Playing catch up

For everyone who works in foreign service, being back in D.C., whether it’s our hometown or not (more often than not, it’s “not”) is a series of reunions and blasts from the past. People we’ve worked or trained with, for however long and however long ago, appear before us, prompting a series of catch-up conversations, happy hours and other events.

Even if the person crossed your path briefly, it’s a time to find out where the person has been, where they’re going and why they happen to be in D.C. And you don’t know when the reunions will occur. Usually, it’s at our little college-like training center, the main office building or any random hotel where we congregate (in my case, Marriott Residence in Rosslyn), but they happen all over the D.C. area. For example, Trader Joe’s (the one in Clarendon) seems to be a place where all us posted overseas come back for a fix and we run across each other there.

Last go-around, I left Guangzhou on a Friday and had a class on Monday morning. When I arrived, I discovered the person teaching the class had been one of the TDYers who had come to work in my department. I didn’t recognize her at first, but we both thought each other was familiar and discussed it enough to figure it out. When realization hits – THAT’s where I know you! – suddenly, you’re old friends catching up. (In that case, we had yet another commonality: she’d just come from India the Friday before and we were both jet-lagged like nobody’s business.)

Since I’ve been here, on a daily basis, I’ve met up with at least one new person from my past each day. Two of my colleagues from Istanbul randomly showed up for their own trainings, and both brought their wives and little girls. One of the wives is one who worked closely with me before she went on maternity leave. I’d thought I’d seen these people for the last time in my life, and then suddenly, we’re having breakfast together every day. It’s just random and wonderful.

Some of the people you catch up with, you’re seeing for the first time. A reunion of someone you’ve never met sounds odd, but we have so many e-ways of communicating that you can know someone without seeing them in the flesh. On Monday, when I walked into my classroom, I found I knew via e-measures three people plus had met one before my first tour started. Of the others, one was headed to where I was going and another to the same country.

It’s all very incestuous. When you ask someone where they’re going or where they’ve been, your brain jumps around, trying to find the people you know who might know that person. Invariably, there’s someone.

In an effort to track down everyone, we do things like plan post reunions and throw out a net to invite anyone who might have walked through the post when you were there. I’ve got two such get-togethers on the calendar, one for Guangzhou and one for Istanbul. I’m looking forward to both equally.

It’s a small world for us in foreign service. Today, I took a bus to a different site. There was a woman struggling with her bags – she’s headed out to her new assignment after this training and didn’t have a place to leave it – so, after loading them up, it seemed natural that we sit together and chat. 

Turns out, we’d both been through Guangzhou. She whipped out her photos and showed me some. In the very first one, one of my friends, whom I’ve made a point to meet with since I’ve been there, beamed back at me. That person had been in Guangzhou a year after me, and the lady started to show me more from that trip.

The sights were familiar; she’d lived in my same apartment building and had similar photos to what I took. She also went to one of the hot springs while she was there, a trip I made twice. In viewing the photos on her iPhone, I took a look at the dates and realized that she’d been in Guangzhou in February of the same year I was there, and I left in April. We overlapped and didn’t realize it.

In one of her hot springs photos, I thought I saw another familiar face, albeit behind a pair of sunshades. I took the camera and did the englarge-y thing with the fingers and confirmed that yes, in the small world of foreign service, that was indeed me in the photo.

I’d been catching up with a colleague without even realizing it.