After several weeks of stress, we found out last Friday night when one of our friends called at 2 a.m. to wake us up and tell us that assignments had been announced. I checked my crackberry and lo and behold, there was the email saying that we were going to Lisbon in March 2010 for me to work in the Political/Economic section of the embassy. I'll get to brush up on my Portuguese and Hill will start to learn it from scratch when we leave here next summer.
But it wasn't easy to get there. Our previous blog entry talked about how I was able to schedule a last minute Portuguese test, but that wasn't the end of the drama. On the day that I was told that I'd receive my test score, I didn't hear anything so I contacted our HR department. I then found out that something had gone wrong and the tapes were garbled, so they couldn't score them. And they were totally unwilling to do anything another way so that we could get a test score in time. Bureaucracy at its best. Luckily, there was a guy at the State Department's language school who knew what he was doing. Apparently the only problem was that the tapes were recorded at the wrong speed. He was able to slow them down and my test was scored just in time for it to count.
Hillary doesn't know what she'll be doing there yet. They say they guarantee anyone who wants to work at least 16 hours per week, but hopefully she can find more regular work, either inside or outside the embassy. Regardless, we know we'll be going to a beautiful country with great food and nice people, so we couldn't be happier.
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