This weekend marked the departure of my beautiful wife Angeli as she heads back to Texas to resume occupancy of our house and resume work in her field of expertise. Like me, a nurse practitioner by trade, Angeli jumped on board the Foreign Service adventure knowing it would likely mean sporadic work in the medical field. Her flexibility and commitment to the adventure has been a blessing. Spousal employment or lack thereof has ended many a foreign service member career, so her resiliency early on in this career pivot while serving in a pretty austere country has been a testament to her endurance.

During our tour in Mauritania, she had to endure 6 months of unemployment while awaiting a security clearance, and then when she did start working, she was employed with our general services department, in no way related to the medical field. Fortunately, she got to do some volunteer work with an NGO here in Mauritania to keep her medical skills current, but nowhere near the same level she was getting back in the U.S. To her credit, she is amazing at whatever she does. She had to run the entire GSO section for months at a time during the last year (usually a 3-4 person job managing 100+ local employees), and she was heavily awarded for her performance. I’m pretty sure she has received more awards for her work than I have. Angeli doesn’t half ass anything she does, and it was obvious.

As a silver lining, my tour in Rangoon created a nice opportunity for her to continue to practice in the medical field during my time away. Once we knew I would be doing a solo tour, she started looking for work back in Texas, and when her previous boss caught wind of her return, called her up and asked her to come back. The only real downside was he asked if she could start earlier than the end of our tour, but with our house sitting empty the last few months, we decided it would be worthwhile to have boots on the ground to get all the ducks in a row for our kids return (summer school programs, daycare, medical appointments, etc).

She will return to Nouakchott to help us all PCS, but I can’t say enough nice things about my wife and how much she means to our family. The next 2.5 months are going to be difficult for us all, but ultimately, a worthwhile decision for some temporary career stability in her actual field. Counting down the days until we can be together again. -Nick