Ray, Management Officer
My name is Ray. I'm in the Management career track.
When I was a post management officer in the AF Bureau, I covered East Africa — all the countries in East Africa…and at the time, we were in the process of moving the embassy in Sudan from Nairobi back to Khartoum. We moved back to an old hotel, which was an embassy building. There were lots of problems with the building in terms of security.
At one point, the proceeding of a particular meeting, there was just all of this bickering back and forth. And we were moving nowhere. We weren't pushing the ball down the road, so to speak. And so I slammed my hand down on the table. And it got real quiet. You could've heard a pin drop. And I said, "Today, we in this room have to decide if Embassy Khartoum is going to be an embassy of the United States, or a hole in the wall." I said it like that. And I think that it crystallized something inside people's brains. And, all of a sudden, I added that we had to make these decisions – we have to make this thing work – this thing representative of the United States of America. And in the process of re-establishing operations in Khartoum sort of got ratcheted up to a new level.
So, that was one day — one discreet moment in time when a slap of my hand and making a statement got everybody to focus everybody’s attention, and I think I made a difference.