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.