How difficult is it to get time away from the job if you are the only provider at the embassy? If you are new, is accruing paid leave difficult?
A few people have asked me this, and this was something I also asked folks before I onboarded. Simply stated: It is not difficult to get time off.
I will caveat this and say that it will vary by post, but what a lot of people don’t understand is that many, if not most health units hire local physicians to also work in the Health Unit, so you aren’t really the only provider. Some posts also have very seasoned nurses that have functioned on their own for a very long time and know what to do in most circumstances. I my case in Nouakchott, I have a part time physician that will back me up if I am out, and my nurse spent the first 5 years of her career in Mauritania as the sole healthcare provider in the embassy (She is also western trained and boarded, so her quality is excellent).
When I do want to take time away, I simply coordinate it with my nurse and my local physician just to make sure someone is here, and it hasn’t been difficult at all. I also am OCD and plan my personal leave months and months in advance, so telegraph my absence well.
If all else fails, there are also several worldwide rovers MED has posted in various regions, and if you are early to the game in your request, can get coverage.
Leave is a different animal. On the paper, when you first start working for the federal government, you accrue 4 hours of leave per paycheck, which boils down to 2.5 weeks off per year. Coming in as a hospitalist, I had 2.5 weeks off every month, so this was a huge change. I got to post with 28 hours of leave to my name and wondered how I would ever get enough time off to take more than a week vacation. Considering getting anywhere, including Europe is typically a 2 day affair, it didn’t really inspire confidence that I was going to be able to fully utilize all the R&R this post comes with.
Thankfully, the department has a few other mechanisms for accumulating leave that weren’t clear to me until I got to post.
The first, is compensatory time off. Basically if you do overtime, you can instead choose to take it as extra leave hours instead of extra money. Working as a med provider, you get a lot of weird after hours work, so it wracks up quickly. In my time at post thus far I have accumulated over 100 hours of compensatory time off, basically adding an extra 2.5 weeks to my annual leave allowance. That to me is worth more than the few thousand dollars I would have been paid had I taken it as true overtime. Eventually I will have more leave than I know what to do with, but until then, I will be taking all my overtime as comp time.
The second mechanism is travel compensatory time off. Basically, if you have to travel for official government business, and the flight times/schedule occur after official business hours, you get to claim all the travel hours spent as more compensatory time off. When you consider any flight into or out of Nouakchott typically occurs near the weekend and in the middle of the night, getting this extra leave is easy and accumulates quickly. Trips to and from the U.S. will often grant over 40 hours of extra leave because the flights are often overnight and on weekend. Given all the temporary duty work I have done, and the 2 trips I have made for work back to the U.S. since being hired, I have gotten nearly 120 hours of comp time, or 3 more weeks of time off.
So, within a year of joining the Foreign Service, and roughly a year since moving to Nouakchott, I have accumulated 8 weeks of leave across the various mechanisms. None of these even factors in the federal and local holidays I get each year, which are between 15 to 20 extra days off depending on the country. Once I hit 3 years of service, my leave will increase to 6 hours earned per paycheck, and at a certain point I think folks have more leave than they will ever use. Either way, it is indeed possible to accumulate a lot of leave hours, even if you are the bottom of the totem poll, and it is easy to actually enjoy those hours.
