Sometimes our group of six friends - five of whom were born overseas - hits on a topic to talk about over tea. This one was my suggestion: incidents that took us by surprise as we moved into other cultures. What I will mention are three episodes from Caracas, our very first post:
The question was posed casually to my mother by a woman not quite retirement age on Cape Cod, where Mom and Dad had retired to in the 1980s: "What did you do while you were overseas?" Here is her answer, which she wrote out instead of saying, leaving the record for me to discover some 40 years later....
July 3, Hotel Potomac This is our first report from Venezuela. We are set up in an unpretentious hotel called Hotel Potomac, accent on the first syllable. Looking out at the afternoon sunshine from our hotel rooms we can see why Caracas is called beautiful. The city is situated in a high valley and all…
on Venezuelan Independence Day, she set down in another letter about how the American Independence Day seemed to be done in Caracas. She was an outsider, sharing her observations with perhaps more enthusiasm than she could yet feel.
Behavior matters,especially when you're in a Foreign Service family in the Italy of the 1960s.
Nonetheless, Bologna it was to be, and down the Autostrada from Milan we went in our little pale-blue Fiat 1100, “la millecento.” For housing, Mom and Dad opted for the downstairs floor of a hillside house on Via Putti where it was reported the Nazis had their regional headquarters during the War
At 2AM July 3, 1955, my parents and I, a 8 month-old, arrived at the seaside airport down the mountains from Caracas. It had been a marathon: driving up to NYC from DC, where they'd had two months of orientation training, leaving the car at loading docks, and taking our 10 pieces of luggage…
These are the words of my father, Robert C. Amerson, as captured in his 1988 interview about his career with the United States Information Agency with Allen Hansen, and in Dad's book, When Democracy Triumphed Over Dictatorship, American University Press, 1995. I came out of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1950 with a…
He is exactly the type of diplomat any American would want representing their interests abroad, and he was sought after within the State Department for increasingly difficult and challenging assignments because he's strategic, smart, savvy, curious, loyal and non-partisan…” (CNN, June 6, 2017) That description could have applied to my father, Robert C. Amerson, who…
[Dear Mom: As Mother’s Day Month 2017 fades away, I want to thank you for all you gave to Susie and me, and to Dad. Here’s how our family’s overseas story began. I know how you ached to rejoin Dad in your final years, just as I know you are together again, on to…