Almost no one gets a cushy post for their first tour in the foreign service.
As a fluent speaker of Russian, Potomac’s Matt Blong guessed he would end up in Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan, where the Russian would be useful, on his first tour.
But in August, Blong, 25, shipped his car, his furniture and crates of comfort food to Bujumbura, Burundi, where he is serving a two-year term as General Services Officer for the U.S. Embassy there.
As General Services Officer, Blong is responsible for the daily maintenance and operations of the U.S. Embassy and all U.S. facilities in Burundi. Though as a junior officer in a management position he does not set diplomatic policy, Blong is part of a diplomatic staff of fewer than 20 and works closely with all of them, including Ambassador James Yellin.
Burundi, a landlocked country the size of Maryland, is situated between Tanzania, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo in southeast Africa. The country of 6.3 million is one of the poorest in the world. It has spent 12 years in a civil war that has claimed 300,000 lives.
The conflict is in many ways inseparable from the ethnic fighting in Rwanda — with conflicts, and refugees, spilling over both countries’ borders. More than 1,000,000 Rwandans died in the 1994 genocide there.
In 1993, Burundi held its first democratic elections. But President Melchior Ndadaye was assassinated months later, setting off the rebel conflict. The parliament elected another president, Hutu Cyprien Ntaryamira in 1994. But Ntaryamira and then Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana were killed when their plane was shot down approaching Kigali airport in April of that year.
A transitional government was set up at Arusha in 2000, but attempts to finalize the peace process and install a permanent government have stalled repeatedly.
Elections scheduled for last month were put off. They are now planned for August.
For Blong, who grew up on Tobin Circle near Our Lady of Mercy and attended Sidwell Friends School in Washington and Yale University, the Bujumbura posting was a shock.
While posted there, he is subject to security restrictions including a 10 p.m. curfew. His house has been hit by stray gun fire.
Blong sat down for Q&A at his Potomac house while on home leave last month.
Q: When did you first think about applying to the Foreign Service?
A: It was when I was a student abroad in Paris. I was doing a semester abroad in Paris the summer of 2001 as a photography assistant. … I met a classmate of mine from Yale who told me about the Diplomatic Readiness Initiative. Basically, when Colin Powell became secretary of state in spring of 2001, he saw that the State Department did not have the human resources in order to meet the diplomatic needs of the 21st century. There had been a lot of attrition from the Foreign Service over the 1990s and we were understaffed. At that point he came up with his diplomatic readiness initiative that basically said we’re going to hire twice as many people over the next three to four years. They continued that throughout 2004
Q: So that was before Sept. 11?
A: Yes, and after Sept. 11 it only continued to gain steam. They started especially realizing that they had a lack of Arabic speakers. At the time I had heard about that though, they said, all you have to do is take the written exam and it’s free so you give it a try. I took the written exam in Sept. 2001, was called back for my orals in February 2002 and I passed both exams the first time. So in a way I was lucky. When you’re 22 years old and you pass the oral exams, it was kind of a humbling thing basically, because I beat out a lot of guys who are older than me, who had more professional experience, who had military experience.
[But] I had a lot of overseas experience. By that time in my life I had … lived overseas for two of the previous five years. In France, Germany, I had traveled through Southeast Asia and had been all over Eastern Europe as well. That’s probably what really helped me get accepted.
Q: Then you had to get security clearance?
A: Basically the security clearance process, the reason it was taking so long back then it was because it was just after Sept. 11 and all the diplomatic security people were busy doing security checks on additional people that had been hired. The whole federal government was just overwhelmed with applications.
I knew that it was going to take a long time. But by summer, 2003 I had my security clearance but I was at the bottom — once you pass the oral exam and get your security clearance and medical clearance, you’re put on a list of eligible hires. … I was so far down on this list that I thought I had no chance of being hired.
I came back from Russia in December 2003 and the same week I returned home I received a letter saying that the State Department would now give hiring preference to people who spoke what they call “critical needs languages” and these included Arabic, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean. … I took the exam, the phone exam, when I got back, passed, and was instantly bumped up the list. In January 2004 I got the call.
Q: What is the training like?
A: It’s basically the ABCs of how to be a diplomat. … You’re given a list of countries on the first day, a list of 100 posts for 95 people to choose from. You’re given about a week to think about your choices and submit your bids and then for the next five weeks nobody has any clue where they’re going to go.
I wanted to go very much to central Asia. With my Russian, I thought I was well qualified for that. But I also spoke French.
Q: How did you find out where you were going?
A: There was a flag day ceremony. They call it flag day. When you show up you have no idea. I was kind of hoping for central Asia. That morning I heard that the Bujumbura job had been assigned. And I said, ‘Who could that have gone to?’ And talking around to my classmates I figured out that it was probably me because I had put that on my list. You put a city on your list and a bid is a bid is a bid. It doesn’t matter if you bid the last in order, you could get that job. You rank 25 of them. Bujumbura wasn’t my 25th choice, but it was low.
I was pretty shocked and my parents were pretty shocked. My parents didn’t know anything about the place and my mother kind of congratulated me and I was like, ‘Mom do you know where Burundi is? Do you know what it is? It’s a war zone. It’s out there.’
[That night,] everybody traditionally buys a beer from the country that they’re going [at the Brickskeller, a Washington bar with close to 1,000 international beers]. I had to take a Kenyan beer. I got the Tusker. It was the closest I could get.
Q: What is a General Services Officer?
A: The General Services Officer is responsible for the day-to-day operations of the embassy as a whole. I have about seven sections that report to me. These include real estate, real property, also non-expendable property and expendable property. Non-expendable property would be like furniture and generators and things we don’t throw away and expendable property is … supplies like paper and fuel. I’m responsible for purchasing, procurement, customs and shipping, maintenance — that takes up a lot of my time.
Q: Did you find it very different actually being on the ground compared to the more academic training that you got?
A: Actually I was given the minimum training needed because my position was vacant. … They gave me just the requisite professional training.
It was a sharp learning curve. There was a lot I had to learn about how an Embassy works. There are a lot of day-to-day things I had to learn how to do.
They teach you how it should work, but then you get to a country like Burundi, on the ground there and you have very capable and smart people, but we have limited resources to deal with. So the way that things actually work is quite different
Q: What was the most surprising thing?
A: I didn’t realize that I would have such a large maintenance staff, technical staff. I have two plumbers, two carpenters, two masons, two A/C techs, two welders. Then I have half a dozen other laborers and so on.
Q: What is Burundi like as a country?
A: Well first let’s say what Burundi used to be, from what I was told. Burundi used to be a kind of small tropical mountain paradise, in a way. It had a fair amount of tourism in the '70s and '80s and there was a decent tourist infrastructure in place. You also had direct flights from Europe and from other African countries. …
The so-called source of the Nile is located in Burundi, the southernmost or most distant source of the Nile waters, and what they call the Crete Congo-Nile, the divide between the Congo and the Nile basins. On one side of the mountain if you drop a little drop of water it will flow out into the Congo basin and out into the Atlantic, and the other side will flow through a system of rivers into Lake Victoria, which empties into the Nile and carries you all the way to Egypt.
To characterize Burundi, I would say it’s a little bit still of a colonial backwater. Culturally it’s a very interesting place. It’s a very beautiful corner of the world. But very crowded. Bujumbura is not a large city. It’s population is about 250,000, but I don’t know if that give you a sense of how crowded a country it is because you have the vast majority, 95 percent of the people in Burundi living off the land. Every day there are just thousands of people who walk by my house every day, starting about 5 in the morning, with their bananas or with something to sell. People coming from all over. It’s not uncommon for people to walk 10 miles into the city to go to work and 10 miles home.
Since 1993, there has basically been no functioning tourist infrastructure.
Q: Since 1993 Burundi has been in civil war?
A: Basically yes. Although it’s tapered off in the past couple of years, although in 2003 the rebels did attack and hold some positions within the city. They bombarded the city for about a week in July, 2003. That was a tough time for the embassy. And I also know there was a tough time for Burundi, between 1996 and 1999 there was an embargo against Burundi by a lot of the other African countries. Basically nobody could trade with Burundi and no international airlines could land there. American diplomats had a real hard getting in and out. They had to come by chartered planes. It was real tough for them. For a while they had run very low on fuel. But the embassy never closed. It never closed.
We talk about the embassy, the way it runs today — we have back up generators, we have water tanks, and that’s a lot of infrastructure just for our houses. That grew out of real necessity because we never wanted to close the embassy. We would never concede to doing that. So we had to have that kind of infrastructure.
Now our power doesn’t go off for more than a couple hours a week, but we have the generators there. We wouldn’t have to leave for a lack of electricity or a lack of amenities.
Under the Arusha peace accords, they established an interim government. And they had to have a constitution so somebody drafted what they call a post-transitional government draft constitution. And there was a referendum on this on I think Feb. 28. It was approved by over 90 percent. It was a resounding majority. Now they can proceed to democratic elections of a permanent president and council.