I’m starting a new segment in which I’m asking FSOs two questions. 1. Please share your best FS story or greatest FS achievement. 2. What is the biggest foreign policy challenge the U.S. faces? To open this series, I’ve asked blogger FSO Globetrotter over at FSO Globetrotter: Our Man in Chile. Here’s what he had to say:
1. That’s a tough one. I haven’t achieved much without the help of so many others, so I’ll just stick to a story. In the waning days of my year in Lahore, Pakistan, I decided to walk through the Old City on foot and see what it was really like. Since this area was/is off-limits for security concerns, I had never been there before, except once with a posse of military police for an official event with the Imam at the Badshahi mosque. The Old City was off limits because of its traditional hostility to foreigners, especially westerners. On this particular morning I went to the Old City at dawn, wearing my Pakistani clothing, a Peshwari hat and my beard grown heavy to look less conspicuous. As I made my way down the narrow back-alleys, the buzz of daily life was beginning. Tea stalls were selling cups of hot, milky tea to men squatting on the ground. Once again I found myself in a deserted alley. As I rounded a corner near the Cuckoo’s Nest, an thin, leathery man wearing a dirty outfit and pushing a heavy bicycle called out a greeting “Salaam Alaykum.” I returned the greeting “Wa Alaykum Salaam.” He stopped his bicycle to chat, and we exchanged courtesies. Then he asked me where I was from. “Meh Ahmrica hoon” (I’m American) I said, and tried to anticipate his response. He broke into a toothy grin and put his palm over his heart in a Pakistani sign of friendship, and said in Urdu “Lets be friends then.” A few minutes later we parted with pledges of fraternal friendship.
In this economically challenged old city, where people are naturally suspicious of foreigners, the idea crystallized in my mind that it is the individual encounters like this one that can turn the hearts and minds of people into goodwill. If little experiences like this one could be repeated a thousand fold, what would the world be like?
2. The biggest foreign policy challenge the U.S. faces–and this is strictly a personal opinion, based on my own limited experience in the world–is to tell our story, to help others around the world to understand the freedom and liberty and unlimited potential that each individual in the world can enjoy when they live in a democratic republic such as the United States of America. This little experiment in democracy that started with our founding fathers in the early, desperate days of our nation has grown and flourished to become one of the greatest nations in the world’s history and is a beacon of hope to millions of oppressed and struggling people around the world. Our country is based on the rule of law and firmly embedded in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights that permit personal liberty to each American, the right of the press to freely express the views of all, and the rewards for anybody willing to work hard. Our challenge is to cut through the thick haze of misconceptions and half-truths that are told about The United States of America, and to tell our story, one person at a time, about the limitless potential people and nations can enjoy when the government is truly serving ‘of the people, by the people, for the people.’ I don’t know exactly how we are going to do that, but I know that as the lead foreign affairs branch of the United States, the State Department, and every single Foreign Service Officer and Foreign Service National employee overseas is working very hard every day to tell this story. We need more dedicated men and women to join us in telling America’s story.
