John and I have been here in Monrovia for seven months now, which is difficult to believe. Since people started taking the authorized departure from post in late March, the embassy has been a ghost town with most local staff told to stay home and routine consular services closed. \u00a0I still have emergency appointments, and are trying to process narrowly defined mission-critical services. We\u00a0have started preparing briefing materials for our new ambassador-nominee, a career Foreign Service Officer nominated by the President last month. \u00a0Surprisingly, there is still a lot of work to do and we do the best we can, as safely as we can.<\/p>\n
Yesterday I took our TDY embassy doctor around to a few grocery stores, and stopped along the road a couple of places to buy fruits. The grocery stores are good about hand-washing, mask-wearing, and temperature checking before entry, but the rest of the Liberian public largely ignores these protocols. There\u2019s still a 6PM curfew supposedly in effect, but I don\u2019t know how well it\u2019s adhered to. Mostly it looks like daily life has resumed. There have been a few commercial flight in\/out of the country, too.<\/p>\n
Otherwise it was a rainy and routine week (whatever that means these days!). John and I are watching a Finnish crime drama and \u201cCurb Your Enthusiasm\u201d during the week. We watched the depressing but utterly lovely \u201cA Marriage Story\u201d yesterday – I thought it was just wonderful with amazing performances (and who doesn\u2019t love Laura Dern?!).<\/p>\n
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John and I have been here in Monrovia for seven months now, which is difficult to believe. Since people started taking the authorized departure from post in late March, the embassy has been a ghost town with most local staff told to stay home and routine consular services closed. \u00a0I still have emergency appointments, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6086"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6086"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6086\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6087,"href":"http:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6086\/revisions\/6087"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}