Buenos Aires, here we come!

Well, it's official! Mike and I have both officially been assigned to consular officer positions at the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires. We are very excited. Buenos Aires is an incredible city, and we're very lucky to have both been assigned there. In fact, it was nothing short of a miracle: we had been trying for months to be reassigned (my original assignment as some of you may recall, was Vienna). But in the end, the State Department was unable to assign us together.

I was a couple hours away from quitting when we got word that a position for me may have opened up. It turns out that someone else assigned to BA was no longer able to go, and I would be able to serve in that position. The job starts at the same time as Mike's, so we'll both arrive May 30th and work there for 2 years.

We view it as a complete miracle that we are both able to go to such a wonderful city when we were begging to get sent to much worse places (Juarez, Iraq) in order to get reassigned together. Also, now that I don't have to quit, I am eligible for "tenure" this year, which means I can take LWOP and could even quit and re-enter the service if I wanted, without starting the process from the beginning again. My not-having-to-quit also means we won't owe the Department a substantial amount of money to pay back my training, per diem, and leave. VERY lucky.

The prospect of having to quit much sooner than I had anticipated also made me realize we had no plan B for what I would do if I weren't working and we didn't have kids (or even if we did have kids, and I decided to take a break or quit). For weeks I couldn't come up with the answer to my own question: what am I interested in? What would I want to get a Masters in? And then, coincidentally the day I almost quit, I came up with what I thought was a pretty awesome plan (Mike thinks I had to come to terms with it all and come up with a plan B before the miracle could happen :).

I had been thinking about how much I had enjoyed the 5 months of German training I had received (for my Vienna assignment), and how fascinated I especially was with the grammar (finding common Latin roots between German and Spanish, noticing how Biblical or old English sentence structure is very similar to German,and shouting out things in class like "Is that a gerund?!). And I thought, perhaps, I would love to get a Masters in linguistics. And I think I will. I also had been looking that day into jobs for FS spouses in Buenos Aires, and I found opportunities to work at the international school there, or to get a TESOL certification and teach English as a second language. These were all options that I could do in combination or one at a time, short term or long term, on and off again, in any country in the world. It sounded fantastic (I was, after all, originally an elementary education major in college) and I was so convinced that's what I was supposed to do, I was a little baffled when a couple hours later, I got a call from the Department, asking me to please not quit.

Well, needless to say, when I got the call asking me to stay on as an officer, I said yes. After 6 months of long distance, which included an engagement, marriage, and getting ready to move to another country, Mike and I are just glad to be back together and to not be heavily indebted to the Department. What happened really was a miracle, we're convinced of that, just like us meeting in the first place was. I mean, meeting the love of my life in Venezuela, who'd have thought?

We're SUPER excited about BA, we have heard it is just a fabulous place to live, and I really enjoyed my visit there last year. Please come visit!