Nothing makes you remember the part of being a foreign service officer wherein you committed to being “worldwide available” like looking at a bid list! We received the list of possible postings for second tour officers who are scheduled to leave their current posts in the summer of 2019 (read: me and an unknown number of my colleagues, about half of my A-100 orientation class and part of some others before ours who had language training for their first post). We now have 2 weeks to digest it, read up on others’ experiences in the various options, and submit our list of preferences. It really is fun to do this kind of research and imagine ourselves living in the various places. Based on a first review of the list, I think we may have more people wanting to visit than we have had here in Nigeria.

We’ve got a few goals this time around.  We’ll have 3 kids in highschool by the end of our next tour (wait, what!?!?!), so we’re looking for places with good schools, and hopefully a reasonable size pool of potential peers.  Hopefully we won’t need to avail ourselves of the medical care quite as often as we have here in the last few months, but it would be nice to have medical care available.  We definitely want more access to nature/wilderness!  Living in a megacity with restricted movement is not the same as living 1 house away from the Dixie National Forest.  I’ll be required to learn a language for my next tour, so wherever we go it will start with several months in Washington.  Stay tuned for the news about where we’ll be headed in early May.