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U.S. Foreign Service Officer headed to Wuhan, China

The mission of a U.S. diplomat in the Foreign Service is to promote peace, support prosperity, and protect American citizens while advancing the interests of the U.S. abroad. The work that diplomats do has an impact on the world as they serve at one of any of the more than 270 embassies, consulates and other diplomatic missions in The Americas, Africa, Europe and Eurasia, East Asia and Pacific, Middle East and North Africa, and South Asia.

The duties of a Consular Officer include to provide emergency and non-emergency services to American citizens and protect our borders through the proper adjudication of visas to foreign nationals and passports to American citizens. We adjudicate immigrant and non-immigrant visas, facilitate adoptions, help evacuate Americans, combat fraud, and fight human trafficking. Consular Officers touch people’s lives in important ways, often reassuring families in crisis. They face many situations which require quick thinking under stress and develop and use a wide range of skills, from managing resources and conducting public outreach to assisting Americans in distress.

First day in Tokyo, or how I ended up staying at a Buddhist temple for a week



After enjoying a night in a hotel, my host Rotarian picked me up at 10 a.m. the next morning.  The plan was to take me to the apartment near the university that I was going to sublet for the next few months.  The apartment belongs to another peace fellow from the year before who is currently doing her internship in South Africa.  She had also sublet her apartment to a different fellow in my class who came early and stayed for the month of July.  When we arrived, the apartment was kind of a mess because the fellow was still in the process of cleaning and moving out and my host was horrified.


He wouldn't let me stay there because of the chaos and instead, took me to the Buddhist temple where he works and is the head priest and overseer.  The temple always has visiting priests so they had many separate tiny condos, one of which was available for me to use for awhile.  I appreciated the generosity but was also a bit nervous because the Buddhist temple was almost two hours outside the center of Tokyo.  Being that I don't speak Japanese and had zero concept of the layout of the city or how the transport system worked, I was more than a little nervous about getting to my Japanese class on my own the next day.



My host, Nobuyuki Okamoto has been a Buddhist priest at temples in New York, Los Angeles and Hawaii.  His English is amazing and he was good at explaining things that he knew would be strange for me since he'd spent so much time in the U.S.

After dropping off my bags at the temple and having tea with the other priests, we had lunch at a really fancy traditional Japanese restaurant in our own private room surrounded by ridiculously manicured gardens, decorative bridges and koi ponds.  The lunch consisted of nine courses and everything revolved around presentation.  Before each course, our own private waitress elaborately explained what the food was, where it came from and what it meant.



Tired, sweaty and a bit jet-lagged, I devoured everything, even several dishes with strange creatures full of eyes that even Nobuyuki couldn't identify.  It was a really cool experience and I wish Sean could have been there to share it with me as I know he would have loved all the sushi.  But here, I'm assured, there's plenty more where that came from.

After lunch, I headed back to my condo on the temple grounds and Nobuyuki promised to research public transportation options for me for the next day.  I tried to stay awake as long as I could but ended up crashing at about 5pm.  Fortunately, being wide awake at three a.m. the next morning gave me ample time to figure out how to use the crazy and indecipherable self-filling mini bath tub and fancy toilet.

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    Sarah Sanderson
    I am currently in Mandarin language training as a new diplomat in the U.S. Foreign Service. Sean and I depart for Wuhan, China in November 2019 for my first tour in consular affairs.
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