Yugoslavia, 1990

My first overseas assignment with the foreign service was a temporary posting in late 1990 to the Canadian Embassy in Belgrade, the capital of what was then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The purpose of this assignment was to train me on how to do visa and consular work at an overseas mission. With that first step into the chancery airlock* I entered into a completely new and sometimes baffling world for which an upbringing in mid-sized southwestern Ontario cities had not prepared me.

*In case you’re wondering about the vocabulary, the “chancery” is the generic name for the main building of an embassy. The “airlock” is a double set of bulletproof doors that allows you access to the chancery using a numeric code. Once you pass through the first door you must allow it to close behind you before you can code into the second door, meaning that you’re momentarily locked inside a small passage way. You’re typically on video camera during this period. The system prevents intruders from forcing their way into the building. Later in this post I refer to the "Head of Mission", a generic term that covers Ambassadors, High Commissioners, Consuls General and similar titles given to Canada's chief official representative to another country.

1990 was the last good year for the Yugoslavia. The Slovenian secession of 1991 triggered a decade’s worth of increasingly brutal civil wars and shattered the federation into seven new states (Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia). I would witness firsthand the fallout from that decade of conflict when I returned to the region in the period 1999-2002 as Canada’s Immigration Control Officer, but for now I wish to write about that last good year.

Optimism was high in 1990. The Cold War had recently ended and the Soviet Union had collapsed. Yugoslavia had been a Communist country and nominally still was, but unlike its neighbours Hungary and Romania, it had managed to maintain a level of independence from the Russians. The result was that rapprochement with Western Europe was moving at a rapid pace, and western businesses and products had started pouring into the country. Colgate toothpaste could be bought in corner shops, upscale Italian clothes seller Benetton had opened shop in Belgrade, and McDonald’s opened its third restaurant in Belgrade the week I arrived – things that had been unimaginable only a few years earlier.

I lived for six weeks in the recently opened Hyatt Regency hotel, across the Sava river from the old city of Belgrade that perched on the high ground overlooking the confluence of the Sava and the Danube. To one side of the Hyatt was a set of new luxury condo towers, the Genex apartments; on the other side was a miserable shanty town of self-built shacks inhabited by Roma people (more widely known by the disparaging term ‘gypsies’). This was the first time I had seen such a jarring juxtaposition of wealth and poverty; I would see it many more times during my career.

I’ll talk at greater length in another blog post about the nature of day-to-day work in the visa and consular sections of an embassy. For now, I’ll simply mention the general routine I followed in Belgrade. Most mornings I would interview people seeking temporary visas for Canada – tourists, students, and people with temporary jobs waiting for them. They had booked appointments many days in advance. The interviews took place in a small cubicle, with me separated from the interviewees by bulletproof glass. Many applicants didn’t speak English, so translation was provided by a program assistant employed by the Embassy, who sat on a stool next to me. She was my age and was very pretty. Although I was smitten, she wasn’t interested in me.

In the afternoons I interviewed people who had applied to immigrate to Canada permanently. These interviews I did in my temporary office, the applicants being led in by a security guard once they had gone through the metal detectors. I didn’t need a translator for these interviews, since most spoke English well – a main requirement for qualifying for immigration unless you’re being sponsored by a family member. One of the first people I ever issued an immigrant visa to was a woman in her late twenties who moved to Vancouver, lived with her aunt, and got her first Canadian job at Eatons. I know this because she later sent me a letter, care of the Embassy, to tell me how things were working out for her. It was the one and only time that ever happened in my twelve years of visa work.

What I enjoyed best were the evenings and weekends. Sometimes people from the Embassy would invite me to go out with them or visit them at their homes, but many times I was on my own. That was fine, I was more than content to stroll around the streets of the old city – a pastime the French call being a “flâneur”. Like most continental European cities there was a main pedestrian-only street, and it ran from the shopping core out to Kalemegdan, the old fortress from which the city of Belgrade developed. Much of Belgrade had been leveled by bombing during the Second World War, so the architecture along the walking street was fairly forgettable, but the people were fascinating. Many would get dressed up specifically to spend a pleasant evening strolling up and down, gazing in the shop windows and at one another. Having come from Ontario, where pedestrian-only streets are practically unheard of and urban walking is often distinctly unpleasant because of the traffic, I hadn’t encountered anything like it before.

Belgrade had other unexpected surprises in store for me. One weekend night I went over to my supervisor’s house for supper. It was a pleasant evening, but ended early, as she had kids who had to get to bed. Her kids' caregiver - a woman about my age - had stayed on that evening to babysit, and was getting ready to go out at about the same time as me. She invited me to join her as she went to meet some friends at a club, and I did. The taxi drove us into a distinctly seedy-looking part of town I hadn’t seen previously. We hopped out and she led me to a nondescript steel door in the side of an old brick building. There were no signs, just a bright overhead light shining down on the stoop. She pounded on the door and, like something out of the movies, part of the door slid open and from inside came the bass beat music and the glare of an enormous bouncer. She spoke to him in Serbian; he scowled at me but grudgingly opened the door and let us in after I gave him (on her instructions) the equivalent of five bucks. We walked up a short flight of stairs and entered an absolutely packed dance club, full of beautiful people straight out of a magazine. I’d like to say I had a wild night, but in truth my companion and her friends quickly abandoned me for the dance floor. Being disinclined to follow and underdressed for the venue, I left after a drink or two.

The following Friday there was a happy hour or reception or some such event at the Embassy after work. I was chatting with one of the guests, an ambassador for one of the Nordic countries, who was in his mid-sixties. He was telling me about his favourite Serbian painter, Konovic, and about the charms of Sombor where there was a Konovic museum. I said offhand that it sounded cool, I’d have to check it out some time. He said that if I had nothing else planned for the following day, he’d be happy to take me on a road trip to Sombor. We could check out the museum, and grab a bite to eat. Guilelessly I agreed. It was about midway through dinner the following evening in a quiet bistro with a glass of good Montenegrin vranac wine that I realized I wasn’t on a road trip, but on a date. I must say, he was a gentleman, and concealed his disappointment when I declined the invitation to go back to his apartment when we returned to Belgrade. Monday morning at the office my colleague Nathalie was doubled over with laughter at my naïveté as I recounted the story to her.

I received another unsolicited advance two weeks later at the Embassy Christmas party, a tradition at most Canadian missions where all the employees of the Embassy, both locally engaged staff and the Canadian diplomats, plus all their spouses (and often their children as well) are invited to the Head of Mission’s house for supper. I decided to attend only at the last minute, as I was still recovering from a bout of salmonella I’d picked up the week before, the first of many gastro-intestinal illnesses I’d suffer over my foreign service career. At supper I was seated next to a locally engaged secretary from another floor of the Embassy that I rarely passed through. We chatted politely about this and that. After the main course was eaten she turned to speak to the person to her right while at the same time plopping her left hand into my lap, where it remained for several minutes until dessert was served. Like my night club escapade and my dinner date in Novi Sad, this was something new to me. Had circumstances been different, I might have pursued the secretary’s advance, in spite of the briefing I’d received my first day at the Embassy, at which I was warned against fraternizing with locally engaged staff outside business hours without notifying the mission security officer in writing. Fortunately for Canadian security, my post-salmonella tummy was grumbling ominously about the rich food, so I made a hasty departure and spent the remainder of the night alone in my hotel room with a bottle of Pepto-Bismol.

First Days at External

At my desk in Fort Pearson, 1990

When I moved to Ottawa to join the foreign service I spent my first night in a jail cell. It was May 1990, and I had taken the bus from Cambridge, Ontario, an eight hour journey. I arrived with a large suitcase containing one suit, two new sports jackets, three new pairs of dress pants, five shirts, a half-dozen ties, two new pairs of leather dress shoes that hurt my feet, plus whatever other clothing I could stuff inside. I was mostly broke and didn’t know a soul in Ottawa, so after arriving at the bus station I made my way to the youth hostel on Nicholas Street, which was once the city jail. My bunk was in a cell down the hall from the scaffold from which condemned prisoners were once hanged; a new noose had been added to it for macabre effect. The hostel was quiet, and my only neighbour was a Japanese student who asked me to teach him the words to 'O Canada'.

The following day my new employer – officially known then as External Affairs and International Trade Canada, but referred to by everyone in Ottawa as simply “External” – gave me an advance and hired someone to help me find an apartment with immediate occupancy, so I only had to spend a couple more nights on death row. I rented an unfurnished, ninth-floor, one-bedroom apartment with new hardwood floors, relatively few cockroaches, and a spectacular view of the Gatineau hills to the north. At the old Home Hardware store on Elgin Street I bought a patio table and chairs to stand in for a dining room set, literally rolling the round table home on its edge. I then rented a van to drive back to Cambridge to retrieve some very old pots and pans, a second-hand couch and lamps, and a well-used futon mattress passed along by a high school friend who apologized for the period stains she couldn’t get out of the fabric. My new apartment was spartan, but it was steps from the Rideau Canal, and a pleasant half-hour walk along Sussex Drive to the Lester B.Pearson Building, External’s headquarters.

It was a big change from where I’d been the month before. In April I was writing final exams at the end of my first year of law school at the University of Western Ontario. I liked law school well enough, and had good enough grades to make the Dean’s honour roll. But when in January of that year I’d received a phone call from Ottawa offering me a gig in the foreign service, it was too good an opportunity to pass up. After all, you can always go to law school, but how many people get a chance to try being a diplomat? The caller had asked if I could start right away, but I put them off until after exams, so that I could qualify for a year’s leave of absence from law school in case the diplomat thing didn’t work out.

I didn’t know what to expect when I arrived to work at the Pearson Building. It’s sometimes referred to by its denizens as “Fort Pearson”, which is an apt description. It’s a giant brown structure shaped like an assembly of odd-shaped shoe boxes piled in a heap (or maybe something a kid would build in minecraft), situated on a sort of island between the Rideau River and the six lanes of traffic roaring to and from the bridge to Gatineau, Quebec. Access is limited to a small turnaround that leads from Sussex Drive to the front main doors, and a parking garage below the building that’s approached from the rear. There are no walls or fences surrounding the building, for there is no need. There are no main floor windows. Instead, the brown walls of the building sort of erupt out of the ground and stretch up ten or fifteen feet before the first row of hermetically sealed tinted glass appears.

When you enter Fort Pearson there’s a large atrium with flags and large works of Canadian art. I think there was a GordonSmith painting hung prominently when I worked there. In my memory the atrium was huge, but I was back for a meeting at recently, and it turns out it’s smaller than I remembered. It also appears to have the same brown leather couches in the waiting area as it did in 1990, but maybe I’m mistaken. Front and centre is a reception desk where visitors check in, and behind it, to the left, a large cafeteria, where at certain times of the day certain high ranking officials would sit at particular tables and have coffee. Sort of like high school, where the senior students had their table and any grade nines foolish enough to sit at it would be glared at by other students until they relocated elsewhere.

The offices in Fort Pearson are situated in four “towers” or elevator banks; only the ‘A’ tower, which has the Minister’s office in it, is truly a tower. After I’d been working at External for a couple weeks, my director general at the time took me and another newbie, my great friend Sarah, on a tour of the Minister’s office. The Minister at that time was Joe Clark, who had once briefly been Prime Minister, but he was nearing the end of his run at External, soon to be replaced by Barbara McDougall. The Minister’s office was spacious, and I recall three specific things about it: the private bathroom, the large balcony, and the brown leather furniture (I was told Mr. Clark was fond of brown leather).

Unlike the Minister’s office, the rest of the building was a rabbits’ warren of corridors, small offices (many of them windowless), and walls of a post-industrial hue of greenish-beige that put your stomach slightly off on cloudy days. There were two or three times the number of employees working in Fort Pearson than it had been intended to house when it was constructed in the late 1960s. The building was designed with thin interior walls made of metal that could be moved around, though not quickly or easily, to reconfigure working spaces and offices in response to changing needs. Perhaps the only tangible benefit of metal walls was that magnets could be used instead of pushpins to hang things up.

In my first weeks I was assigned to an administrative unit responsible for paying out benefits to diplomats overseas – things like allowances for supplemental vacation travel, sending kids to private schools, unusual medical expenses, and so forth. It was pretty dull stuff, but the idea was that it allowed me to get my feet wet and learn a bit about departmental culture. There were three of us newbies in that unit – known collectively by our job classification, “the FS1D”s –and we became fast friends. One was a Nova Scotian who had previously worked in a mental hospital where he had once had to tend to a former Canadian boxing champion who spent some time there as a patient. The other was a young woman, fresh out of university like me. My starting salary was slightly more than $21,000 a year; hers was two or three thousand dollars less, because she had never had a job of any kind previously. I had worked in factories every summer and most weekends since I was sixteen, and my very gracious personnel officer counted this as “relevant prior experience” when calculating my salary. And in hindsight, I would argue it was indeed relevant, if only because in the factories you learn not only how to work hard, but also how to put up with difficult people.

So that, then, was me at 23: new job, new apartment in a new city, new friends, little clue as to what I’d gotten myself into, and no money. I was a bit lonely and very lost, but overall very happy.

How I got my gig as a diplomat

By the start of my third year at the University of Western Ontario I’d decided I wanted to go to law school. I was enjoying my undergrad program in Resources Conservation, but I figured the money and job prospects were better for lawyers than for people coming out of geography departments. I planned to write the LSAT that fall. One day in September while passing time between classes in the student centre I noticed a flyer saying that someone from the government of Canada would be on campus the next day to give a talk on how to become a diplomat. Had that single flyer not been posted, I might now be writing wills instead of this blog.

The speaker explained that the first step in getting into the foreign service then – and I believe it’s the same now – was to write the foreign service entrance exam, which I did that same fall. The exam then consisted of two parts. The first was sort of like the LSAT – lots of logic questions, of the type, “Five people wearing hats are standing in a line. One has a blue hat, one has a red hat, and three have yellow hats. How many ways can you arrange them so that the person in the red hat never stands next to the person in the blue hat?” The second part of the exam was on current affairs and world issues. It asked what acronyms like UNEP stand for, what happened at Bretton Woods, and who scored the winning goal in the 1972 Summit Series. I watched the CBC national news fairly often and, I’m a geographer after all, so I didn’t find the test to be any more or less challenging than the LSAT, which I wrote a around the same time.

The absolute value of your score on the foreign service exam is meaningless, what’s more important is how high you score relative to others who wrote the test. The test is simply a screening tool. Each year the government decides how many new foreign service officers it wants to hire (some years dozens, other years only a few) and selects an appropriate number of people to interview from the top of the test results. Some months after I wrote the exam – I don’t recall exactly when – I was notified that I would be interviewed on the Western campus, and that I should bring a lunch because it would take all day.

I showed up that Saturday in my high school graduation suit and tie with a lunch and a book. I really had no clue what to expect. I learned later that many people write the FS exam year after year in hopes of getting an interview, and that for many it’s a life’s dream. I was merely following the process along, keeping my employment options open. I think maybe the fact that the test and the interview took place on my campus left me especially unprepared for what I encountered wen I got to the waiting room. There were several people already there, and more subsequently arrived. All were older and more sharply dressed than me. I recall asking the woman seated next to me what she studied (thinking maybe she was a grad student) and she replied flatly, “I’m an accountant”. Looking around the room reminded me of the old poker players’ saying that if you look around the table and don’t see any easy marks, you’re the easy mark. Rather than making me nervous, however, the realization that I was the least experienced person in the room relaxed me. When you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose, wrote Bob Dylan.

My interview was conducted by a group of five people, three or four of them current foreign service officers, and at least one an HR specialist from the Public Service Commission. It started with some general getting-to-know-you questions, but quickly moved on to talk about my experiences, which weren’t exactly impressive given that I was only 21 or 22 at the time. I told them about working in the factories around Cambridge and Kitchener making auto parts. They wanted to know about my travels. Fortunately my parents thought nothing when we were kids of loading up the station wagon, hitching up the tent trailer and driving to Nova Scotia or British Columbia or Florida for a summer holiday, so I could say with a straight face I’d visited nine provinces and a dozen US states. Also, the previous year I’d blown some of my OSAP money on a spontaneous trip to Italy to visit a girl in Turin who was a “pen pal” – which can sound impressive if you tell the story the right way, and I did.

Next came the scenario questions, of which there were several. The one I remember most clearly was, “Imagine you’re the consular officer at the Canadian Embassy in Mexico. A Canadian man shows up in a panic, his nineteen year old daughter had been at a Mexican beach resort for spring break, was caught buying drugs, and was now in a Mexican jail. Her father wants you to help him bribe some Mexican officials to get her out. What do you do?” This is an easy question, especially if you’re a student who had on two previous spring break trips to Florida consumed enough cheap vodka to have easily run afoul of the law but, thankfully, had not. So I responded without hesitation, “Yes, I’d certainly try to help him”. This prompted the interviewers to start scribbling furiously on their notepads, so I though that I’d best add a few details. I added something to the effect of, “I mean, I know it’s wrong and probably something Canadian officials shouldn’t be doing, but I don’t think a Mexican prison is a safe place for a young Canadian girl”.  It must have been a good answer, since I did eventually get the job.

After the interview, I was sent off to eat my lunch and return in the afternoon for the second part. This took place in a board room, and all the other people who I’d seen in the waiting room that morning were now seated at the boardroom table, and the interviewers were seated around the perimeter of the room. This was to be a role play, with the interviewers wanting to observe our interactions with one another. The scenario was something like this: we were to imagine we were Canadian Embassy staff in a Caribbean island country. The government of Canada was providing development assistance to this country, and had allocated up to $200,000 for spending on new development projects on the island. Each of us was given a file folder containing the description of a possible project option. We were to present our project to the group, and then collectively we were to decide which projects would get funded. We were given a few minutes to read our files and prepare our presentations.

Mine was a real dog of a project: the island’s revenue agency was requesting $150,000 to spend on new computer software to help them improve their efficiency in collecting taxes. Even I could see this was a loser. So when my turn came to present my project, I gave a simple synopsis, its strengths and weaknesses, and concluded by recommending we fund the sewage treatment plant someone else had presented moments earlier. After everyone had made their presentations, the discussion quickly began to focus on the relative merits of two particular projects. I didn’t interject too much; a few of the interviewees were dominating the conversation. Things seemed deadlocked, since the two projects together cost more than $200,000, meaning only one could be funded. I did some rough calculations on my notepad and saw that if one of the line items in one of the projects could be reduced by a certain amount, the sum of the two projects would be exactly $200k. So, I proposed we go back to the fictitious island government, ask them to modify the pitch for that project accordingly and, if they agreed, fund both. Everyone around the table agreed, and we were done.

Some weeks later I received a letter from Ottawa saying that the recruitment process was still ongoing, and could I please complete the enclosed forms as they wanted to do some background checks on me. More weeks passed. One of my professors saw me in the hallway and mentioned cryptically that strangers had been asking after me. My high school basketball coach phoned to say that some plainclothes policemen had come to see him about me. My parents’ neighbours reported the same thing, and finally my girlfriend’s parents did, too. These were actually CSIS employees going around to make sure I didn’t have any bad habits or skeletons in my closet, since foreign services officers typically receive “top secret” security clearances (i.e. they have access to government documents classified up to the Top Secret level).

Months passed. In the meantime, I started law school at Western. More than halfway through my first year, and probably about 16 months after I wrote the FS exam, I got a phone call from Ottawa offering me a job as a foreign service officer in the “social affairs stream”. There were four streams in the foreign service in those days: political reporting, trade promotion, development assistance work, and social affairs (i.e. immigration, refugees, and consular work). I was asked if I could start right away, which struck me as kind of weird, since it had been a while since I’d last heard from them. I struck a deal to move to Ottawa as soon as I’d finished my final exams. And that is how I came to be a foreign service officer.

A garden variety diplomat - what this blog's about...

In May of 1990, at the age of 23, I joined Canada’s foreign service. By the end of the year I had had my first taste of crisis consular work (I answered phones and gathered information from Canadians whose loved ones had been in Kuwait when Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army invaded) and had completed my first diplomatic posting (a six-week training assignment at the Canadian Embassy in Belgrade, then capital of Yugoslavia). By the time I left the foreign service in 2002 to pursue my PhD at Guelph, I had served consecutive postings at Canadian missions in New Delhi, Hong Kong, Seattle, and Vienna.

Most people have never met a career diplomat, more precisely known as a foreign service officer. The fact that I once worked as one is not something I go around telling people. It’s stated matter-of-factly on my cv, and I’ll bring it up when and where it’s relevant, or when I’m asked directly. Otherwise I keep it mostly to myself. Not because I’ve anything to hide, but because the foreign service is a career and lifestyle that’s hard to describe in brief and simple terms without sounding either offhand or boastful.

Just the same, I do get pressed fairly regularly by interested people – often students – for details of how I got to be a diplomat, the types of work people do at embassies abroad, and any interesting anecdotes of things that happened to me while I was abroad. So, I’ve decided to take the advice of Stefan Zweig, who believed everyone should chronicle his or her own life (if only as a gift - wanted or not - to family and friends) and start a blog looking back on some of my more notable experiences in the foreign service.

Before you start reading, be forewarned: Although many important world events happened during my decade-plus abroad, I was never at the centre of them. My career was neither long enough or brilliant enough for me to rise to any senior level in the diplomatic corps, hence the name I’ve chosen for this blog: A Garden Variety Diplomat. And although spy novels and movies have given many people the idea that the work of a diplomat consists mainly of secretive meetings and cocktail receptions, I’m afraid that most of the time the work more mundane (although I did indeed attend more than a few cocktails over the years).

I’ll start at the beginning, with a short posting about how I got into the foreign service, and on my first days at headquarters in Ottawa, but I don’t plan to write chronologically. I will deliberately skip around, writing about whatever theme or past event happens to catch my fancy at the moment, in the hopes of keeping it at least mildly interesting. Some of the things I hope to get to include entering Kosovo at dawn in a bulletproof Suburban, the role alcohol played in my job, and an afternoon spent seeking Dracula’s grave with the Romanian army. Thanks in advance for reading.