See you next in:

Half a year without a post. I wish I had kept this updated more over the past several months, but in the meantime a very blog-worth update:

And

It's crazy to believe that I already have my second tour assignment(s) and things are planned out for me until 2016. After leaving Khartoum next summer, I'll be at the UN General Assembly in New York for 4 months before Chinese training and two years as a consular officer in Hong Kong! This was my #1 bid and I am pumped, despite already wondering what sort of crazy pills I must be on for choosing to learn Chinese, which will be my full-time job for 8 months. 

Not only was I lucky to have a vibrant colleague here in Khartoum (who also got her #1 and better get her guest room in Milano ready for my visits), I'll be serving in the consular section with yet another 160th-er in Hong Kong! 

In the meantime, I'm going to try to keep my focus here in Sudan, where there's a lot of good, challenging, important work to be done and fun times to be had with the awesome people here. 

That time already?

I still feel like I just got here at times, but it looks like it's already time for my first Rest & Recuperation trip. The State Department knows that living in difficult places is, well, difficult, and so giving us a break from the hardship now and then helps us come back and do our jobs better. Khartoum is especially difficult in the eyes of State, so we get 4 R&R trips over the 2 years here (compared with 2 in most other hardship posts - not including Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan).

So, only 5 months in to my tour here, I'm already jetting off to the motherland. It's especially odd because some of my A-100 classmates are still in training at FSI, having not even started their first tour yet. In my five months here, I've done political, consular, managed visitors from DC, and gone on trips in country. The past couple of week here have been incredibly busy, with so many of our embassy colleagues gone for the holidays but with just as much- if not more- going on. Needless to say, I definitely feel ready for this vacation!

Ciao, Khartoum, see you in a couple weeks!