Abstract
I feel uncomfortable when attention is focused on me. Moreover, conventional markers such as birthdays are nothing more than that. Markers. I simply see them as chronological goalposts measuring time passed but not those consequential events that may have happened on only one day or over the course of a number of years. Historical episodes may be time bound, but for those who are directly engaged they may never end.
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Notes
- 1.
Unknown.
- 2.
United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA).
- 3.
Students marvel at my career seeing it as extraordinary which is something I never did. With their own futures in mind they want to know how I joined and what I did. They want to know what it was actually like.
- 4.
Initiated in 2017 by the UNFPA Executive Director, Natalia Kanem of Panama, who was appointed by the UN Secretary-General António Guterres on 3 October 2017. This followed consultations with the Executive Board of UNFPA which is made up of representatives from 36 countries elected on a regional basis—Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean and Western Europe and others.
- 5.
From my experience, these may include access to a US green card, education of children in a privileged setting, a salary package well beyond that which was locally available and a well-endowed pension on retirement.
- 6.
In 2000, the Association of Former International Civil Servants (AAFI-AFICS) published a report: What Happens to the Second Generation? It endeavoured to define the community of international officials in the following manner. We live, generally, outside our own country. We are separated from our extended family and the society we were born into. We often work in a language that is not our own and is different from the language used in our own country. Our social life is with people from different countries, languages, societies, cultures, habits. We often end up marrying someone of a different nationality and culture; sometimes a marriage that would have lasted happily ever after in the home country, founders in alien climes. We may move about during our career and live in different countries. When we retire, we have to make a conscious choice of where to settle. And we might add to this list: We often feel more at home with our colleagues than with our compatriots. Yes, we are all this but aren’t we something more as well? We have been moulded to a way of thinking, we see the problems of an increasingly interdependent world in a different manner, our viewpoint is no longer that of a particular nationality or tribe, we march to the beat of a different drum. Should we consider ourselves as rootless, cut off from the sap that nurtured us? Or should we consider ourselves as people who have accepted the planet as our homeland and discover that we are at home everywhere? In time, we may learn to look at the Earth as Neil Armstrong must have done on 21 July 1969 when he stepped on the Moon and took one giant step for mankind. We would see the oceans and the seas, the lakes and the rivers, the mountains and the glaciers, the deserts, and the forests—but we would not see the frontiers and the boundaries that divide nations and peoples. A career as an international civil servant would seem an ideal way to see global problems in a global context; the concept of an ‘International Community’ would become a living reality.
- 7.
A UN euphemism for aid via the use of technical advisers to a particular country.
- 8.
Better still, I thought, if we located that “shop” within the village and not at some distant location, thereby making it accessible and affordable.
- 9.
AFS Intercultural Programmes (or AFS, originally the American Field Service) is an international youth exchange organisation. It consists of over 50 independent, not-for-profit organisations, each with its own network of volunteers, professionally staffed offices, volunteer board of directors and website. In 2015, 12,578 students travelled abroad on an AFS cultural exchange programmes, between 99 countries. The U.S.-based partner, AFS-USA, sends more than 1,100 U.S. students abroad and places international students with more than 2,300 U.S. families each year. More than 424,000 people have gone abroad with AFS and over 100,000 former AFS students live in the U.S.
- 10.
After serving as Majority Leader, Jim Wright became the 48th Speaker of the House, 1987–1989.
- 11.
Had I known that the President would greet crowds in the car park across the street from the hotel, I would have been even earlier.
- 12.
Carswell Field was a major Strategic Air Command (SAC) base during the Cold War. It was and is still located west of the central business district of Fort Worth. The Fort Worth Division of the General Dynamics Corporation (GD), an American aerospace and defence multinational corporation, was also critically important to the city.
- 13.
While in Washington at an exchange student rally I directed a question to Attorney General Bobby Kennedy. I asked him about Jimmy Hoffa, the notorious Teamster leader, and what were his intentions.
- 14.
The Advisory Committee is an expert Committee of sixteen Members elected by the General Assembly for a period of three years, on the basis of a broad geographical representation. Members serve in a personal capacity and not as representatives of Member States. The Committee holds three sessions a year with total meeting time between nine and ten months per year. The programme of work of the Advisory Committee is determined by the requirements of the General Assembly and other legislative bodies to whom it reports.
- 15.
Later, UN staff from President Bush’s designated “axis of evil” countries, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Cuba and Libya would require special US government permission if they sought to travel beyond the five boroughs of New York.
- 16.
We never did hear from the “famed” UN blue helmets.
- 17.
A year later I had to again evacuate the building when it was presumed we were under threat. The Asia and Pacific Division had arranged a New York training programme among whose participants was a colleague from the Dhaka office in Bangladesh. When he arrived on the morning the training was to begin, his airline failed to locate his luggage. They sought advice from him as to where he would like his suitcase delivered when it arrived on the next flight. Not yet having booked a hotel, he gave the address of the UNFPA office, ℅ the Daily News Building, 220 East 42nd Street between Second and Third. Later that day a van belonging to a courier service pulled up outside the building, parked illegally and the driver ran inside and dumped the suitcase. The people in reception looked at the labelling and then checked with our HQs staff listing but found no one of that name. “Isn’t Muhammad Khan (not his actual name) a Muslim name?” said one receptionist to another. “I don’t know but that suitcase looks suspicious. Evacuate the building and call the bomb-squad!” Once more I instructed staff to walk down the stairs and meet at the designated rallying point. Our Bangladeshi colleague trooped down along with everybody else oblivious that it was his suitcase about to be examined by the bomb-squad. Outside I again instructed everybody to go home, leaving any personal effects at their desk. Fortunately, the suitcase didn’t explode, and it was collected the following day.
- 18.
Where possible I have deliberately avoided naming names. Not surprisingly having spent so many years in the system including being in charge of personnel for 7 years, I know a lot about a lot of people. But I have no wish to air dirty linen, to tittle-tattle, to gossip and besmirch individuals. Besides, it would be only my view and I may be wrong. More to the point this book is about the UN system as a collective of agencies, funds and programmes of which the staffing profile, its characteristics and the milieu in which they work is more important than the individuals who make it up.
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Howie, I. (2021). From Melbourne and Back Again. In: Reflections on a United Nations' Career. Springer Biographies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77063-1_1
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