Scars

I was home for two weeks in late March and early April for my final R&R before I leave Libya on 1 June.  Eric and I had hoped to close on our house, but that didn't happen - process has been delayed and now won't happen until next week, most likely.  (Buying a house is complicated, y'all.)  Still, we had a good time - we shopped for furniture for the house whenever we DO get it, I got to drive around town and cook dinner for friends, and Eric and I went on a five-day vacation just by ourselves for some us time.  We're both looking forward to living together again and having a normal married life - which, technically, we've never had, since I moved away from Turkey right after we got married and Eric never got here.

I realized while I was home just how much my time in Libya has affected me.  On the flight into Washington, everyone else in my cabin enjoyed watching Argo on their entertainment screens; I cowered into my seat, tried not to see the scenes of the embassy takeover, and tried to keep the tears from being too obvious.  I've always had a cynical, somewhat dark sense of humor, but during the trip I made a few jokes that made even my closest friends stop and stare at me.  Things that pass for normal humor here are too much for polite conversation, apparently.  An article in The New Yorker by a famous Libyan novelist and dissident reduced me to sobs, because Ambassador Stevens always had the latest issue - it seemed to be his only pleasure reading out here.  I remember a journalist contacting me last year to tell me what he'd found when he went through the compound in Benghazi - a ton of internal papers and a smoky, damaged copy of the latest New Yorker, still sitting at Amb. Stevens' bedside.  Ever since then, I can't read the magazine without a twinge of sadness.

While at home I also had a good look at myself in a mirror and realized how much weight I've put on in the last few months.  I weigh more now than I ever have in my life.  Grief eating and stress drinking will do a number on your body - I've got stretch marks on my thighs and abdomen from the rapid weight gain.  Since it's not easy for me to replace my clothing due to the slow mail service we have here, I'm stuck wearing things that are less than flattering.  Thankfully Eric didn't marry me for my body - it was never willowy, but it's taken on a decidedly Rubenesque character in recent months.

And icing on the cake, the day I flew back in to Tripoli, I found out a colleague in Afghanistan and several others were killed in an attack on them in Kandahar.  I didn't know the woman who was killed, though many of my friends knew her well from their own stints in Afghanistan.  What struck me most was that she and I both joined State at age 22.  She volunteered for a difficult, dangerous assignment.  There but for the grace of assignments officers go I...  One of my friends from Tripoli who was not able to return here after the evacuation ended up going to Kabul instead, so she had to go through a second "ramp ceremony" for a fallen colleague in six months.  She said it was pretty rough for her, but she's trying to turn her experiences after Benghazi into an opportunity for people in Kabul to talk to her and vent with someone who understands what they've been through.  (A ramp ceremony is when remains are loaded onto a military cargo plane with full honors and returned to the US.  Usually the members of unit or agency to which the dead belonged attend the event; in this case, almost the entire Embassy turned out.)

What can I do about the mental and the physical poor health?  Well, for one thing, knowing that in six weeks and change I'll be home for good keeps me pretty balanced right now.  I can serenely blow off things that used to push me over the edge, because I know that I'll be gone soon.  I've started planning for how I'll eat healthier when I'm back home, with an emphasis on vegetables, fewer processed foods, and fewer grief-induced midnight binges on snack foods.  I am not comfortable using the gym here, but once I'm home I'll walk a lot more (taking mass transit to get to work, increased mobility because I won't be living on a tiny compound, etc), and I hope to start some regular exercise scheme for the first time in my life.  I also want to find a good therapist or grief counsellor when I'm back - one who specializes in military cases or in civilians who've served in war zones.  I don't know how long it will take for me to come to terms with what I've been through, but I don't think I can move on without some substantial lifestyle readjustments and help from friends, family, and professionals paid to deal with me.  I'll bear the scars of this year for a long time to come, both mentally and physically, but I hope that in the not-too-distant future I'll be able to point to them as reminders of what I've survived, not impediments to my daily life.  

Back in Tripoli

It's been a hell of a month, with lots of ups and downs.  Today I got back from R&R in Washington, and saying goodbye to Eric yesterday was harder than it's been at any other point in this tour.  Eight months down, four more to go.

Merry Christmas from Libya

I thought Christmas was going to be a depressing affair this year - on lockdown, boring food, most people having fled for the holidays with their family or in more interesting places (Rome, London, Berlin, etc).  But my house hosted a big Christmas party tonight, and it turned out well.  Someone smuggled in a ton of fancy chocolates, cheeses, and sausages from Trader Joe's, and we had a mixed bag of tasty treats from Germany as well, so we were able to stuff our faces in style.  With the combined efforts of several creative people we were able to make smores at the firepit that's been set up in my yard, so as long as you didn't think about the chemicals that were soaked into the wood we were burning it was really a very pleasant evening.  We even had someone with a guitar and the ability to play three chords, so we stumbled through a few Christmas songs and a few other songs that ostensibly everyone knows.  (Even if the lyrics were usually la-la-la-la-la-don't-know-the-words HEY IT'S THE CHORUS SING THIS PART REALLY LOUDLY!)  We eventually gave up and strung together three extension cords and an iPod out of my kitchen window to get music out by the firepit.

For a group of people who's been operating at 110% for so long, the ability to kick back and enjoy some treats was really nice.  Last night I and my housemates turned coffee filters into snowflake decorations (come on, you know you did it in grade school too), and we made a 2D Christmas tree out of typing paper and candy decorations.  Twizzlers make great garlands on a paper tree!

So merry Christmas from Tripoli - where the small band of us who are still here are having fun and keeping our spirits up.  Hope you're all having a good holiday in whichever way you most prefer to celebrate it.

Kind of a Shitty Day

So the ARB report came out today.  I have no comment on it, obviously, but it's still hard to see everything rehashed from mid-September.  It's like having a scab picked off by your worst enemy while he pours salt into the new wound.

But on the plus side, I picked up my stuff from the most recent mail delivery today - specifically, eight boxes of awesome.  My mother, my mother-in-law, and a few friends conspired to send me exactly the things that make me happy.  I have basic kitchen goods (measuring cups, dish towels, a cutting board), spice mixes, my favorite candy (sour patch kids!!), fancy smell-good soap, wild rice, quinoa, the particular type of couscous I like, my university alumni magazine, recent pictures of family members, a deck of cards, a Scrabble set, and a few hand-written letters, among other things.  I was able to make a healthy, tasty dinner for myself and a sick housemate, plus I could make her a modified hot toddy after dinner to soothe her throat with the apple cider mix I got in today's mail.

Whenever I have a down day, like today, all I have to do is look in my kitchen at all of the care packages I've received since I've been in Tripoli.  Thank you, all of you - you have no idea how much they mean to me.

I'm Not Meant for Pioneering Life

After my return to Tripoli on 1 October, things were looking up, at least as far as our cafeteria goes. The food was improving, the chefs seemed to learn how to use spices, and the menu was expanding. (We actually had chicken tikka masala one night - oh my God!)  However, the chow hall is sliding back to its older standards of potatoes, dry chicken, and overcooked, unidentifiable cuts of beef every night, with some form of sauce.  It's getting pretty grim around here at meal times, so I finally decided to break out the cookware I have smuggled in and make lentil chili.  I'm not able to get out and buy fresh vegetables and meat, so I have to use what veggies I can steal from the chow hall (tomatoes, onions, carrots on occasion) and use up the dry goods I was able to buy on my one trip to a supermarket in early August (pasta, lentils, canned tomatoes).  My spices arrived via pouch from Istanbul last week, so surely I was set!

Perseverance builds character, so they say.  I couldn't find the one kitchen knife we have, so I diced carrots with a regular dinner knife.  I now have a blister on my right hand from the effort.  I have neither stove nor hot plate (nor even a skillet), so I had to brown the onions and carrots in the only rice cooker I could find in Libya, which works a little slowly and is rather small.  I also had to make the chicken broth in the rice cooker, so I let the bouillon cube melt slowly while I sliced the carrots. Finally, once I had everything in the crock pot and ready to go, I realized that though it's on a European voltage cycle, the plug is unlike any I've ever seen before - three round prongs in a triangle.  It's like British and European plugs had a child that neither wants to claim.  So I took a picture of the plug and started wandering around compound hoping to find someone with a really good converter set or a house that's better equipped than mine.  Finally, something went my way - in the second floor hallway of a friend's villa, I found a multi-function power strip (currently powering a wireless router) that appeared to have forgiving enough sockets to take my special crock pot.  I lugged the base over, tested it to be sure, then schlepped the actual pot of ingredients over, getting strange looks from my neighbors all the while.

So my chili is currently simmering in the floor of someone else's villa, while we all wait patiently for it to finish.  It better be good, because I'm going to be supremely embarrassed to have brought in people outside my villa for the process.  (Also, the dinner menu is appalling tonight - we're depending on this chili.)  Updates once it's cooked and we test it!

Update:  Dinner SUCCESS!  We served the stew (not really chili, more stew) over basmati rice and ate ourselves silly.  I and my housemates have at least another day of leftovers to keep us going through whatever the cafeteria throws at us tomorrow.  Onwards and upwards!

Back in Tripoli

Well, I'm back - got to Tripoli about a week ago.  Some things haven't changed, but a lot more is different (miraculously, the food appears to be on an upward trend).  People are mostly cried out, it seems - now we're just super busy all the time, which on balance probably a good thing.  I have these moments where I just stop and stare at a wall for a few minutes before going back to work.

It's good to be back, though.  I am busy, and I know that I'm pulling my weight and taking some tasks off the shoulders of my colleagues.

Heartbroken

One week on, and I'm still a bit in shock about the attack on our office in Benghazi.  I don't really want to hash through the details that took four of my colleagues from me.  Instead I want to share a few stories about the two I knew, and share links to sites raising funds for their families and in their memories.

I never met Sean Smith, but he and I are both members of an online community called Something Awful.  The members of SA (Goons) have a vibrant sub-community of people working at State, and we all kept an eye on where we were each stationed.  We also shared career advice to new arrivals in our midst, advice on how to prepare for entrance exams, and stories about the foibles and hilarity of serving in a large bureaucracy overseas.  When he told me that he was coming to Benghazi for a temporary stint, he asked what he could bring to us out here in Libya.  My immediate response (as I always tell TDYers) was a bottle of whiskey, but apparently his security colleagues told him that was a bad idea.  Sean was frustrated with the slow pace of the Libyan visa bureaucracy, but I worked with our local staff to convince him that he'd be able to arrive on time for his thirty-day stint in Benghazi.  We were planning a meet-up in Tripoli one weekend, or that I might come out for a short trip to Benghazi during his time here - it would be my first Goon Meet, and possibly the very first one ever to occur in Libya.  Cool!

As we all know, that didn't happen.  Just a few days before I left for the States, I talked to Sean on our inter-office communicator one Saturday afternoon, commiserating about shitty cafeteria food  and the long working hours.  He was so excited to be there, and clearly such a good guy.  I've heard stories now from across the world about how many people whose lives he touched, including people I went to high school with.  Some of his friends from SA have created a fundraiser to support his family, his wife and two children who are left to pick up the pieces after his death.

Ambassador Stevens was amazing.  What else can I say?  I wanted to stay in Tripoli a second year to keep working there, and I only spent three months with him.  He was so funny, so thoughtful, so kind, and so damned good at his job.  On my third day in Tripoli, I was thrown into the car with him and told to go take notes in a meeting with the Prime Minister - eep!  On the way back to the office, Chris asked me what I thought were the most important parts of the meeting.  I listed points X, Y, and Z, nervously avoiding making any commentary or analysis of the meeting.  He listened to me avidly, nodding, and then said, "That's great, definitely.  What about G, H, and I too?  I thought that was really important too, maybe we should include those points too in the reporting on this meeting."  I felt valued, because he listened to my points.  When I started writing the cable after the meeting, I realized that my points were secondarily important to the very crucial things he mentioned, but that he wasn't going to crush a new arrival at post for not being as in-tune with local politics as he was.

Once I got to know him better and became more comfortable with Libya and with the Ambassador himself, things got more fun.  We'd run out of meetings and frantically take notes on napkins so we wouldn't forget what we'd been told in a situation where we couldn't take notes obviously.  We piled into vehicles five-deep when we left the office at the end of the day, squeezed in to the only vehicles with space for his lanky frame.  He shared meals with the rest of us in the chow hall, speculating about what exactly was being served each night and hoping that the next day would provide something more palatable.

Libyans loved him.  I don't know how to state it any more clearly, but everyone loved him.  Small kids, young politicians, journalists, and little old ladies would swarm him for photos.  He knew everyone in the country - if he hadn't met them in his first period in Tripoli, from 2006-2009, he knew them from the time he spent on the ground in Benghazi during the revolution.  He lost friends during the revolution, as did almost every Libyan, and he respected their losses.  He supported the revolution, but his real passion was rebuilding free Libya.  At every crisis that emerged (and there were plenty), he was calm, collected, and had the right Libyan authorities on the phone to find out what was going on or what we could do to mitigate the problem.  He was the person everyone wanted to see at any big event in Tripoli, but he never wanted to take the focus away from the real heroes, the Libyan people who are working every day to make their country better and stronger.

The Ambassador would wander from office to office during the work day, on a hunt for candy and a friendly smile.  In almost every meeting, he borrowed one of my pens and chewed on it absent-mindedly while he contemplated his next move.  Chagrined, he'd always apologize after he realized that he'd taken another of my pens.  I stocked my bag with cheap Bic pens and ordered several packages of my preferred pens from Amazon.  His desk probably still has a cup filled with my half-chewed pens.  He had a great sense of humor - one time, he asked me if I could find a press briefing transcript for him on whitehouse.com.  Seeing the look on my face (at the mention of a notorious pornographic site, not the Presidential web page), he quickly corrected himself and said, "No, no, don't look there, they'll shut down our computer network access if you download that, and I have to have my Facebook."

Chris relied on text messages to communicate with us, so it was nothing to get a message from him at 2 in the morning informing you that you were going to a meeting with him the next morning at 8 AM, or that he was having a party in his residence for some new arrival at post.  The last time I saw him was the night I left Tripoli on vacation, when we had a farewell party for a colleague who was known for his particularly well styled hair.  I inherited a tub of hair gel from someone who had left post previously (don't ask), and word got around that I had product for offer.  I got a text from the Ambassador that simply said, "Gel?"  When I delivered the gel to him, he proudly dug in the tub and slathered his hair up into what can only be called a hot mess of hilarity.  Before I left Tripoli, I hugged my departing colleague and laughed with Chris about his close approximation of my colleague's habitual outfits.  And now he's gone.

Ambassador Stevens' family has created a website to collect treasured memories and tales about the lives he touched.  They are also collecting funds for an as-yet undetermined charity to honor his memory.  Nothing says more about Chris than the photo his family selected for the top of the page - seated on a very diminutive donkey with an extremely goofy smile.