Trading the Train for a Yam Boat 4 comments

By Laura Bramon Good

After my old boss jumped ship at the end of the Bush Administration, her emptied office framed one of the wide northern windows of our building in the Forgotten Quadrant. I used to wander into her old office in the afternoons, my eyes on that wide window, watching the scene shift in perspective from the hulking, Hopper-esque wall of the abutting building, to its grey profile against the sky, to a hazy cityscape crowned with the faint steeples of the National Cathedral.

I usually made this walk in the crosswinds of the afternoon, having pulled myself out of a spreadsheet or a squabble with a belligerent HR help-desk representative, my brain fried as much from tedious work as from the cube farm’s cacophony of random conversations.

On one side, a Child Protection Specialist fought with a sheriff about transporting a trafficked child to Miami; on the other, a colleague made extracurricular courtesy calls on behalf of the Daughters of the American Revolution. And in the hallway, a senior bureaucrat best known for incessant fine art day-trading erupted in obscenities at the stalled color printer, while in the cube across the way, his rival shouted down a crackling international phone connection to hundreds of Iraqi asylum applicants who, I kid you not, got the man’s name and telephone number from homemade immigration posters plastered all around the Green Zone.

When I wandered toward the wide, kaleidoscopic scene of that empty office window, I was dreaming of leaving the Forgotten Quadrant.

Of course, everyone in Washington, DC, is looking for another job. If you’re under thirty and happy with your lot, either you’ve landed a choice political appointment or you’ve settled into data-entry and secretary spread. Especially at the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a beleaguered mid-point between the glories of the U.S. State Department and the perpetual headache of state-level refugee services, wanderlust is nothing new. When young people arrive, they stay just long enough to leap to an international organization, where they can gaze freely out at the wide world.

I stayed at ORR for three years. After several failed attempts to flee, I hunkered down and did my job. I got to know my colleagues: among them, the aforementioned fine art day-trader, who wore a blue-hooded sweatshirt and called everyone “Boo,” and two older Ethiopian men, both former refugees, who went for noonday strolls around the National Mall. From the latter, I learned to keep a sense of humor. From the former, I learned to do my job faithfully, discontent notwithstanding.

I assumed I would stay at ORR until my husband Ben finished medical school. But in October, we had the chance for simultaneous short-term employment in the same city in rural Ghana—the kind of opportunity whose peculiarity marks it less as happenstance and more as a blessing. It was right to leave, so two weeks later, I did.

Now I’ve finally jumped ship, joining the young, creative brain drain plaguing the world’s government bureaucracies. I’ve traded the train for the yam boat and the power suit for cotton dresses that I wash in a tub at night. It ought to be a DC dream, and in some ways, it is.

But it is also hot and lonely and hard to sleep for the humidity in small, stagnant rooms. And it, too, is databases and reports, protocols and controlled correspondence.

I am looking back now and seeing the dignity of those days in the Forgotten Quadrant, especially the afternoons when I pressed through and did my work and didn’t flee for the Smithsonian galleries or Facebook. I am remembering what all the sages say about time and impatience, and I am thinking of Thomas Merton’s “deep wound” that “had to be stanched”—that wound of want for love that no work can heal.

I am wondering if I am old enough or tired enough to finally learn this lesson.