With Nate, Ariel (Bangladesh) and Aaron (China)
…Let’s go adjudicate! That’s John’s little cheer for our duty on the passport task force. I joined John at SA-44 to process the huge backlog of passports – the work is actually not bad. It’s kind of voyeuristic – you get a little glimpse into people’s lives. I also think it’s interesting to see the array of old birth certificates that people send in. It was funny because John had several applications from people from Little Rock, one belonging to a programmer he worked with many years ago at Systematics. John’s been especially proud of “making Americans” – he’s had several cases where the passport he issued was the first piece of paper that minors have to prove they are Americans (these come about when the parent of a minor child becomes a naturalized citizen…at that point, the child becomes a citizen, too). The only down side is that we have to work on Saturdays, which makes for a very short weekend.
One thing I find really odd is that my Toastmaster friend Amy told me that Brady Post Office in Little Rock recently had a passport fair, where people stood in line for hours to fill out passport applications! There are already about three million passports in backlog – State has flown FSOs in from posts around the world, re-hired retirees and delayed our departure to our first posts in order to process the backlog…so I’m not sure why a local post office seems to think we need more passports to process! Oh, well!
For our sole day off this week, we went to Baltimore for a baseball game (Orioles v. Yankees) with some of our classmates. We drove up to Camden Yards with Sarah and Aaron. Bad traffic, but a great day for a game – it kept threatening rain, so there was no sun and nice cool breezes.
I read a great book this week, A Long Way Gone by Ismael Beah. He was a boy soldier in Sierra Leone in the early 90s. Fascinating and well-written.
Camden Yards