across the sand to the water.
With the half dozen guests of the resort providing an honor guard, none of the
baby turtles’ traditional predators were able to feed on them and all of them
made it into the waves.
Finally, I flew from Kavieng to Rabaul to visit the major
Japanese WWII base. In addition to touring the caves they dug and the gun
emplacements guarding the harbor, I dove with a group on a site called The Deep
Zero. It’s a Japanese fighter that was shot down close to shore and sits undisturbed
in about 140 feet of water. The deeper you go, the faster you use your air. In
spite of that, I made it down to the plane and almost outlasted one other
diver. Although I went up first, everyone else was right behind me. Back on the
dive boat the group reviewed the dive and compared the things they’d seen. It
seems that there was a yellow moray eel in a hole in the wing. Oh yeah, I
totally saw that too. At least I did see the damn plane!
On solid land I went to the base of the very active
Tavurvur volcano. In the 90’s this monster erupted and wiped out Rabaul City. You
can’t hike up it now because it’s too active and unstable but, for some reason,
they’ll let you stand around at its base and gawk up at the fumes and ash
raining down on you. Etna, Vesuvius, Stromboli and Tavurvur, hike it or not,
I’m adding it to my active volcano collection!!
The islands are a good deal safer and quieter than either
Port Moresby or the Highlands. Apart from active and unstable volcanoes, that
is. It was nice to be able to go to the market and even ride on a bus neither
of which is recommended in Moresby. The diving is excellent and I wasn’t asked
to eat muu-muu even once.
In the time it’s taken me to write this, I’ve received a
reply from AFSA. Sadly, it appears that my union won’t be calling on all
diplomats for a general strike on my behalf. Nor do they recommend that I
pursue my argument further. In fact, they recommend that I drop the whole
thing. Cavalier treatment, I say, of a man who knows the general location of a
cave containing a ghost who, with the right incentive, might just move to DC!!
On the bright side, however, I’ve just learned of a man with emphysema who
dives once in a while in Moresby. I have every expectation of coming up second
in the near future!
