BFF Corner







Monic (17) and Laure (16) in Thakhek, Laos 1966 and together again in Normandie, France 2010

 Riad and Laure, OASIS Reunion, Paris/France October 2010
Laure (Patrick) Riad @ the ferry at Rosso, Mauritania/Senegal Border 1980

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My love affair with the African continent...

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What do you do when you are married to a Foreign Service officer? You travel around the world. And if you are with USAID? You travel around Nations of Rising Expectations. Sure we have posts in Rome and Paris, but my husband does not get sent to those places. Except for one time he was sent to Paris for two weeks to evaluate the one and only house owned by USAID in Paris, near the Place Concorde, in a cul-de-sac; otherwise inhabited by Arab Sheiks and Princes all having more money that USAID can count. We were in Afghanistan when Barnett told me that our next assignment was going to be Mauritania. “Mauri-what?,” I said. To simplify the matter, he showed it to me on a map. Since then, we had a globe, and he would point out our next assignment each time. As an Asian/French teenager, you know about Africa because you studied geography. Even then, it was not the best subject while I was in school. I landed in Senegal in 1978, I looked around, and except for the fact that there ...
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Life in the Foreign Service is not effortless. While it may sound glamorous, living abroad in places such as Casablanca or Cairo; or living in a place with an exotic name such as Nouakchott, life can be harsh, especially for a “spouse.” You leave your home, your job, everything you know and are comfortable with following your spouse into the unknown. You arrive at a post with nothing but a cruddy hospitality kit waiting for you in an unfamiliar house with generic furniture. It is cold, it is sad, it is depressing. You keep on saying to yourself that tomorrow it will be better. But tomorrow is not better, sometimes it is even worse. If you are in a small post, it can be nice and you can find that the community is warm, tight and helpful. But if you are in a big developed post, then you are practically on your own. If you are in Paris, you’d better start learning French, and fast. If you are in Beijing, you’d better learn Chinese and fast, and so on. If you are lucky, you will...
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