Day 325 - While Actually Employed

by  SalFalko  I knew there was life after retirement. I had been introduced to the While Actually Employed, or WAE, opportunities all the way back to my assignment in Doha when John was sent as our communicator while Steve was on leave in Australia to be with his wife for the birth of their second child. John wasn't the first TDY or temporary duty communicator, but he was the most memorable. He became part of our small embassy family so quickly that when we later needed a TDY communicator again, we asked for John. The TDY coordinator wasn't used to being asked for a specific individual and warned us that she couldn't make any promises, but she did send John. We ran into John again in Barbados and eventually spent a very pleasant weekend with him and his wife in Pennsylvania a few years later. In Moldova, we had a number of TDY staff, some sent from Washington where they otherwise worked, some, WAE. But it was Yemen where I began to see that working on a WAE basis after retirement was something quite desirable. One couple who arrived as a pair to help us were Ann and Allen. Ann was a retired consular officer who was one of several TDY consular officers sent to help Pat while Cynthia remained in Aden. Her husband Allen had been a foreign service officer back in the 1960s, although he resigned after a few years and chose instead a career in education. When he retired from teaching, Ann decided it was her turn to explore career options. She took the foreign service exam and entered the service just before she turned 60, right at the age limit. When she retired and explored WAE opportunities, Allen learned as a former Foreign Service Officer he too could work part-time for State. Allen was the first WAE GSO to fill in after David resigned. I think his first week on the job was the week of the ambassador's plane being hijacked.

Another of the WAEs who worked for me in Sanaa was Irene who also filled in as GSO. Her husband, Mel, was a retired regional security officer who worked for a company that provided training to law enforcement and security personnel. The ambassador had run into him while she was in the U.S. after the attack on the USS Cole. The ambassador arranged for Mel to come to Yemen to set up a training program for Yemeni security staff. Irene was our bonus.

Many more WAE staff were sent to Aden, some of them previously quite senior within State. When the FBI abandoned their Aden offices and moved back to Sanaa, these retired senior officials ended up in Sanaa, purportedly working for me. It was a bit intimidating to have the man who was the executive director of the Near East Asian Affairs bureau while I was the administrative officer in Doha nearly 15 years earlier working as GSO in Sanaa. I was especially pleased to have the opportunity to work with Georgia who had previously been the administrative officer in Doha and Sanaa. I knew how similar our situations were because people who knew her told me all the time. But since she was always ahead of me, she didn't know about the parallels in our personal and professional lives. She had also met her British husband in Doha, for example.

Working after retirement on a WAE basis is less than half-time work, but the idea of continuing to travel while the government paid for both the travel and accommodations made it a very attractive prospect for my post-retirement life. My career plans were set at that point for me to retire after two more years, at my 20th anniversary with State.

But plans, they have a way of not working out.