In an International Emergency, Who Ya Gonna Call?

Alan Campbell (left), US Consular Agent of Seville, and his husband, Juan.

​“You’re the first Americans I’ve ever met,” a Spanish friend confided one night at my dinner table. I was so gobsmacked almost dropped the bowl of cranberry sauce I was handing her.
 
The occasion was a Thanksgiving meal Rich and I had prepared for the members of my Seville art class. I’d learned my new amigos were fascinated with the exotic ritual feast so frequently featured in American movies and thrilled to experience it for themselves.
 
The Spanish don’t tend to be adventuresome eaters, and this was years ago, before the foodie craze brought international cuisine to their attention, if not their dinner plates. But I knew everyone at my table had eaten turkey (although never in whole bird form), a stuffing-like cubed-bread dish called migas, and pureed potatoes. I figured they’d be fine.

In Seville's butcher shops, whole turkeys are less common than game birds and rabbits fresh from the country.

My amigos could barely swallow a bite; it was just too strange. In vain I pointed out the familiar ingredients; they nibbled, nodded, smiled politely, and pushed the food around on their plates.
 
But they loved the cranberry sauce. So I just kept refilling their wine glasses and passing around the cranberry sauce and baskets of local bread, and everyone had an uproarious time. No doubt they have been telling the story for years, just as I still describe eating pig brains at a party in საქართველო (the Republic of Georgia) back in the nineties.
 
Many Georgians at that long-ago party had never met an American, and I shouldn’t have been surprised that in the days before Seville was overrun by tourists some of my Spanish amigos hadn’t either. Most of their knowledge about America was gleaned from TV shows like Dallas and Dynasty, and they seemed a trifle disconcerted to find Rich and I were not ruthless, gun-toting, adulterous billionaires tortured by dark secrets and family scandals. (I know, right? Suddenly I feel so boring.)
 
Whenever we’re the first Americans someone encounters, Rich and I feel honor-bound to provide a more positive image of our national character and to serve as ambassadors of goodwill.

We do our best to serve as ambassadors of goodwill. Or at least project a more wholesome image than the families on Dynasty and Dallas.

We are strictly amateurs, of course, and I’ve developed deep respect for those who represent our nation on a professional basis — like our friend Alan Campbell, America’s official consular agent here in Seville. This week, Rich and I met up with Alan in the café La Gata en Bicicleta (Cat on a Bicycle), and as he sipped what’s arguably the best hot chocolate in Seville, I asked him how he came to live abroad.
 
“I was born in Atlanta, Georgia,” Alan said, “and grew up in Brentwood, Tennessee. In high school, you had to take a foreign language, so I took Spanish. I was working at a restaurant at the time, and it was the first time in my young life that I realized you could use something from school outside of school. I was able to talk to the folks that I was working with.”

Brentwood, Tennessee is a quiet suburb of Nashville. Photo: City of Brentwood

​Alan joined the US Army in 2002 and served as logistics officer on a NATO mission embedded with the Afghan National Army from 2008 to 2009. Afterwards he went to college on an ROTC scholarship and eventually earned a BA, two MA degrees, and later, in Spain, a PhD — all in subjects such as Spanish, linguistics, and international communication.
 
Nothing prepared him for the quirky dialect spoken here in Andalucía.
 
Moving to Seville in 2010 for a job as a language assistant in a public school, Alan struggled to understand speech riddled with missing syllables. To locals, for instance, the Andalucían dialect is Andalú. It’s as if everyone’s in such a rush to reach the punchline they can’t be bothered to enunciate every syllable along the way. The attitude is, “Hey, do I really have to spell it out for you?”

Standard Spanish classes are essential for the basics, but many find online courses in Andalú to be really helpful as well. This is Rich's favorite.

​“The language was hard,” Alan recalled, laughing. “I remember having this moment where I'm like, Okay, I have a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in this language, and I don't think I can communicate with these people. This is a lot of wasted years of education. And then it was a challenge, it was fun... You have these wins where you finally figure something out, you can communicate something, and that feels like the success of the week. It is thrilling. And I think it's healthy, good for my mental agility.”

By now he's so fluent friends have nicknamed him Alandalú.
 
Alan's next job was in a language academy, where he met his husband. Juan grew up in a suburb of Seville then studied in the US and UK; both men are fully bilingual and are raising their adopted son to be equally comfortable in both languages.
 
Until 2019, Alan was still in the Army reserves, serving in Madrid a few days a month. There he got to know people in the US Embassy and heard about a job opening for Seville’s consular agent. “So I applied for it and got hired.”

​​If you’re a little hazy on the ranking, it goes ambassador (one per country, living in the capital, interacting at highest diplomatic level), consul-general, consuls, vice-consuls, and consular agents; this last is usually a part-time job.

“So what do you actually do?” I asked.
 
“Routine services include passports, reports of birth, reports of death, anything related to citizenship. Everything else is special services: prison visits, anything that might involve a victim of crime or someone in distress abroad; we get international parental child abduction cases.”
 
He explained US law requires him to visit Americans in the Spanish penitentiary system at regular intervals. The jails here don’t provide uniforms, so Alan brings US prisoners clothes, and also books in English, eyeglasses, toothbrushes, and the luxuries of seeing a friendly face and speaking their own language.

Prison would be bad enough. Prison without books and reading glasses? Nightmare!

​“A lot of stuff too, comes from the States,” Alan said. “People reach out to our emergency line in Washington and eventually it gets to us: ‘Hey, my son's studying abroad. I haven't heard from him in two weeks.’ Or, ‘Hey, my sister's traveling there, and she lost all her stuff.’”
 
That’s when it truly hit me how tremendously lucky we are, as Americans living in Seville, that Alan is here to help us. So much of his job isn’t particularly glamorous or newsworthy, but it’s done with kindness and meticulous care. Because it all matters. Bringing mystery novels and reading glasses to a prisoner. Reassuring a mother that her son is alive and well, if a bit hungover. Making sure a child’s birth is registered properly, so she has the chance to become an American citizen, even an American president if she chooses.
 
This is what it means to be an ambassador of goodwill. “Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people,” said President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who steered the US through WWII. “A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.” Performing small acts of service and compassion, even in the darkest times — especially in the darkest times — has a ripple effect, touching others, reminding us that we are not alone and that we all matter.

My spiritual teacher Thich Nhat Hanh viewed dish washing as a Zen exercise and an act of love. Just look at all the love in my kitchen last Thanksgiving!

​​THE AMIGOS PROJECT
This post is part of my ongoing exploration of how living and traveling abroad can enrich our lives and help us find fellowship, avoiding the  isolation that's become a global epidemic.
See all my Amigos Project posts here.

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