Foreign Service Books
Married To The Foreign Service: An Oral History of the American Diplomatic Spouse
By Jewell Fenzi with Carl L. Nelson
"Every young person, male or female, who is considering joining the Foreign Service should read this book."
Lawrence. S. Eagleburger, former Secretary of State
"Foreign Service spouses lived in obscurity for decades, unrecognized and unpaid. This is an excellent, long-overdue chronicle of their experiences."
Patricia Schroeder, former Colorado congresswoman.
From Married To The Foreign Service
Chapter 4 - Good Morning Mrs. Jones
He was assigned to Bhopal, India. We arrived there in 1956 with six daughters and no adequate schooling. Fortunately, I was a teacher and a musician. We later had another daughter for a total of seven--Burnetta, Christina, Carol, the twins Estrelita and Anita, Carlotta and Loretta.
Our house in Bhopal was unbelievable, a Roman-style pavilion with Doric columns and marble floors. It had been a palace guest house for the last ruling royal family of the state of Bhopal but was a bit run-down by the time we arrived. It had six bedrooms, six dressing rooms, and six bathrooms around an enclosed courtyard, and a terrace overlooking a huge lake with the lights of Bhopal in the distance. There was no kitchen and no dining room--food had been brought in from a detached central kitchen.
By constructing a cover from packing crates for the tub and toilet, Harold converted one of the bathrooms into a kitchen. A bedroom became a dining room. Another very large bedroom...became a schoolroom. Harold made desks from the shipping crates and he found a blackboard on the local market. The girls were my only pupils, and I taught first through eighth grade with the Calvert system and also used the University of Nebraska high school correspondence course.
We had a regular routine. The five school-age girls said goodbye to "Mama" "left home" at eight every morning and "arrived at school" by walking around a huge roundabout in front of the house. When they entered the "classroom" they said, "Good morning, Mrs. Jones," and sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" or "America" before we began lessons. When school was over in the afternoon, they reversed the process. We had brought a piano, two violins, and a clarinet, and we had an ensemble, with the two younger ones singing along. We had a menagerie of pets: the usual cats and dogs and a rabbit, plus a rhesus monkey, a seven-foot python, and a tiger we later gave to a wildlife group.
When the temperatures were 100 or 120 degrees, we would sleep on the roof. Sometimes on starry nights, just before dawn, I would give lessons on the constellations and lunar eclipses and other celestial phenomena. Other times the monsoon rains would send all of us scurrying downstairs.
During the week Harold was at his official post, a remote agricultural station in Budni, which was 60 bumpy, dusty miles from Bhopal. He came home on weekends, but for the other five days I was everything to the girls--mother, father, teacher, and nurse if necessary. I did this for four years and--after a break from 1960 to 1963 while we were in New Delhi--then again when Harold was transferred to northern Nigeria. By that time Burnetta was at Fisk in Tennessee and Christina had gone to Vassar.
The girls have now attended nine universities and earned a total of twelve degrees--four from Vassar, two from Smith, and one each from Brown, the University of London, Harvard Law School, the Johns Hopkins School of International Studies, George Washington University and the University of Maryland.
Burnetta was married before she graduated from Fisk. Their adjustment to life in the United Stats has not been without problems: discrimination in the work place, for instance, and being taken for foreigners because they didn't have American slang and mannerisms. But we were spared any drug or alcohol problems, and most of our disagreements have been over money management and male companions. With one or two exceptions, the girls are very poor housekeepers because, having had a housekeeper for 21 years in the Foreign Service, that is one area in which I am less than exemplary."
Jewell Fenzi, a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, spent 30 years as a Foreign Service spouse. She is the director of the Foreign Service Spouse Oral History, Inc., in Washington, D.C. Carl L. Nelson, a graduate of the College of William and Mary, is the recipient of numerous writing awards and is the author of Protecting the Past from Natural Disasters. He is president of Nelson & Associates in Washington, D.C.
Interviews for Married To The Foreign Service were recorded and transcribed with a generous grant from the Marpat Foundation, and with contributions from AAFSW members and other foreign affairs agency women and men. Published in 1994, the book was an eight year project to record and preserve the memories of foreign affairs agency spouses from World War 1 to the present.
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