This past week was an exciting one. Exactly one year to the day I learned I would be heading to Mauritania, I received my official bid list for my next assignment in Summer 2024. This marks a pretty big change from how the cycle went down last time when I was in orientation. Back then, we got our list during our second week of training and basically had to cobble together a rank ordered list in a weeks time and learned where we would be heading less than a month later. We moved to post 6 weeks after we learned our destination, which is a pretty tight turnaround for upending your entire life and moving to Africa. (Note: this tight turnaround really just applies to MED specialists)

This time around there is a little more clarity in the process, partially because I have gone through this before, but also because the timeline is more spelled out and I will have a full year to prepare for the move. Another difference is I will bidding with nearly everyone that onboarded in 2022, so our list is much larger. Finally, I also will be bidding with a lot of equity, where last time this was not a factor in the process.

Equity is the system the State Department uses for first and second tour employees to help determine their second assignments. MED uses it as a bidding factor throughout a career. What it boils down to is each country has a number assigned to it that is a combination of hardship differential, danger pay, and any difficult to staff incentives a post might have. Typically the harder the post is to live, or the more dangerous it is, the higher the equity. For example, Mauritania has a 35% hardship differential and is historically difficult to staff, so it is assigned a value of 40% equity. A place like Baghdad will be even higher, closer to 65%, and a post like London will be 0%. Individuals with more equity will have higher precedence in being allocated their second assignment, with greater choice in where they go, essentially rewarding them for serving in difficult places. While technically at entry level you can be assigned anywhere on your list, equity plays a large roll.

Out of my peers, because I serve in Mauritania, I have one of the highest equity values, so in theory should be able to land one of my top posts. Just what my top posts are is another conundrum. Our list this go round is a bit more varied than my first list and there are several factors sort of tugging at each other as my wife and I hammer out our priorities. For example:

1. Should I prioritize getting to mid-level career status sooner and go to a 1 year assignment without my family? Pay will be better but is it worth a year apart? Didn’t we sign up to do this thing together?
2. Should I prioritize checking off career requirements and serve in a post with greater than 20% hardship?
3. Should I cash in all this equity and bid on only the lowest equity posts?
4. Should I prioritize my finances and stay in a very high equity post (basically somewhere in Africa) that my family can go to?
5. Should I try and go to another French speaking country to continue my language learning?
6. Should I base my bidding on the quality of domestic beer? Mauritania has none so this might be important 🙂
7. Should I just bid on all of the above and see where the dice land?

All of these questions are swirling around my head. The list itself has several countries I would be perfectly happy serving, and given my high equity will have no trouble getting one of them, but I am not sure if I should really zero in on one or two of them when it comes time to submit my list.

Coming from Mauritania, the requirements my wife and I have are we would like to serve in a place with a solid food culture, a place Angeli can easily work, and we also would like a place with solid green/public space. Although Mauritania has beaches, there is nothing in the form of public parks, and even the beaches are private. Being able to relax in a large public park or plaza with the kids on a weekend afternoon would be great. Our embassy currently provides us with that relief, and it is a wonderful space, but sometimes you get tired of going to the place you work all week for your leisure time as well. The same goes for food. There are a handful of restaurants in Mauritania we frequent, but we burned through all of them in the first 3 months we were here, and if they were to exist in the U.S. all but maybe one of them would be considered mediocre at best. I wouldn’t mind a place where I have FOMO that I won’t be able to try all the city has to offer from a culinary standpoint in a 2 year tour.

Decisions, decisions. In less than a month I will know where I am heading, but before then, we really have to buckle down and work out exactly what we want. I am grateful for the opportunity, but it isn’t easy. I knew in orientation when I bid Mauritania highly, I would likely get it. This time around, it’s a crap shoot. Wish me luck! – Nick