Everyone Is...with Jennifer Coronado
The intent of this show is to engage with all types of people and build an understanding that anyone who has any kind of success has achieved that success because they are creative thinkers. So whether you are an artist, a cook, a bottle washer, or an award-winning journalist, everyone has something to contribute to the human conversation.
Everyone Is...with Jennifer Coronado
Cheryl Casebeer: Thank you for your Foreign Service!
**Content Warning: This podcast contains discussions of genocide and violence and may not be appropriate for some listeners.
What happens when someone with a passion for languages and cultures grows up to become a diplomatic problem-solver? Meet Cheryl Casebeer, or Casey as her friends call her, a seasoned diplomat from the US State Department. This episode takes you through Casey's unique upbringing, where frequent relocations sparked her interest in understanding diverse cultures, setting the stage for her remarkable career.
From the complexities of U.S.-Cuba relations to high-stress assignments in the Ivory Coast, Casey shares the intricate workings of American diplomacy. This episode also delves into the often-overlooked emotional toll of diplomatic service, discussing resilience and coping mechanisms essential for handling trauma.
www.slightlyprod.com
Hi folks, it's Jen. We are very excited for this week's podcast, as it contains a lot of revelatory information about what it's like to work for the US State Department. We did, however, want to warn our listeners that towards the end of the podcast, there are some discussions on violence and genocide that might be triggering for some people, so please exercise some self-care when listening. Otherwise, we hope you learn a lot from this episode. Otherwise, we hope you learn a lot from this episode.
Casey Casebeer:This is a really good example of how diplomacy works. Despite the fact that we didn't like each other and had dramatically different ideas about how government should serve the people, we had a lot of stuff that had to be talked about.
Jen Coronado:Hello and welcome to Everyone Is. I am your host, jennifer Coronado. The intent of this show is to engage with all types of people and build an understanding that anyone who has any kind of success has achieved that success because they are a creative thinker. So, whether you are an artist or a cook or an award-winning journalist, everyone has something to contribute to the human conversation. And now, as they say, on with the show. And now, as they say on with the show, I have always had a fascination with government and how it works, and also what makes someone choose a life of public service In one department. An area that I find especially intriguing is the US State Department, so imagine my delight when I was talking to someone and they mentioned their friend was the most brilliant problem solver they'd ever met, and that person is Cheryl Casepear, also known as Casey. Welcome to Everyone Is Cheryl.
Casey Casebeer:Casepear. Thanks for having me over to talk, jennifer, jennifer.
Jen Coronado:Stover, I want to know a little bit about your background, like where did you grow up, jennifer Stover?
Casey Casebeer:So I was born in Virginia and we lived on the West Coast. My dad was a native Californian, my mother was from Boston, my dad was in the Navy until I retired to my present house. I never lived four years in a row in the same place. When I was about 13, we moved to California and a couple of years later my dad retired and I've been a resident of California ever since, although, as I say, I've never been in one place for very long. Once I joined the Foreign Service, it was, you know, a new post every two or three years.
Jen Coronado:Wow. So did you find like you got a travel bug when you were a kid because of that, because you moved around so much, or did you feel like you were always trying to find a place to?
Casey Casebeer:stick. I think the connection with the uprooted childhood is more that I got the bug for trying to understand people. You know, moving from the East Coast to the West Coast is a shock to the system and moving back is also a shock to the system and to the clothing. Yeah, yes, and I have always been interested in how people who are apparently very different are really the same and how people who you expect to be the same are really different. What about difference matters and what about difference doesn't matter?
Jen Coronado:So that's something that I've thought about all my working life though did you see yourself manifesting that as a kid, as you're going through education? Like things that you picked up on that were super interesting for you because of that?
Casey Casebeer:Not really. I was interested in everything. I was one of those kids that you know if there was a book I would read it, regardless of what it was about. I went through the entire library of my elementary school and then went through the library on the military base and, you know, we didn't have online then there was no internet, so you read what you could get your hands on. I'm a person who's always interested in the next thing. As soon as I've mastered something, I lose interest in it. So I would read all the books about Greek mythology. And then I was done with Greek mythology for a while and I would go read everything about wildlife in North America and once I got that down, I kind of moved on. So by the time I went to college, my enemies and friends in high school called me the walking encyclopedia, and I still do this and it drives my friends crazy, you know somebody says well, where does that song come from?
Casey Casebeer:And then, you know, three minutes later in the chat I pop up with a link saying it looks like this song was originally sung in Nova Scotia, but it passed through the logging community and ended up in. You know, I can't help it. That's the way my mind works and fortunately that type of a mind is perfect for the Foreign Service. You have to be constantly ready to learn something you didn't know. You were going to have to know a day or two ago.
Jen Coronado:Right, you mentioned college. Where did you go to college?
Casey Casebeer:Undergraduate Berkeley and master's degree at Columbia.
Jen Coronado:What were your focuses at the two universities?
Casey Casebeer:Well, focus was not on my mind at first. So I went to Berkeley and it was a revelation to me. It was the first place where I was not the smartest kid in the class and that was good for me. But then I wanted to study everything and I took anthropology and archaeology and political science and rhetoric and history and French and Spanish and I just wanted it all. I couldn't have it all, but I wanted it all. I had been taking French right through high school, so I got advanced placement into college with French and I wanted to go and spend my junior year abroad, in France.
Casey Casebeer:And my counselor told me Cheryl, if you don't declare a major, we're not going to let you go. So I got the catalog and I started going through the catalog trying to figure out how to. Cheryl, if you don't declare a major, we're not going to let you go. So I got the catalog and I started going through the catalog trying to figure out how to how many of the courses I had already taken might be applied to some majors. So I could get a little bit further, as my dad would say. I ended up in something called the development studies. It was a multidisciplinary, sort of experimental in those times. So the idea was that you take the problem of developing countries and developing countries in general don't work very well. Why don't they work very well? So I could apply anthropology and sociology and history and French and Spanish and all these things that I was interested in anyway, toward a degree which was very handy.
Casey Casebeer:Got out of my undergraduate degree. I wasn't interested in running a city or a public administration, I guess you would call it. So I wanted to continue to learn about other countries, and languages has always been a common theme in my life. I'm fascinated with other languages. Berkeley had a great program in international affairs, but with a focus on organizations and administration in international affairs. That wasn't what I wanted, so I ended up with a scholarship and that helped me choose Columbia.
Casey Casebeer:I got a region scholarship which doesn't steer you in any particular direction, but they had a wonderful program, again a little bit edgy at the time, that focused on developing countries with a lens of looking at how economics and politics interact. The idea is that you can't get very far with your economic ideas unless you can manage the political environment, because nobody will support you and you won't get anything done and people your great ideas will go nowhere. Also, if you're a politician, you can't get anything done unless you understand the economic effects on your base and the economic limitations on what the projects that you want to accomplish in your political life. So I hesitate to use the word political economy because that has a lot of baggage. But what they were focused on is making sure that we graduated always looking at these two sides of problem solving that in any public arena. You were going to have to bring along both of those groups if you wanted to get anything done.
Jen Coronado:Well, going back to what you said before, that goes into what you were saying about what was interesting to you, which is people who are alike who can't meet, you know, on common ground, and people who are different who can meet on common ground, right, yeah, so that makes complete sense as far as a strategy for studying how humans work. Right, as far as a strategy for studying how humans work right, absolutely.
Casey Casebeer:So everybody in my specialization took the Foreign Service exam, because everybody did. We just all went and took it together and I passed it. So then I had to decide did I want to go on to the oral assessment, which is the second triage step? It involved going down to Washington DC, but they paid the way. So I went and lo and behold, I passed that as well. So they put me on the roster, which is a list of fully qualified people from which they draw when they're ready to hire.
Jen Coronado:Really quick about the oral exam. What is?
Casey Casebeer:that like I don't know what it's like now, I can only tell you what it was like then. So at the time, the idea of an assessment center that tested people's actual skills rather than just making them take a test and going by their answers, was a kind of a different idea, and they had a number of different types of assessment. They got four of us in a room and gave us each a portfolio of projects costing a certain amount of money and had us negotiate how a limited budget was going to be spent. One person had a law degree and came in hard charging to get her project through regardless, and, of course, me being the generalist that I've always been, I ended up as the negotiator saying okay, it looks to me as though you know, this project can't be funded no matter what, because it eats almost the entire budget and some of these other things are worthwhile, so can we agree that we need to rule this one out? And sort of gradually guided us through the process. It turned out that's what we're looking for. So I mean, there are plenty of hard chargers out there, but people who can negotiate are kind of thin on the ground. Yeah, so they had that. They had a pile of inbox stuff ranging from the ambassador's toilet is plugged up to you need to inspect fire damage in this room before we can begin repairs, and they left us to get through it. And some people already had the skill needed to do a pile of work like that, where you spread it all out on your desk and decide what's most pressing, anything that has to be done today and can't be done tomorrow, anything that involves somebody who has so much influence that they can impede your progress and all the rest of it. Anything that is genuinely and intrinsically important and deserves your attention, whether or not. A lot of people are encouraging you to do it.
Casey Casebeer:So they were interested to see how we weighed priorities, which is not an easy thing to test in a candidate. They had a one-on-one or a two-on-one, which was even more terrifying two-on-one interview. So you went into an interview with two people, having no idea what they were going to ask you. They asked me about the role of China in the coming decades. You know, here we are 50 years later. Turns out to be a really relevant question yeah, prescient even, and I didn't know jack about China, but I did know an awful lot about Africa at that point. So I used Africa as an example and talked about China looking for having an ever-growing population and looking for resources and knowing that they were going to have to develop. If they couldn't get away with developing colonies, they would have to find some other way to pump other countries for resources.
Casey Casebeer:Anyway, I came up with something and apparently they weren't really interested in whether I knew about China. They were interested in whether I could think on my feet, which is another really important characteristic for foreign service people. You never know what someone's going to ask you and you need to know what you can say and what you can't say and what the sensitivities of your audience are, so that you know whether to push a button or not. They already knew before I set foot in the room that I was a bright student and that I could learn well. What they were interested in was what kind of a person was I and how would I manage the environment in which the odd environment in which foreign service people work?
Jen Coronado:Now you talk about. You know these are the type of things that foreign service that you know you need to know for foreign service work. And you look at that all in hindsight right, because you were in the foreign service for such a long time. But what did Casey, at the moment can you remember as you're taking this foreign service exam, like, how do you get past the terror of a nervousness? What resources did you draw?
Casey Casebeer:from. I don't think I was really terrified by tests, because I was always a good student. The question in the back of my mind was what if I pass? The Foreign Service wasn't exactly what I had in mind. I wanted to work in international development. I wanted to help countries that were in the process of changing their economies and their cultures in order to be able to feed everybody, and that was the nexus of problems that interested me the most. Well, I passed it and they put me on the roster. And then the Graham Redmond thing came along and there was a hiring freeze. Can you talk?
Jen Coronado:about that for those who don't know what the Graham Redmond thing is.
Casey Casebeer:It was the beginning of the Republican revolution in the United States. It was an attempt by the Republican Party to gain more political control by controlling the budget through the congressional budgetary process, and it was very successful.
Casey Casebeer:But, among other things, it was the beginning of a very long period in the foreign service and in every other aspect of government where people were trying to keep the government going without enough people and resources and training to do the job. And when you're overseas in a in a very difficult environment and you can't get training because we can't afford the airfare, this kind of thing requires creative thinking. I suppose we had to figure out other ways to get the job done, and we did so. You took the test.
Jen Coronado:You're on the list and there is there a phone call. That happens. You get a letter in the mail signed by the president. What happens? How do you enter? I?
Casey Casebeer:knew I wasn't going to get a telephone call for a while because there was no hiring being done.
Casey Casebeer:But there were a couple of organizations in the government that were exempt from the hiring freeze, and one of them was the Social Security Administration.
Casey Casebeer:So I went home to California and I got a job as a claims interviewer for the SSI program, which is assistance to disabled people and to people whose retirement income is below a certain threshold, and I was assigned in a place in the north part of the Central Valley which has a lot of farm workers, and many of them spoke Spanish, and there had never been a Spanish speaking claims rep in that office. Wow. So I had a line around the block because I was the only person in the office that could talk to these folks, and some of them had got crosswise, you know, 10 years ago and never got themselves disentangled. You know how easily you can get, even if you speak the same language as the person interviewing you, how easily they can misunderstand what you say. Well, these poor people had lost their benefits and all kinds of bad things, had been forced to pay things back that they shouldn't, and so I got involved in disentangling all of these old claims. Well, that wasn't what they hired me for.
Jen Coronado:You're problem solving.
Casey Casebeer:Then too, I couldn't help it. So my boss, who she was limited by the requirements of the bureaucracy as well and she wanted to help those people and couldn't. So when she called me in to do my, you have to do an annual evaluation. It's part of the way the government manages personnel. When she called me in for my first annual evaluation, she said I can't give you your annual step increase because you aren't doing what I hired you to do, and you know it. And you're doing what I hired you to do, and you know it, and you're doing what you want to do anyway.
Casey Casebeer:However, I for one am really glad that it's getting done. I'm sorry that I can't be more honest with you. So I really respected this woman. She came right out with the limitations of the institution and she was aware of them. She wasn't going to quit because of them, but she was quietly getting the job done at the cost of my first annual step increase. But hey, so that was a good learning experience for me that that particular institution wasn't equipped to value good quality work. What they wanted was volume. They wanted me to move those claims, interviews and annual redeterminations of benefits. A certain volume of them had to go across my desk every year, and what I was doing was not making that happen. So I became determined that I would not accept a job with the Foreign Service or anybody else again until I could find an employer who would value my desire to do it right.
Jen Coronado:It's very interesting. I frequently think about rules and how rules could be applied, and I always think, if there comes a point when rules don't serve what you've set up to begin with, that you can change the rules because you made somebody made the rules at some point. So that's interesting that you were wanting to push through that in your next role. So what was your next role?
Casey Casebeer:Well, I received a telephone call saying that the hiring freeze was lifted and they were filling long vacant positions as fast as they could. And was I interested in being an administrative officer? Now, the Foreign Service at that time was broken up into specialties that they call, for reasons lost in the mist of time, cones. So they had the consular cone. Those are the people who manage visas and passports and the problems of Americans overseas. They have the political cone, who learn about the local political situation and report on it, so Washington understands what's happening in a country. Economic cone the same thing, but for the economic side and financial side and business. And then they had public affairs.
Casey Casebeer:Handling the press, making press releases and managing the image of the African roots had inspired some of the music of America and then how that music had come back to Africa and become mixed up with West African pop music and all this sort of thing.
Casey Casebeer:That showed people how we were connected.
Casey Casebeer:Then, in addition, there's somebody who has to keep the lights on the people who hire and fire and do the budgets and run the motor pool and hire people with trade skills to maintain people's houses and do an environment that's so different from theirs that they can't live like local people and still do their job.
Casey Casebeer:So the State Department's approach to this is to try to make diplomats home as much like a home in the United States as is practical in the local environment, much like a home in the United States is practical in the local environment. So, anyway, somebody had to do that job and those jobs had gone begging during the hiring freeze. So I took the job because I desperately wanted out of the impasse I was in with the social security job and what I found out right away was that my problem solving skills were central to my identity, that in any situation where there was clearly a problem impeding what I wanted to do, I wanted to fix it. So that was a good thing for me to know about myself and I learned it early because of social security, for which I thank my old boss.
Jen Coronado:Now let's step back for a second, because this was your first assignment.
Casey Casebeer:My first assignment? Yes, and where exactly were you in that? It was in Cuba. Oddly enough, we didn't have, and don't have, formal relations with Cuba for historical reasons, and this is a really good example of how diplomacy works.
Casey Casebeer:Despite the fact that we didn't like each other and had dramatically different ideas about how government should serve the people, we had a lot of stuff that had to be talked about. You have a very heavy traffic air traffic area, so you have to have overflight clearances. Every flight that goes across somebody's territory you have to have the host government's permission to be there or they have the right to shoot you down. So you have to talk about that, whether you like each other or not. We had to talk about immigration, legal and illegal. There was drug interdiction issues, being so close to Florida, and all these things required that people speak in a civil way, which was not what was going on on the public level, but under the public level, the diplomats get on with the job. So it was actually a fascinating assignment.
Casey Casebeer:I ended up interviewing a group of prisoners called the plantados, the ones who would not move because they were political prisoners. They viewed themselves as political prisoners and wouldn't wear the prison uniform. So the Cubans at that time and I would say still play hardball with people who don't participate in their model. So they said we can't make you wear the uniform, but we're not going to give you anything else. So these guys had been in prison for 20 years in their shorts, which just is such an image of the hard-headed, unmoving, unbending unwillingness to discuss matters that really matter that has characterized that relationship for all these years. So I got to interview these guys in the prison for a special visa program to get them where Cuba had said they would be willing to release them to go to the United States, and most of them did in the end.
Casey Casebeer:So here I am. What was I? 24 at that time or 23? 23-year-old in high heels in a Cuban prison, interviewing crusty old guys in their underwear. It was a very strange introduction to the Foreign Service and welcome to the government, yes, well, so it was a wonderful tour and I loved the Caribbean.
Jen Coronado:And so you were in Cuba and you were hanging out with older guys in their underwear, and then you moved on to what was your next assignment after that.
Casey Casebeer:Africa, because I had focused on Africa in my graduate studies and I wanted to see it for real. So I went to Ivory Coast, côte, d'ivoire, and brushed off my French, which, you know, I had not been using for those three years, while I was speaking Spanish all the time.
Jen Coronado:And what was your role there at that point in time?
Casey Casebeer:The first tour was consular because everybody did a first tour as a consular officer at that time. So this was my first tour in the specialization that I was assigned to. So it was my first tour doing administrative work and the embassy was at that time very large. It was one of the two or three sort of hub embassies in Africa where there are some functions that you need in an embassy, like a doctor, but you can't afford to put a doctor in every country. So you assign a doctor in a country that has good air service and the doctor then can make regular runs to the surrounding countries and check on people with particular medical conditions and assess whatever needs to be assessed locally.
Casey Casebeer:Deal with the local. You know, all of a sudden everybody's getting some local disease and he might be able to figure out, or she might be able to figure out what's going on. So anyway, some hub embassies had a very large population of these regional people and so the administrative section was supporting a huge base of people who weren't actually focused on that country. So I was doing leasing in that first job, not a very romantic job, but it got me out into the community. I was viewing houses and negotiating with local people in the local languages and I never learned anything but French. But anybody who could afford to own a house at that time in Ivory Coast probably had gone to school in French, and so my French got me through and learned a lot about negotiation and got my French back up to speed.
Jen Coronado:How many tours did you do?
Casey Casebeer:and what was your next one? You know I'd have to sit down and count, and my history is complicated by the fact that in two different periods of my life I was what the State Department calls a rover. Africa has a lot of jobs that fall vacant and stay vacant for way too long, because it's hard to recruit people who are willing to and trained to work in the African environment, and so they maintain a small group of people called rovers, who go out for a year at a time with their bags and they're plugging holes wherever some job has been vacant too long and bad things are starting to happen because there's nobody to do the job. So you go from spot to spot. You might stay for two weeks while somebody takes a vacation, or you might stay for six months until they can recruit and train somebody for the job. So you never know from one assignment to the next how long you're going to be there or where you're going next.
Jen Coronado:So I crisscrossed the map doing that what a complex web you had.
Casey Casebeer:You were talking earlier about breaking rules. There are ways to break rules in a bureaucracy. Usually, a well-designed bureaucracy will have ways for you to say I'm aware of this rule. Here's the situation. If I apply the rule, the following outcome will result, which is not to our benefit. Here's what I propose as an exception. And usually it'll go high enough to where someone can make a decision and they'll say go ahead. And then you have a piece of paper that says I'm authorized to do this. You cover whatever part of your anatomy requires covering at that point and you get the job done. So I learned how to how to use a bureaucracy and how to get things done despite the obstacles that a bureaucracy creates.
Jen Coronado:I have to tell you, casey, what a skill that our bureaucracy creates. I have to tell you, casey, what a skill you have to be able to see those gaps, to be able to say, all right, if I do this and these three things, then I'll be able to hit this process and take it up here and then get the approvals I need to do, the one thing that I need to complete and you're using the same skills that the traditional problem solvers are using.
Casey Casebeer:In order for you to get that done, I bet you had to make a friend. You had to go in and sit down with somebody and say you know, I need an ally here. I need you to understand what I'm trying to get done. So being a bridge is part of what the Foreign Service is about. No matter what kind of work you're doing, you are trying to help Washington understand how the world looks to the local people and help the local people understand the oddities of Washington's behavior and interpret it so that they can make good decisions for themselves. So you're constantly going back and forth across that bridge.
Jen Coronado:It's interesting. I wanted to get to one of your larger roles, which I think is so fascinating, which is chief of mission.
Casey Casebeer:So the first time that happened, I was in Burundi and they were having a civil war and the ambassador reached the end of his assignment and departed post. I had just come in as the deputy chief of mission, which is the ambassador's number two, the person that acts as ambassador when the ambassador is out of country. So I stepped into that position, which in the diplomatic world is called the chargé d'affaires, the person who's in charge of country. So I stepped into that position, which in the diplomatic world is called the chargé d'affaires, the person who's in charge of matters.
Jen Coronado:I love that I'm going to start calling myself that that's right.
Casey Casebeer:So I became the chargé within days of arrival at post, but I didn't know anybody and that I held that position for, I guess, seven months or so until they could get another ambassador. And that was the first time. The second time I was deputy chief of mission in Chad, and that was when the Darfur conflict was happening. Right, the State Department has, you know, you have the secretary and the undersecretary and then you have department heads, so you have the African Bureau and you have a person in charge of the African Bureau and then a group of people right under that person, and all of those people need staff.
Jen Coronado:Yeah, I just find all that process so fascinating. The other thing that I was thinking about is you know, you've had a lot. You've been to Cuba, you've various parts of Africa, different jobs and roles that you got flown into. What was the toughest situation you ever got into that you had to solve?
Casey Casebeer:for One is in 1994, I was flown into Kigali, rwanda, after the genocide. So the genocide started in February and ended in around I don't know April, and then by August the violence was over and we wanted to know if we could reopen the embassy, the embassy. So they sent in the former ambassador, a security guy and an admin person me to figure out whether conditions were ready for, whether we could work safely in that environment. The embassy had a mortar shell through the ambassador's conference rooms, this great big hole with rain pouring in, and the houses where the diplomats who were evacuated had lived had all been occupied by what you might call squatters, people who needed a place to stay, and there was an empty house. So they moved in A million dollars worth of household furniture and refrigerators and washing machines and what have you had disappeared or been moved to the neighbor's house and what have you had disappeared or been moved to the neighbor's house and our warehouse had been sacked. There was no fuel delivery to the country, so we had no power and no water. And there was one hotel. The hotel rooms had no doors but they were renting out rooms to people like us, diplomats and company representatives and so forth, who were trying to decide whether they could come back to Rwanda. So within three days of arrival I had a door in my room, which was a great reassurance, and we just went through.
Casey Casebeer:You know, we made a list of what the basics were without which we couldn't operate safely. Could we get a physical perimeter where we could work safely in the building? Where were we going to get fuel? We had generators. So if we could get fuel for the generator we could get the electricity back on. Then would the computers work. All of the batteries had been run all the way down and in those days that was not a good thing. So could we get batteries in to get the system back up? And what about medical coverage? Could we get a nurse in? And then how we were going to get medicines in? And I mean every aspect of life had to be worked through. I worked 16 hours a day. If I was not sleeping, I was working for months. I've never worked harder in my life.
Casey Casebeer:And all of our employees, because of the history of Rwanda, at use, computers could draft, could speak foreign languages. Almost all those people were Tutsis. Tutsis, you'll remember, are the people who were the subject of the genocide, although many Hutus who didn't want to cooperate with the genocide were killed as well. So almost all of our employees had either been killed or had run off to refugee camps or hidden themselves in some way.
Casey Casebeer:During the violence, and as the word got out into the community that the Americans were back and that there was somebody at the embassy, people started to trickle in and they had stories. Every one of them had lost parents and children and entire villages, and it was beyond comprehension, it was impossible to absorb. So for them, we, the embassy, were this one little tiny spark of normality in a world that had completely lost its meaning, and they were determined to come back to work and try to work. But they were in post-traumatic stress and all of them were mentally ill in some way. At the beginning, you know window, and he wouldn't even be aware I was there. You know I put a hand on his shoulder and he would notice I was there and smile. And you know it was a very unusual working environment, to put it mildly.
Casey Casebeer:To make a long story short, we were able to get everybody, get a whole lot of people whom we had feared dead were able to come back from neighboring countries where they were living in refugee camps. We were able to slowly persuade people to give us back the houses that we were leasing and bring in furniture, and I found a way to get fuel driven down from Kenya so we could get the electricity going and we got the hole in the ambassador's conference room repaired the electricity going and we got the hole in the ambassador's conference room repaired. The rainy season came early that year and I was sleeping in the library of the public affairs presence on a cot and it started raining and all I could think was, oh my God, the ambassador's conference room and I went charging upstairs with an armful of tarpaulins and several other employees came to help me and we were, you know, trying to protect the furniture and things that remained in that room and the books Just unpredictable things.
Casey Casebeer:You don't know what to do first in a situation like that. You know, normally the ambassador's conference room would be very, very high on the list of any administrative officer overseas, but there were way too many other things going on and the ambassador, bless his heart, was a man who knew what was important and he didn't mess with me. He just said you know what needs to be done. Tell me if I can move an obstacle for you. And then he went about his business with the political and economic side of the story.
Jen Coronado:I mean, how do you you talked about the PTSD for the people who suffered through that you know, very specifically how do you deal? With their trauma? How do you deal with their trauma impacting you?
Casey Casebeer:I was young for one thing, so I was resilient, but I mean, I'm still dealing with it. You know, I'm still. There are still people. I remember when I came back from that assignment I got some leave and came back to California, to this very house In fact my parents lived here at the time and we have a room outside which once was an enclosed porch, which has been turned into a room and has a wood-burning stove. It was wintertime and I built a fire in the fireplace and sat out there for hours with my guitar, and my mother would come out and bring me food and sit for a little while and I wouldn't have a lot to say, and so she'd take the dirty dishes and go back to the kitchen. She was worried. She told me later, but I processed, and there were a few take-home messages, a few things that I will never forget as a result of that experience.
Casey Casebeer:One is that everybody can kill. You think that you can't or that you wouldn't, but when faced with the right situation, set of circumstances, everybody can kill, and fear is such a powerful thing that your body will take over from your mind and make you do what you have to do to save itself. There were heroes, lots of heroes, lots of people who risked their lives for one another. I'm not underselling or understating what they went through and the chances that they took From that experience. I couldn't look down on somebody who wasn't a hero, because a lot of good people did a lot of bad things in that situation because they were afraid. They didn't want to die. They didn't want the people they loved to die. And when somebody has a knife to your you know your six-year-old's throat and says you are going to come with us, put on this uniform and kill people, or I am going to kill this child here and now, you just do what's in front of you to do and when it's all over, you sort through the wreckage and try to make a life again. So that was the first take-home message that everybody is capable of doing terrible things in the right environment. So try to be compassionate.
Casey Casebeer:And I also learned how to set priorities under time pressure. In that situation, everything had gone wrong. Every single aspect of our lives was unendurable. So, okay, first we have to have water, because if we don't have water we can't stay more than a week. So I worked on the water first.
Casey Casebeer:Then we needed power, because the ambassador couldn't do his job without a computer. So then I worked on the fuel situation and gradually worked up a list of the things that had to happen, and then, as people came back, I had to bring in people from Washington to help me sort out the personnel issues, which you can imagine were incredible. The State Department usually solves this problem by simply paying people as though they had been working through the whole crisis, because there's no figuring out at what time this person was no longer working for the US government. Some of these people were in the evacuation cavalcade and helping to solve problems the whole way. How could we not have paid them? I mean so set your priorities when people's lives are on the line and you only have a limited amount of time to make your decisions. That was a really good early lesson, which I used over and over again in later years.
Jen Coronado:You've since retired. What are you doing now? What are you doing now with all these skills that you've developed?
Casey Casebeer:Well, interestingly enough, I'm doing things that I really love doing and I'm not using most of those skills. When I retired, I went back on contract, which is not unusual at all in the Foreign Service. You have, as you say, all these specialized skills, and jobs are going begging in the Foreign Service, so they bring people back on six-month contract. So I went to Niger while they were having an Ebola epidemic in West Africa and helped organizing a medical evacuation network because the usual SOS medical evacuation. People didn't want to subject their pilots and staff to the danger of getting Ebola, so they weren't going into that area, but people needed to get out. So I went back two or three times.
Casey Casebeer:2015 was my last assignment, I think. So since 2015, I've been doing the two things that I couldn't do when I was working that I desperately wanted to do. One of them was spending lots of times with my friends, lots of time. I would come home for a two-week R&R every year. In that time I had to visit my parents and my friends in Berkeley, which is about a three-hour drive away, and my boyfriend in Oregon. So it was three days here, three days there, three days there, do a shopping trip and go back to Africa. This is not normal, right. So the few friends who were able to keep real contact with me during all of those years are people who really understood me, and those people are worth taking care of and I spend a lot of time with them.
Casey Casebeer:Now. The other thing that I do is sing. When I was in the Foreign Service I had to sing what people locally wanted to sing and with the people locally who already liked to sing. I didn't have time to develop a community. I was only there for three years in that In Madagascar everybody sings. So I had a Friday night music group that came to my house in Madagascar and we sang, and in Chad the only people who sang in English were missionaries, so I sang a lot of gospel.
Casey Casebeer:There were a couple of people in the American community who liked to sing show tunes, so I learned some show tunes, but I couldn't sing what I wanted, which was traditional music, the music that people in European history have put together for themselves that tells their own story. So when I retired I really dug deep into the English language ballads, which are songs that tell a story. All of this stuff really fascinates me. So I have a ballad group, I have a harmony group, I have a group of sing-along and chorus songs. So you can do harmony in a big group with that wonderful buzzing in your sinuses when you get perfectly tuned with a big group of people. So I'm doing music all the time now and I love it. Doesn't require much decision-making, not a great deal of prioritizing, so those skills are lying fallow.
Jen Coronado:Well, casey, I have to say I think you're very impressive, and we frequently tell people who have served in the military thank you for your service, because it's an important thing to do, but I also think I want to thank you for your service in connecting with global communities and representing our country. You've done tremendous things and I'm super envious of all of it. So thank you for taking time with us today.
Casey Casebeer:It was a pleasure. You can't put a life into an hour, but you have the gift of bringing people back to the thread, which is well applied to this kind of communication, and I'm really glad you're doing it. Well applied to this kind of communication, and I'm really glad you're doing it. So I suggest, may I suggest to you, may I suggest?
Jen Coronado:this is the best part of your life. Thank you for listening to Everyone Is. Everyone Is is produced and edited by Chris Hawkinson, executive producer is Aaron Dussault, music by Doug Infinite, our logo and graphic design is by Harrison Parker and I am Jen Coronado. Everyone Is is a Slightly Disappointed Productions production dropping every other Thursday. Wherever podcasts are available, make sure to rate and review, and maybe even like and subscribe. Thank you for listening.
