A Friendly Chat, with Logan Sachon: Chris Andino, Our Man in Libya

I met Chris Andino my first semester at the University of Virginia. He was the managing editor of the weekly humor and news magazine, and I was a first-year staffer. Dino, as they called him, was one of a group of guys on staff who were super smart and incredibly funny and quick in a way that I had never encountered before. They made jokes about the characters on C-SPAN. I was scared of them. My first year was Dino's last, and after UVA he moved on to DC and the Foreign Service. After a two-year stint in Bogota, Columbia, he is currently serving in Tripoli, Libya. We spoke in the late summer; it was late morning in Libya and 2 a.m. in Portland. Attempts to follow-up, get a little background info, some pictures maybe, to try to get him to say something funny about Qadhafi, whatever, were thwarted, because: the Lockerbie bomber was released, there was an African Union summit, it was the 40th anniversary of Qadhafi in power, he had a human rights report deadline, and then there was that whole G20 thing.

THE AWL: One of the articles you wrote in college, you said you could kill a cow and you could drive a bus, so at the very least, you'd always be fed and working. I remember that sometimes and think: I have no skills.

ANDINO: I was a bus driver in college, and I was also sorting trash for recycling. So those were my career experiences. My final major was international relations with a specialty in Latin America. But growing up in Iowa, I never would have thought of the Foreign Service. My professors had been diplomats, and at UVA you also have a lot of kids with parents who were diplomats, because DC is so close and that's where they are. So that's where the idea was put in my head. I took the test [the Foreign Service Exam] while I was still in college, and it took awhile to get hired because you had to go through the clearances and stuff. Actually at the same time that I was applying to the Foreign Service, I was also going through the application process to be a bus driver for DC Metro. Applying to the Foreign Service is a long, drawn out process; but they got back to me before Metro, which says something about DC.

THE AWL: So what exactly does a foreign service officer do?

ANDINO: There are five tracks, but we can all do any of them. We're hired to be generalists. There's a political track, you do the traditional representational things, talk about bilateral relationships, the other component is that you're like a reporter, you talk to people, figure out what's going on and then you write about it. So having some journalistic experience is really helpful. Another track is economic, which is like political but with more emphasis on economic policy. Consulate is visas and passports. Management, one of the hardest jobs, they make sure the embassies are up and running, and then there's public diplomacy, which does a lot things to make us look good, like coordinating scholarships for people to come study in the US. I could do any one of those jobs, and I could do them anywhere in the world. But my track is political, though I did two years of consulate in Columbia, and that was totally fascinating.

THE AWL: But that might change?

ANDINO: Every two years you get a new job. For me, slightly ADD, this is great. I can choose a new country and a new function. I'm picking my next assignment now. You have input on where you go. It's like a normal job hunt. They have a list of available positions and you apply. It's kind of like fraternity bid week or something, not that I'd know much about that, but it's similar: you try them on, they try you on, and you see if it's a good fit. There are more jobs than there are people so you'll always find something, but we'll always be understaffed some place.

THE AWL: So you got in right after school.

ANDINO: One of the weirdest things for me being a diplomat is that it's a grown up job. I'm 29 years old, I've been doing this for 5 years, I'm getting to the mid level. In my next job I might be in charge of other diplomats. I've been married for 5 years. We might have kids. All these things are atypical for people our age. I lucked out and found out what I wanted to do really early. But I still act like I did in college. I have fun. We have people over and play Rock Band: a quintessentially 29-year-old thing to do. We were in Bogota before, and we would have parties all the time, these great parties with Senators and college kids and everyone. One end of the house would be a kid doing a keg stand and at the other end you're talking to a Senator. It was incredible, and then you go back to the US and no, that doesn't work anymore.

THE AWL: You speak Arabic.

ANDINO: For a year my only job assignment was to study Arabic, so I went to class 6 hours a day, 5 days a week, and that only got me to half the level that I would need. By comparison the same level of Spanish takes 6 months. And that's just to learn Koranic Arabic, and then you need the dialects, which are different in each country.

THE AWL: Do you hang out with Libyans at all?

ANDINO: We're just beginning our relationship with Libya. Libyans are very fascinating people and ordinary Libyans are really interested in what's going on with the US. And one of the best ways to get a feel for the people is to ride in a taxi. We spend so much of our time talking to the elite, it's really important to get out there with regular people, and here in Libya, you're often the first American they've ever met. And they can't believe it! "French?" "No, Amercican." "America! I love America!" They love America! "What do you love about America?" "The movies." They love gangster movies and kung fu movies and they associate that with the US. Well, okay, we'll take it.

THE AWL: So what if one of these cab drivers wants to talk politics. Is it the party line all the time?

ANDINO: There's not a line. One of the things we are hired for is our judgment; that's the primary thing we are hired for. What they're looking for is quick thinking, being able to distill information and pass things along at your discretion. I am an employee of the executive branch. So you don't swear an oath to the administration, you swear an oath to the Constitution. I think that it's really important that we have a skilled foreign service that is nonpolitical so that there is a core group of people that stays there from administration to administration. I give a lot of credit to the people who have been doing this for several administrations. The policies change, but the main goal stays the same.

You also learn to pick your battles. If you take a stand on every issue that you disagree with, it loses its meaning and power. You just have to trust that it's your job to implement policy, that the people who are making the decisions know a heck of a lot more than I do. If everyone who disagreed with the war in Iraq had quit, we would be so much worse off.

THE AWL: So we met on the staff at the alternative paper at UVA. I'd say it was a pretty "damn the man" culture. And now you, arguably, are the man, or at least you're working for him.

ANDINO: If I'm the man, there should be much better benefits. No, I'm not the man. There are people like that, damn the man people, in government, too. It turns out I'm pretty patriotic. And I didn't know that until I started doing this job. I don't really want to join the Army, I still have those sentiments. Not that I could, because I am fat and lazy. But I do have enormous respect for these guys. They are all doing what they think is the best for the country.

I think there is a more of a ragamuffin sense of how I approach US relations abroad. So what I do to engage people is have them over for drinks at my house. We play darts. We play Rock Band. Which is not a traditional strategy.

At the end of our day our job is to do this to make people's lives better in America. If that's your mission statement, it becomes really easy to do your job. Yeah, I put on a suit everyday and I brief four star generals and I talk to heads of state and that's also really cool—I don't stop being a tourist, I just met Qadafi, fantastic. People are going to be buying me drinks for the rest of my life because I have so many cool stories to tell. There was just a meeting of the AU here, and I looked around the room and it was like, damn, like a third of the heads of state in the world are here, in this room. I don't know that that will ever get old.

THE AWL: You're married. Is your wife with you in Libya?

ANDINO: Yes, she is here. The state department is good and getting better about employment opportunities for family members, and she works at the embassy. They just instituted new rules for MOH—Members of Household, because if it doesn't have a TAL—Three Letter Acryonym—it doesn't exist. The new rules allow better benefits for non-married officers and their partners. Everything has to go through Congress, and it takes awhile, but they are doing the right things.

THE AWL: How many of you are out there in Libya?

ANDINO: There's like 20 to 30 diplomats here?

THE AWL: And is that basically your social circle?

ANDINO: We have friends in the embassy and outside the embassy as well. The expat community is two groups: diplomats and people who are here to start commercial opportunities, mostly stuff with oil. We hang out with a really international group, which has been awesome for traveling. By the time I'm out of the service we'll have friends in every country. We got to spend time at a friend's house in Costa Rica, we were just with friends in London.

THE AWL: One of my favorite things to do when I'm traveling is check out the grocery stores. What are they like in Libya?

ANDINO: There is an entire aisle of canned tuna. Floor to ceiling canned tuna. It's a city of 2 million people, and there's only one or two things we'd consider a supermarket. Everything is imported, but we do have amazing dates. There's a separate green grocer, a separate butcher, sometimes there's a separate dairy place. Bakeries here are abundant and cheap; bread is subsidized. Gas is also cheap, 65 cents a gallon, subsidized. It's a cash-only society, there are few places that accept credit cards and very few banks, and then on top of that the highest denomination bill they have is like the equivalent of US $17. We recently booked tickets to London and I had to go to the travel agent's office to get the tickets and everyone is buying their tickets with cash. It's like a bank robber film, just mountains of cash.

THE AWL: What about booze?

ANDINO: There is booze on the black market, but prices are so astronomical that you don't participate in it. A ten dollar bottle of Absolut Vodka goes for $130 here. You find ways to get by. There isn't pork here, and there's not any good cheese. When we get out of town we are gluttons for bacon and beer. We were just in London and had about a hundred dollars worth of cheese with us in the hotel room. I think the housekeepers thought we were nuts. Next week is Ramadan and there will be no food. Nothing will be open during the day. Everyone becomes nocturnal, except for diplomats. We still work normal hours and bring our lunches because nothing is open. But we get to live in this amazing country, so: wah.

THE AWL: Had you traveled in the Muslim world before?

ANDINO: Coming to Libya was my first exposure to the Middle East, and it was one of my first choices. It's a fairly new embassy, so it's exciting to be here in the beginning of the relationship. Since being here I've taken short trips to Egypt. It's a very cool country, Egyptians are very nice, very keen on lots of tourism. The pyramids are one of the few things I've seen where pictures just really don't even come close. I've briefly been to Tunisia, to a synagogue that Al Qaeda bombed in 2002. Got to drive in the southern mountains, go off the map, speak Arabic, barter for pottery. We get to these really neat things just on our weekends. We want to go to Turkey. Dubai. One of the things I would love to do is the Haaj, just from cultural standpoint, but there isn't really a way to do that without being totally culturally insensitive.

THE AWL: You said you got to more or less pick your assignments. But what about Iraq? Could you be made to go there?

ANDINO: There's always the outside chance that you could be made to go anywhere. But so far all the Iraq diplomats have been volunteers. I have friends in Afghanistan who have been shot at, I have friends who have been kidnapped, but gotten away. There are diplomats that have died in Iraq. We aren't in the line of fire like the military, but it's still Iraq. It's gotten better apparently. But you have a fairly decent salary, you don't get rich in the foreign service for sure, but if you've served in the Middle East, there's a benefit package for what is a difficult year, and then you get a leg up on choosing your next assignment. It's unlikely that I'll go to Iraq next year. I have lots of friends that have done it, and I want to feel like I should be doing it, but you want to make sure your motivations are right, that you're doing it for the right reasons.

As cheesy as it sounds, it's really a humbling experience to be in the foreign service. You walk in the first day—and basically every day after that—and you're like, "I'm the dumbest person in this entire room." I had very little international experience before joining. My class had a PhD who spoke seven languages; I barely spoke Spanish. There was someone who had lived abroad for 30 years; I had been out of the country a week and half. That's a hard thing, to check your ego. To admit that yeah, I am the dumbest person in this room.

When I was doing visa work in Columbia, I was making hundreds of decisions everyday about who would get to come to the US on tourist visas, and it was an honor, but also very humbling, very hard. Over 99% of the people that applied really just want to come to see their family, or go on vacation, but there are also people who want to come to work, and then of course there are also terrorists and drug traffickers coming out of Columbia, and I have to use my judgment and training to make sure the right people get in and stay out.

THE AWL: How do you keep up with what's going on in America?

ANDINO: We are required to spend a month in the States every two years for that very reason, so that we don't get so distanced from the place and the culture we're representing. While on assignment I get Netflix. It's slow, but once a month I get my Netflix movies. I'm about four years behind pop culture in the US.

THE AWL: What about blogzzzzzzz?

ANDINO: I love music, so I read a lot of music blogs, I'm on Take Away Shows and Daytrotter and Pitchfork—indie rock stuff; I don't know anything about Beyonce. I don't want to tell you how much money I spend on iTunes. We get a certain amount of bandwidth a month, and I pretty much spend all of mine downloading episodes of Lost.

I read five or six international newspapers a day in the course of my job, and I do that through Google Reader. The "J" key on my keyboard is worn out from scrolling through headlines. Having lived in Washington for so long I'm a Washington Post junkie, not so much the New York Times. I do Google News Alerts for Libya and Columbia, since I have friends there still.

Personal blogs I'm less into. I mean, don't get me wrong, I had a blog in 2002 that I had for awhile, and now I run a small blog that has a really tiny readership of foreign service people, it's just like, you can get this benefit and that benefit. I think part of it is that it's an echo chamber now, everyone commenting on the same things. There are some blogs about the Middle East I read, FT.com has some foreign policy blogs that I read, Mark Lynch used to blog as Abu Aardvark and now he's over at Foreign Policy. I don't always agree with them and sometimes we have different perspectives, but it's good to get that viewpoint, so I read that. I read Geekery; I read Lifehacker before it started being about keep a clean desk and organizing your folders. DCist I still read to keep track of what's going on in DC.

THE AWL: And social networking sites?

ANDINO: I had a Twitter account for like three years but right now there just isn't much that I want to share with absolutely everybody. Like if my wife got pregnant, no, I would not put that on Twitter. I do use Facebook. UVA was one of the first schools that got it, and you put your profile together when you were 22 and in college and everyone else who was on it was also in college, and they already knew everything about you, so it was fine. They knew about the picture of you passed out drunk on the couch because they were the ones that took it! For the longest time my profile picture was from the Dec, a staged photo of me streaking the Lawn, high-fiving Ray. It was literally being caught with your pants down when the site was opened to the world.

But it's good for the Foreign Service, it's good for diplomacy. Everyone is on it. I have groups: these people are my friends and they know it all, they can see it all, these people are work people and can see a little less, they might be scandalized that I list the New Pornographers as a favorite band, but I can explain the band name to them, that's cool, and then this group, I don't even want to have that conversation.

I'm at a point in my life when I only talk to my very best friends like once every six months, so that's what Facebook is good for. It is how I keep in touch with people, because I don't have time to really keep in touch with everyone.

One of the things I'm excited to be a part of is revamping the websites. Why can't I Google the IRS website? Why can't I just tag something? There are things to us that just make sense, because we've grown up with it, and I think we're going to change the way things are run. The youngest members of Congress are our age. When McCain was here his communications director was my age and his staffers were my age. And it's like, yeah, when we take things over, when it's our turn, it's going to be okay, it's going to be good.

But you do miss things. I know that "Yes We Can" means a lot to so many people, but I wasn't there, I missed that moment. The BBC doesn't tell me how it feels to be in New York on election night. The American internet is a collection of media, but with the bandwith here, we miss out on some things. Americans have a shared experience and I think we forget that. I go home and people are talking about an SNL sketch, and I don't know what they're talking about. Like what's cool right now? What are people talking about? I don't even know.

THE AWL: Oh, I don't know that you're missing much. The third season of Mad Men just started. Teenage girls like vampires. That might be it.

ANDINO: I've seen the first episode of Mad Men. It just seemed sort of a glorification of misogyny, but I'm probably missing something. But you make certain sacrifices to do this job. I'm glad that I made those sacrifices.

Previously: Molly McAleer on Blogging, Auditioning, Videoing, Making It and Networking In Los Angeles

Logan Sachon is a writer in Portland (Oregon).