Who is coming here? Part 1

Okay, so, Steve and I swore that we would get better then posting once a month. . . and then the POTUS storm hit.



We got word in mid-December that the President and the Secretary of State would be coming to our little island for part of their visit to the Middle East. The party would show up on January 12th and stay the night.



What we saw next was pretty amazing - the embassy was whipped up and organized and everyone took on some sort of responsibility (along with their daily jobs they have in the embassy). The people who had experienced a presidential visit warned us of long hours, vacations being re-scheduled and weekends spent working.



The embassy staff spent the first couple weeks of planning in an extremely busy, but relatively quiet state. The teams were planning and working with Washington on locations and events.



Right around New Year's though, the storm really started. Advance people from all of the different agencies started coming in and everyone in the embassy had a group in town that they were working with.



Steve ended up with a bunch of different responsibilities. The first was that he was the Control Officer for the Advance Staff. So basically, he was the point of contact for the White House advance team. This was one of many positions Steve was assigned to. He was also in charge of the gifts and the Control Officer for some of the other people coming in on the 12th.



The embassy had Site Officer for the different locations the president would be who would make sure all of the logistics were taken care of, we had a point of contact for all of the security team's questions, the communication's team's question. There were people in charge of different areas of logistics - transportation, customs and immigration, the hotels, etc.



I ended up working with the person from the State Department office that is in charge of international Presidential travel. I ended up making and updating the spreadsheets for all the hotels and who was in which one. It actually became pretty challenging - mostly because there is no hotel in Bahrain large enough to house the President and the 700+ of his closest friends who would be in town on the 12th, so we had four different hotels we were using.

And here is where the dorky Architectural Engineer comes into play - one of the things we needed to do when assigning rooms to people was see where the rooms were on the floor layout. Of course we don't have CAD (which would have made life easy, because the hotel did have an electronic copy of their drawings) so I ended up making a floor plan out of text boxes so we could layout where people were and type their names in each room. It made life a lot easier and everything was easy to update and check against out master list - I know - I am a dork....


For the two weeks before the visit Steve and I both were logging in 80 hours a week for work. We didn't have a day we weren't working from December 29th until January 17th. It was a little bit nuts.

Stay tuned for the next post about the actual visit.