Tag Archives: Foreign Service work

A Day in the Life

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Della Mae members Courtney Hartman and Kimber Ludiker make a new friend in Khiva. (U.S. Embassy photo)

Frequently people ask me what it was like to be a public diplomacy officer in the Foreign Service of the U.S. Department of State. “Hard,” is my off-the-cuff answer. My job as Information Officer, colloquially known as press attaché, included a number of key responsibilities:

  • Daily press briefings with the Ambassador and senior staff
  • Drafting press guidance and talking points on a variety of issues
  • Managing the Embassy’s social media strategy, important in a country with press restrictions
  • Identifying speakers for weekly outreach programs
  • Working with libraries and librarians to fund English-language materials
  • Traveling with the Ambassador on site visits throughout the country
  • Coordinating press events such as monthly press conferences and exclusive interviews with the Secretary of State
  • Creating media plans to promote educational and cultural programs in a country with press restrictions
  • Monitoring the on-the-ground situation for working journalists
  • Promoting information about the services of the Embassy’s consular section, including American Citizen Services and visa services for local citizens

There’s definitely more to the job, but that’s a pretty good start. As you can imagine, on any given day I might have other things come up, such as unconfirmed reports that the President of the country had a massive heart attack!

 

 

When I think back on my favorite aspects of the job, they definitely relate to promoting the cultural programs we worked so hard to present for the Uzbek public. During my time in Uzbekistan we had photographers, poets, basketball players, musicians, and dancers come to Tashkent and other cities for master classes, performances, competitions, and more. I had an amazing time traveling with our cultural envoys and coming up with interesting ways to share their work with the citizens of Uzbekistan.

 

The talented students of the Urgench arts kolej perform for arts envoy and photographer Frank Ward.

 

One of my most memorable experiences was the tour of bluegrass group Della Mae, an all-female bluegrass band that spent about a week in Uzbekistan. Della Mae came to Uzbekistan as part of the American Music Abroad program which is “designed to communicate America’s rich musical contributions to the global music scene as it fosters cross-cultural communication and people-to-people connection to global audiences.” Their openness to working with local musicians led to the spontaneous creation of a bluegrass/Uzbek folk fusion that we started calling “Blue-Uz-Grass.” They sang, gave master classes, jammed with local musicians, and performed a fantastic sold-out concert at one of Tashkent’s premier music halls. I had the pleasure of traveling with the group to the great Silk Road city of Khiva and to nearby Urgench where there’s an incredible performing arts high school, known locally as a kolej.

 

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=At9mDNHLW3g&list=TLFHU2Ny2uffM[/youtube]

 

My role with Della Mae’s visit was to coordinate social and traditional media coverage, put together a press conference and press preview performance, and to travel with the group to the kolej in Urgench where we’d had successful arts envoy programs in the past. We did a number of things to promote Della Mae on social media, from tweeting to posting tons of photos on Facebook, and sharing videos such as the one above through YouTube and the local video sharing site Mover.uz. The video you see above was posted to the Embassy’s YouTube channel–and it’s received over 400 views, despite the fact that YouTube is banned in Uzbekistan.

We live tweeted the event in three languages: English, Uzbek, and Russian:

 

We had a great team at the Embassy supporting this visit: the cultural affairs officer and cultural assistant did all the advanced planning to set up the program and supported the band while in country; our multi-tasking staff ran around with cameras to multiple sites to document all the fun (and work!); our  press assistants worked on media releases, interviews, and the press event; and our social media team collaborated to keep our Facebook and twitter communities involved in real time. All along the way we had a staffer from American Music Abroad offering even more social media amplification of the visit.

It was an exhausting week, but worth it in so many ways. I’ll leave you with one of the several Facebook albums we created to share Della Mae’s tour with a larger audience. Our roving photographers followed the band throughout their tour, capturing behind-the-scenes shots of the band working with other musicians, with students, and performing in master classes. This is just a snapshot of what they saw. You can see more if you “like” the U.S. Embassy’s Facebook page!

 

[fbalbum url=https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151495806909186.581651.9631659185&type=3]