I've finished my Charleston assignment in the Comptroller and Global Financial Services Bureau. Now I'm temporarily in the DC area and am at the Foreign Service Institute learning French. Yes, my job for the next few months is to learn French. Mark and Cosmo are here, too, and we're all nestled into our temporary apartment in Sedona-Slate in Rosslyn. It's nice to be all back together after being apart for a year and a half. French class going fairly well. It's a very well organized system designed to get one to the necessary level of speaking and reading as efficiently as possible. Since I had a bit of French coming into the course, I'm what they call a "parachuter". That means that the first week I moved around different sections to find the one that corresponds to the level I'm at. That first week was spent saying je m'appelle Michael a lot. Right now I'm in a section of two people. At the end of May I'll go through another assessment and be put into another section. For now I'm scheduled to be in French until mid-August. However, I have my first language text on June 30. If I obtain my target of 2/2 (2 speaking and 2 reading), then other options may come up. French at FSI has also been humbling. This first video is how I felt, smugly, about my French ability. After my first assessment during the first week, the second video is more how I feel.
Well, maybe not quite that bad, but close. My advice to anyone coming to FSI to learn a language: bring your patience, desire to learn, and humility. It can be fun, but it's also a lot of work. I'll check back in a few weeks from now when I'm in my next section. Here are ten reasons to learn French.
My time in Charleston, SC has ended. It's been a good assignment - rotating through different parts of financial administration for the State Department. I've made lots of friends and colleagues and met a ton of people who will be super helpful throughout my foreign service career. I'll miss Charleston and the friends I've made. But I'll take with me the friendliness and gentility that I encountered on a daily basis. I'm also taking with me about 10 extra pounds, but hopefully the DC bike trails can help take care of that. My last rotation in CGFS was in Disbursing and my last task was a trip to the U.S. Embassy in Kigali, Rwanda to monitor and audit the cashier operations there. I'm very happy to have had this experience to put training into action and to see how a U.S. Embassy runs. It was a small preview of some of my duties as a financial management officer at post. So now it's three months of French language training and then on to the next assignment: Bamako, Mali. Before Kigali, I spent two days in Amsterdam. It was perfect tulip time (late April). Also, take a boat ride with Those Dam Boat Guys.
