"In today's world, we need not only the professional diplomats who serve in our foreign services and represent our country to one another. We need the citizen diplomats who realize that there is no escape. We are in this together. We may have profound differences, but I am reminded that as we learn more from science about the human genome, we recognize that we are 99.9 percent the same. As you look at our DNA, you don't see religion or race; you see humanity." Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State. New Delhi, India, 20 July 2009.
Joanne Grady Huskey is an embodiment of Hillary Clinton's message. Be it in Washington DC, China, India, Kenya or Taiwan, Joanne is a bold example of how all of us can truly get involved in the places in which we live and strive to make a difference as unofficial diplomats.
From being inside the US Embassy with her children in Nairobi when it was bombed, to being on the ground in Beijing during the sad events at Tiananmen Square in 1989, to acting in Bollywood, co-founding a relocation company and an international school in India, volunteering for the Chinese Disabled People's Foundation, being stranded in the Kenyan bush and more, Joanne has seemingly done it all. Which is why her book is so interesting...
Expat Women's Interview with Joanne
Expat Women: Joanne, back ensconced in American suburbia since 2008, do you sometimes wonder if everything you have been through has just been a dream?
Joanne: Going back home is often harder than moving to another post. In fact, my husband was offered a posting in Bangladesh just a few months after we moved back to the US, and both my daughter and I jumped up and said, "Let's go!" because we felt Washington might be dull in comparison.
But we are now here in America and the adjustment has taken some time. Our lives were so rich in Taiwan, our previous post, and all of a sudden in just a day all of that vanished. It is hard to make sense out of your life and to hold onto your experiences. Sometimes each posting feels like a complete lifetime distinct in itself.
I think that is why I wrote a book. I wanted to record all that had happened in each place I had lived, so that I could hold onto those detailed memories forever. Also, I wanted to put my life into some sort of whole narrative that was cohesive and made sense to me and my family. And, of course, I wanted to share all of this with other people, so that they would understand me in a more visceral and meaningful way. Writing the book has helped make the experiences concrete. Sharing the stories out loud with others, both in writing and orally, keeps the memories alive.
Expat Women:Flashback to Nairobi. What was it like to be in the US Embassy when it was bombed, with children in tow and knowing that your husband Jim was also somewhere in the same building? Is it possible to ever fully recover from what you saw/experienced that day?
Joanne: Each time I re-tell what happened to us in the bombing of the US Embassy in Nairobi, I am thrust back there and emotions well inside me. There are no words to describe what it feels like to find yourself on the floor in the dark with your children strewn around somewhere in the destroyed basement room. At first I was stunned, it took me a moment to realize what had happened... and then, it hit me that we had been bombed. I scrambled to find my kids and grabbed them to me and then told them we were going to get out of there. They held my hands and we crawled under the cement dust over the broken glass and rubble.
Adrenalin rushing through me, I was determined to find a way out. The mental map of where the halls went and where a door ought to be was all I had to go by. Nothing was recognizable: there were walls down, cement all over, wires hanging, glass on the floor. My children silently followed me. Finally we saw a hole into the garage. We climbed out only to find a wall of fire where our car had been. It was not until then that I realized the extent of what had happened.
My mind flew to worry about my husband, who was on the fourth floor of the destroyed building. But miraculously, just as we rounded the building, he frantically rushed out of the front door and our children ran to him, slipping through the iron fence surrounding the embassy. Once I was squeezed through the fence, we all ran down the street away from the burning building. It was not until we were thrown into a car that whizzed us away, and my husband ran back to help others at the embassy, that we all began to cry.
You never completely recover from an event of this magnitude. The sadness of the trauma and the loss of all the friends who died will remain with me forever. I only hope that the visceral knowledge of what terrorism really means will help me be a catalyst against it and an agent of peace and understanding in the world.
Expat Women: One thing that stood out to me in your memoir was that you, one of the strongest women that I have come across, struggled each and every time that you relocated. Why do you think that relocation and culture shock are always such big challenges?
Joanne: I know, after having made eight major moves, just how challenging and disorienting a move can be. In your new location, you have no nest, no roots, no definition, no friends and no community. This feeling of transience makes you feel sick, uncomfortable, scared and emotionally empty. It takes courage and stamina to take the first steps out of this isolation and begin to build a life for yourself. Every time I did it, I hated the feeling of losing control. It was not until I made myself a home, made some good friends, joined some interesting groups and found some productive work that I began to feel like myself. It is a normal, but daunting, process. They do not call it culture shock for nothing, it is shockingly hard!
One way, that helped me get out of myself, was to look at the culture I was living in and think about what skills and experience I had, that might contribute something, and then go and offer them. That way, my small seeds of contribution left behind growing organizations.
Expat Women: Hats off to you for co-founding a destination services (relocation) company and an international school during your posting in India. What challenges did you face in setting up these two ventures and what lessons did you learn?
Joanne: When you begin something from scratch, it always feels daunting at first with no resources and perhaps no models to replicate. In India, there were no destination services companies when I moved there. Having experienced my own difficulties moving to India, I actually wondered how expatriates from businesses were able to survive without help. Luckily, I invited a friend of mine to be my partner, who was smart, connected, savvy in business, and had the time and interest to begin a business. Working with a local partner made all of the difference in the world. At first we had no clients and had to risk spending money assuming the clients would come. They did, of course come and have continued to for 15 years.
Starting a school is complicated. One of the greatest risks we took was believing that it would succeed and going ahead and hiring American teachers and an American Head Master before we had any students paying tuition. Once we invested in good people and developed a good curriculum, the students came and their families were willing to pay the tuition. Assuring quality, even when we had only a few students, was our key to success. Our reputation grew rapidly. We filled a real need in Madras. Beginning a school allowed foreign business to move to Madras, invest in the country and improve the lives for many in the city. Little did we know that the school would grow from 18 students to more than 800 in ten years.
Expat Women: Flash forward to your time in Washington DC, just before your final posting to Taiwan. You did the unspeakable: as a foreign service officer's wife, you were so opposed to the US foreign policy decision to bomb Iraq that you wrote a full-page article published in the Washington Post, using words like "You are wrong, Mr President". Did you or your husband experience any personal/social/career backlash over such a bold, brave move?
Joanne: When I sent the letter against the invasion of Iraq to the newspaper, I did not know whether it would be published, but I could no longer remain silent. The day the article came out in the Washington Post, I opened the paper and found that it was a full page editorial with a big photo of children in Iraq. I called my husband at the State Department and told him that he might want to open the paper and I hoped it did not cause him any trouble. When he went into his first meeting, which was to plan the contingencies for the follow up after Saddam Hussein was ousted, most of the people in the State Department meeting had read my article. The Undersecretary of State said, "We saw your wife's article, Jim." But that was all. Jim, actually, took it pretty well. He said that I didn't work for the State Department and had the right to my own opinion.
For my part, it was amazing. I received almost 60 phone calls from people I did not even know – all expressing their solidarity with my opposition to the war. Priests, business people, soldiers, an ex Ambassador to Iraq and even a Congressman called me to thank me for writing the article. Several of them said that they felt the same way, but were hesitant to speak out in opposition to the Administration. To this day I feel it was the right thing to do and history has proven me right.
Expat Women: Joanne, congratulations on both a life well-lived and a very well-written and intriguing account of your (unofficially) diplomatic experience.
