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.

Global Peace Index Grant

This past year, I was one of Rotary and ICU's Global Peace Index Ambassadors. This meant that I took part in additional online training to learn how the Institute of Economics and Peace measures peace and ranks countries in order to produce the annual index. I also had the opportunity to design my own project and apply for a competition to get funding. Another Peace Fellow, Josh Campbell, and I designed some basic ESL lesson plans utilizing the Global Peace Index information as the theme and content. Part of the requirement of the grant was to present the projects at conferences and at Rotary Clubs. I presented our lesson plans at a conference in Okinawa and at one in Tokyo.

This was a really cool project to work on and one that was very practical and useful. We made our lesson plans very self-explanatory so that we could give them to teachers who want to introduce the theme even for just one class period. I have already used a few of the activities when I've been asked to give guest talks in English classrooms. Being one of the ten winners was exciting and extremely helpful financially. We were awarded $800 which is going toward the cost of the conferences and printing.

You can read the article that Rotary wrote about the competition here. I highly recommend checking out the Institute of Economics and Peace website along with the Vision of Humanity website if you are interested in the trends of peace and violence worldwide.

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Wanderlust

In Mandarin: 旅遊癮 (lǚyóu yǐn)

According to my Mandarin teacher, the term 'wanderlust' can best be translated as 'a travel addiction or craving'. In the above translation, 'yǐn' has several meanings such as 'a strong impulse', 'a longing', or 'a desire'.

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

Global Peace Index Grant

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