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USAID Information:
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This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
PROFILES & PRESPECTIVES
In this section:
Communication Is Key for Employees Coping with
Stress, Distance
Simmons-Benton Adapted Career to Family
Couple Makes Marriage Work Despite Distance
Long Courtship Ends in Cairo
Derrick Kids Face Reverse Culture Shock
Panama Mission Director Leo Garza Remembered
Communication Is Key for Employees Coping with Stress,
Distance
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Martha W. Rees
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Marriage counselor, grief counselor, family counselor, job
counselor, dating counselor—Martha W. Rees wears a lot
of hats as USAID’s social worker.
While the humanitarian and development work that USAID staff
does is often rewarding, it can come with a home and personal
life that has stresses not experienced in typical 9-to-5 jobs.
It is not an easy job, says Rees.
“This is not a career choice; it’s a life choice,”
she says.
Dealing with separate lives is only the beginning for USAID
workers who are assigned to permanent, temporary, or emergency
posts outside the United States.
With that comes decisions about where spouses and partners
will live, where—and how—children will be raised,
and what arrangements are necessary for aging parents or other
fragile relatives. Perhaps the most difficult issue of all
is maintaining relationships over time and distance.
Communication is key, says Rees, who counsels staffers before,
during, and after TDYs. Here are some stories about USAID
staffers who are learning—through patience, creativity,
trial and error, or a combination of these—how to balance
their work and family challenges.
There are also resources available through the State Department’s
Transition Center, including a large menu of courses.
Simmons-Benton Adapted Career to Family
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Anne Simmons-Benton and daughters
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Anne Simmons-Benton works for USAID as a senior trade advisor.
Like other parents—she is married and has three children—she
faces the challenge of balancing career with family life.
Anne and her husband, Jon, started with a plan. He would
serve two tours as a foreign service officer with the State
Department and then they would return to the United States
so she could practice international law. It didn’t work
out quite that way.
Jon was assigned to Romania, and Anne was finishing her
last semester of law school before joining him. An accident
a week after their wedding left her unable to attend the summer
semester, so Anne joined Jon in Romania. Midway through the
tour, she found she was pregnant and returned home to give
birth. Despite having a newborn, Anne finished her law degree
in the United States.
Being married to a foreign service officer has its challenges.
The attitude when they first started was that a spouse was
not supposed to have a career outside the home. Anne remembers
getting mail addressed to “Jon Benton and Dependent Spouse.”
The thinking may have changed, but many of the demands have
not. “Someone has to get the family settled in,”
Anne says, “make sure the kids are happy in their schools.”
Now that her kids are older, Anne has been able to devote
more time to work.
Working for USAID has been demanding. Last year, while working
on the Central American Free Trade Agreement, Anne was required
to travel so much that it would have stretched the bounds
of even a single person. Luckily, her husband was attending
the war college in Washington and could spend more time with
their kids.
What advice would Anne give to men and women? “You
can’t have it all at once,” she says. “You
need to be creative and flexible. Don’t be afraid to
do things your own way.”
Couple Makes Marriage Work Despite Distance
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From left: Sheri-Nouane Johnson, Michael, and Steven
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Sheri-Nouane Johnson calls herself a geographically single
mom. She and 4-year-old son Michael live in Dhaka, where she
is USAID/Bangladesh’s deputy team leader for the Population,
Health, and Nutrition Team. Her husband, Steven, works as
a conservation development consultant in Laos.
People are always asking her, “Isn’t it hard to
live apart from your husband?”
“In fact,” Sheri-Nouane says, “we have never
lived together. Living together seems just as foreign to me
as living apart seems to others. Sometimes I feel like asking:
‘Isn’t it hard to live with your spouse all the
time?’”
Sheri-Nouane met husband while both of them were Peace Corps
volunteers in Thailand. They married in 1999, but before then
had already started their long-distance living arrangements,
she in Atlanta and he in Asia.
“We have worked on this commuting relationship for
several years,” she said, “and have managed to see
each other every six to eight weeks, usually in a central
location where both of us take a long weekend or some time
to spend together. We have found that visiting each other
in our respective work locations is difficult unless the person
can really take time off from work.”
While Steven may spend more time apart from Michael, his
work in Laos—where Sheri-Nouane was born—is creating
a link he hopes will be long lasting. Steven feels that helping
make Laos a better place will help his son, who is half Lao,
articulate his culture and national heritage with pride as
he gets older.
“We both feel blessed that we have work that we love,”
Sheri-Nouane says. “We have prioritized our separate
careers to make a unique contribution in the countries and
for the organizations for which we work.
“I hope that we can set an example for our son and
other families that nontraditional family units are just as
strong and healthy as the ‘traditional’ family units,
and there are many creative choices and decisions families
can make to pursue the work and lifestyle they wish.”
Long Courtship Ends in Cairo
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Charles and Charita Signer at the Sphinx at Giza.
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It took more than 12 years from the time they met for Charles
and Charita Signer to marry. In that time, their relationship
crisscrossed four countries, surmounted piles of red tape,
and abided the start of the second Iraq War.
The couple wed in the summer of 2004 and now lives in Cairo,
where Charles is a contracting officer with USAID.
The two met through a correspondence club in 1991. Charles
was with the Kinshasa mission, but was evacuated along with
20,000 others when soldiers began looting the capital. Charita
had recently left college after her father’s death and
was working in the Philippines.
The two met in person at the end of that year when Charles,
vacationing in Manila, invited Charita to visit him.
Soon after, Charita opted out of accepting a scholarship
to finish her studies in the U.S. and attended a university
in the Philippines, keeping her apart from Charles for a time
longer.
“Only a relative few people are able to maintain relationships
at long distances for long periods of time,” said Charles.
“Charita and I are among them.”
Charles, who had been based in Washington since returning
from Kinshasa, was assigned to USAID/Cairo in 2002. But his
arrival was delayed by the war in Iraq. He got to Cairo in
June 2003 and applied for a fiancée visa for Charita.
That took nearly nine months, during which Charles was sent
back to the United States for retraining as a contract specialist.
“Now that we look back, it does seems a little hard
to believe that it took 12 years from our first acquaintance
until we got married,” Charles said. “About half
that time, Charita was in college and another year or two
we were waiting for her security clearance and visa.
“Fortunately, even though we were a world apart most
of the time, we were in daily communication by email, text
messages, and telephone. We are now very happy to be here
and together.”
Derrick Kids Face Reverse Culture Shock
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From left: Carl Derrick, Michael, Carmen, Anna Christina,
and Carla in Ecuador.
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USAID/Ecuador Acting Mission Director Carl Derrick is preparing
his wife and three children for reverse culture shock. Carl
and his family are heading back to Washington this summer
from Ecuador, where he will be taking a long-term training
assignment at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces.
Carl joined USAID in 1987 as an international development
intern and a contracts officer. He went overseas on his first
assignment to El Salvador, where he met his wife Carmen, a
bank executive there. They married in 1990 and have three
children—Carla, 13, Anna Christina, 10, and Michael,
9.
Switching from contracts to project development in 1992,
Carl’s assignments have taken him to Egypt, Bolivia,
and Ecuador.
“My family’s unconditional support has been an
essential factor in my career,” says Carl. “With
the world changing around us so fast, they have given me a
sense of solid foundation and purpose.” He and his family
have had long-term assignments where “friendships grew
strong and built treasured memories.”
“I feel strongly about having a supportive environment
in the mission and in your family,” he added. “Surround
yourself with good people—both in your family and professional
life—and the sky’s the limit. I feel really lucky
because I’ve been surrounded by good people.”
The move to the United States later this year will mark
the first time the family has lived in this country fulltime.
“The number one thing for [the children] is friendships
and schools and stability,” Carl said. “I’m
told by parents at the Agency it gets even more difficult
as they get older. We’re cognizant of that.”
Carl said his family is thrilled about moving to the United
States. The children, who speak Spanish and English, will
have the opportunity to learn American values and customs.
“I am really talking about how wonderful the United
States is now,” he added. “I really want them to
learn the values of their country. Seeing the U.S. from the
outside has given my family and me a much richer perspective
about what the U.S. really represents to us and the world.”
Panama Mission Director Leo Garza Remembered
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Leo Garza and his wife, Edda, at the Panama Canal.
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Leopoldo Garza, USAID/Panama mission director and a 34-year
federal government veteran, died Feb. 15 in Washington. He
was 60.
He is remembered as a man filled with passion for life,
who always gave a lot of himself to others and invested much
of his life in social development in Latin America.
“When Leo talked about the true meaning of our life’s
work, he always arrived at the same conclusion: when you touch
someone in need that is the most rewarding feeling imaginable,”
said Vincent Cusumano, a retired USAID foreign service officer
who served with Garza for many years. “Those who knew
him well could see then and throughout his career that Leo
was someone who was truly motivated by democratic principles
and a commitment to the objectives of social justice.”
Garza began his career with the Agency in the late 1970s
as a special assistant to the assistant administrator for
the Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). In 1980,
he was sent to Ecuador, where as general development officer
he led the mission’s efforts to develop a vibrant civil
society.
In 1985, during the civil war in El Salvador, Garza was
posted to the San Salvador mission as special project officer.
He later became the mission’s division chief for the
Education and Training Office.
Many schools destroyed by the civil war or by the earthquake
were reconstructed under Garza’s leadership and bear
his name today. The capital’s don Basco library also
carries his name in honor of his work to reconstruct El Salvador
after the 1986 earthquake.
Garza left El Salvador in 1989, going on to several positions
in the LAC regional bureau. He was named deputy mission director
to USAID/Ecuador in 1994. Three years later, he moved to the
same position in USAID/Dominican Republic, where he oversaw
the reconstruction program following Hurricane Georges.
In July 2001, Garza was sworn in as mission director of
USAID/Panama, where he spearheaded the program protecting
the Panama watershed and did much to advance democratic institutions
and administration of justice.
The impact of Garza’s work is recognized in the dozens
of condolence letters sent to his family from social justice
and environmental groups, Panamanian government departments,
and individual officials.
U.S. Ambassador to Panama Linda Watt said Garza was “committed
to making the world a better place” and was “a genuinely
kind and likable person. Everyone respected Leo’s work.
Everyone liked Leo.”
Neal Meriwether, a retired USAID colleague and close friend
of Garza’s said: “Leo is the one who put the word
‘gentle’ in gentleman.”.
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