Pamela White

• Pamela White Interview
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Transcription of Pamela White for the show Beyond Maine Borders: Haiti & Africa #255

Lisa Belisle:	Today I have in the studio with me Pamela White, who served as the United States Ambassador to Haiti from August 2012 until September 2015. Prior to that, she was the US Ambassador to Gambia. She also was the head of multi-million dollar aid programs in Mali, Tanzania, and Liberia. Originally from Auburn, she now lives in Orrs Island with her husband Steve and I hear that you also have two lovely grown sons who live in the Washington, DC, area. Steve also has two children. You guys have been all over the place and you’ve been raising children in the midst of it all.
Pamela White:	That’s right, we have.
Lisa Belisle:	So congratulations and thanks for coming back to Maine and also for coming in and talking to me.
Pamela White:	It’s a pleasure, great.
Lisa Belisle:	I’m interested in hearing more about why a woman from Auburn, born in Lewiston, ended up doing things all over the world. Some people just kind of hang in there and never really leave their place of origin but that wasn’t your path.
Pamela White:	Nope. I made up my mind, basically what I was going to do with my life when I was 18. I was a senior at Edward Little High School and my cousin Jim had come home from the Vietnam War almost dead. There was all kinds of things coming out of him and he was my favorite, favorite cousin, and I was just devastated.
	As luck would have it, circumstances would have it, that very same week, a team, which I think the first and the last team ever, from Peace Corps, Washington, DC, came to my high school. They had these slides about how you could help people in Africa and how you could make a difference in the world. Back then, there were two ways of getting out in the world. One was the military and one was this thing, Peace Corps, which was pretty new back then. That was 1967. I went home and I said to my dad, who’s a Marine, “Dad, I’m going to join the Peace Corps.” He said, “Absolutely not.” I said, “I’m going to go to Africa.” He said, “Absolutely not.” I said, “I’m going to do it.” Four and a half years later, I was in Africa. I never changed my mind. I knew that was what I wanted to do.
Lisa Belisle:	Why? What was that? What was the draw for you?
Pamela White:	It just was a different way for engaging in the world and I kind of knew I wanted to engage in the world. I saw these pictures up on this giant screen at my gym. I’ve gone back to that same gym and talked to students about trying to engage in the world also. It was so spooky to be in this place where I had made a life decision. And fun. It was interesting because I started my career as a Peace Corps volunteer and I ended my career as a US Ambassador, which is very unusual, to go from one end to the other. I had made my mind up when I was very young.
Lisa Belisle:	I believe that your father was in the audience watching you give your speech at the University of Maine 2016 Commencement in Orono.
Pamela White:	He certainly was. He was in the audience. Steve was in the audience. One of my sons from Washington, DC, was in the audience. My best friend, Sydney Watson, was in the audience. My mother, Sandy Peters, was in the audience. My mother and sorority sister from Alpha Phi, University of Maine. Very close, long time friends were there. It was so much fun to have them there because they had not been with me my whole career, but they had followed my whole career. To turn around and be able to wave to my 95-year-old dad was really special. He told me later that he didn’t really know that he was crying but there were tears coming down his cheeks unexplainably through the whole thing . It was a matter of just pride and interest and seeing his daughter up there and giving a speech that got a standing ovation, which was very unusual. They told me it was the first time in 25 years that they had seen a standing ovation. To have him there was very special.
Lisa Belisle:	Why did he doubt that you would make it in the Peace Corps? Or why would he say to you, “Don’t do it”?
Pamela White:	Oh, my God, back then, going to Africa was like going to Mars or something. Anything anybody knew about Africa was what they read in the National Geographic, which was not exactly comforting. Kind of wild-looking people or barely dressed. Animals roaming around. Africa was not the Africa that I’ve grown to know and love. It was some kind of freaky, exotic, strange, scary place. So when I went home and said, “I want to go to Africa,” it was like, “Absolutely not. You go to the University of Maine, you have babies. That’s what women do around here.” Like I said, no one that I knew in University of Maine had ever even heard really of Peace Corps and certainly no one was joining Peace Corps. They’d call me the Ape Lady and went “whoo whoo whoo whoo” and strange sounds all the time. I was just convinced I was going to do it.
	I ended up in this village. It was so idealistic of me. I was going to save the world. Then it came down to where “maybe I could just save Africa” and then “maybe I could just save the region” and then “qell, maybe just Cameroon,” which is a country I went to, and then “well, maybe I could just save my village.” Interestingly enough, really, my village saved me in many ways. They taught me lifelong lessons as I mentioned in my speech at the University of Maine. They taught me this lesson that poverty is not about money. Poverty is much more something of the soul or lack of friends and lack of family and lack of culture and lack of history. When you’re rich in those things, and you are in fact rich, so you don’t have to worry about the fact that person sitting across from you is not a multi-millionaire, is not making tons of money. That person, especially the elders in my village, they were so rich in so many important ways. It’s a lesson I’ve carried with me forever.
	It was a village. No running water, no electricity, very few vegetables, no red meat, no white people, no one speaking English. I looked around when I first got there, scared to death, like, “Ahhh, what am I going to do here?” I mean, there were no white people and I grew up in Maine. There were no black people in Maine. Yet, these people took me in and loved me and taught me, as I said, life lessons. It just changed my life.
Lisa Belisle:	It’s interesting to me that you are a young, white woman from Maine chose to go to Africa, was chosen to become the ambassador to Gambia. You were also Mission Director of US AIB in Liberia. You were also the Mission Director of US AIB in Tanzania. This must have taken some like- Well, I can’t use an impolite term.
Pamela White:	Yes! (laughs)
Lisa Belisle:	It must have taken some guts.
Pamela White:	It did take some blank.
Lisa Belisle:	Let’s say guts- To be willing to go into those situations.
Pamela White:	Yeah, it did, actually. At the time of it, I didn’t think about it so much. I just did it. Liberia: tough, tough place, just coming out of a violent 14-year civil war where people did horrible things to each other. It was a country led by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who was a Nobel Peace Prize winner, a fabulous woman. As fabulous as she was, it was a country still in turmoil. Very difficult to make progress in a country where at least 70 percent of the population hadn’t recovered from the war. They had blanks on their faces. In many ways, Liberia was my toughest country and a real challenge.
	One of my favorite stories about Liberia was I had gone from Liberia, much to the disappointment of President Sirleaf, to be ambassador in Gambia. When I was in Gambia, I got a phone call from Secretary Clinton asking me to be ambassador to Haiti. Just after that, Secretary Clinton was in Liberia with President Sirleaf again. President Sirleaf said, “Bring Pam back here, please bring her back here as ambassador.” They call me in Gambia and say, “Okay, you’ve got a choice. You can go to Haiti or you can come back to Liberia because President Sirleaf so wants you to come back.” I so loved her and I really thought about it, but I said, “No, I’m so sorry.” I’ve seen her since and she said, “You turned me down.”
	I decided to go to Haiti for a couple of reasons, but the major reason was that I had been there before. I’d started my foreign service career in many ways in Haiti. I had joined the foreign service in Haiti in the 80s. To have that as my first foreign service post and have it my last. As a junior, junior nothing officer in the 80s ambassador, I used to take my kids to the ambassador’s residence – in the 80s when they were babies, little tiny thing – and say, “You keep your little jackets on and you make sure that you don’t go in any room you’re not supposed to go in and you make sure this and you make sure that. You behave.” Then to bring them back for cocktails on the terrace 30 years later. It was a great experience.
Lisa Belisle:	Is it unusual to be raising children as you’re working with the foreign service or being an ambassador?
Pamela White:	No, my husband Steve was raised as a foreign service brat, as we sometimes call them, child. Lived all over Africa when he was growing up also. The foreign service set’s very, very common. My children, by the time I had gotten into very difficult roles that were extraordinary time-consuming, were already in college. I don’t think you could be really an effective either Mission Director or certainly ambassador- Because as ambassador, I was not in Gambia, which was a much less taxing job. In Haiti, I was working 16, 17, 18 hours a day, for sure, seven days a week. It was never off, I had 1,400 people in the embassy. I had well over a billion dollars I was responsible for, I had 13 agencies – CIA, the FBI, the DEA – trying to bring them all together to form one team for the United States of America. It was very taxing.
	One of your questions was, “What would you have done differently ten years ago?” I thought about it for a long time because I’m so lucky how my career has turned out. I think I would have tried to balance work/life maybe a little tiny bit better, which I was not good at at all.
Lisa Belisle:	How would you have done that? If you’re in a situation where people are looking to you for coordination and leadership and sometimes answers, how do you easily create that balance?
Pamela White:	I don’t think it’s easy. I don’t know, I couldn’t do it. I didn’t do it. I’ve seen other people, when it’s six o’clock, they walk. They go home and they say, “I’ve put in my long day.” They get to the office. One of my – if I’m honest a few – criticism as a ambassador, someone came down and said, “Pam, please stop sending texts to your staff at two o’clock in the morning.” I said, “Well, I don’t expect them to answer at two o’clock in the morning, but I’m up and I’m thinking and something’s going through my mind.” They’re like, “Well, they think that they should be sort of up 24/7 like you are so just wait. Fine, that that’s when you’re thinking, but put it on save and send it when you get up and you’re on your way in the morning.” I said, “Okay, okay.” It was a lesson well-learned because not everyone an insomniac like I am and working.
	I didn’t want them to, I said to them, “I want you to have a family life. I want you to go home at 5:30, six o’clock at night. I can’t do that.” Especially when you go home, either you’re entertaining or you’re being entertained. It’s not like you go home and the day’s over. Ever. It’s fun. Last night- President Martelly was a somewhat controversial president, but I believe with my heart and soul, a guy that truly had the best interest of Haiti and loved the Haitian people. He called me last night and said, “I’m coming to Manhattan, I’m going to a concert in Manhattan. Then maybe I’ll come up to Maine and visit with you.” You build these relationships, these lifelong relationships with people who are in the same circle as you are. They’re trying so hard to make that country a better place. President Sirleaf was the same. President Kikwete of Tanzania did it. Over and over and over you see people who are so dedicated to try to move the needle a little bit on the quality of life of people who are less fortunate.
Lisa Belisle:	You referenced the questionnaire that we have all of our guests fill out when you said, “If you could go back in time ten years, what advice would you give yourself?” You said, “Find a better work/life balance.” It’s interesting to me that another question we asked, “What’s the most rewarding part of your job,” and you answered, “Making the world a better place for the disadvantaged, especially women and the poor, and influencing policy.” It really doesn’t sound like you’ve changed your views on what you want to do in the world since you began this journey when you were in high school.
Pamela White:	That’s right. That’s very true (laughs). I’ve kept my eye on that goal for decades. I thought it was a worthy goal back then and I still think it’s a worthy goal. It was a whole lot harder to move the needle than I thought it was going to be. There is no doubt that I have done that. There are absolute successes that I could look at and think, “Wow, you really hit the mark then.” Then there are years and years that I was working so hard to move countries forward like Mali, which I adored and spent four years there right on the Sahara Desert. I certainly, at the time I was there, increased the number of young girls in school tremendously, by thousands and thousands, got women involved in politics. I think we started with women’s groups that maybe had five thousand and when I left there were maybe 50, 60 thousand. It was a real difference in the ability for women to participate in civil society and it was wonderful.
	Two years ago, the bad guys, the terrorists, come from the north of the Sahara Desert into Mali, a very peaceful country of very moderate Muslims, don’t like to fight, loved people, share everything. These bad, bad guys come down through Mali and disrupt everything that we had done for years and years and years. All these little schools that we had built that all these girls that had never had access to education were in these schools and learning how to be historians and dietitians.
	One of my favorite stories, because when I first asked the men of the desert to send their girls to school, they were like, “Why would we do that? Why would they need to go to school?” I said, “Because these girls can write down your history. These girls can be your dietitians. They can write down the recipes that you pass down for years. These girls can be taught health methods that will help your women be healthier across the board.” All of the sudden it was not that they were just sending their girls for no reason. You can’t just have no reason to send young children to school who have never been to school. I had to change the curriculum, I had to get people trained, a whole new thing. We were practically, at the beginning, using little notebooks that people were stick figures in. We got it all organized, but we changed the way people felt about education, for sure.
	These were tuaregs, these are these blue men of the desert. When I first met them, they would come across the desert on camels from 50, 60 miles away. They didn’t want me to come to their homes at first because they didn’t want this nutty white woman to be where they were. We would sit in a circle with their camels in the background and me talking about two things. I wanted them to use condoms, which didn’t work very well, and sending their girls to school, which worked very well. Good success on one side and not a success at all on the other.
Lisa Belisle:	When you’re talking about the type of work that you were doing, sounds like there’s a significant amount of sales and marketing that takes place.
Pamela White:	Oh, yes, absolutely. In fact, at the end of my career, the last five years or so, I became very, very interested in behavior change and what really makes people change behavior. Why would you after centuries of not sending your girls to school, why would you do that? I found out saying it’s a good thing to do is not good enough. You need a better reason. Just like the condom thing did not work because we want you to space your children, that was not a good enough reason. I learned right then and there, if you’re going to do family planning, do not count on the men to do it. Count on the women to do it.
	I completely changed my outlook. You give speeches all over the place that this is how you should approach family planning, at least in Africa. Let the women take responsibility for their own bodies and the number of children that they want, which tends to be very different, in rural Africa, than men because having babies is sort of a status symbol and responsibility does not lie with the men. The women have full responsibility for babies until they’re a teenager, so that was an interesting thing. Yeah, how do you get people to use a bed net when bed nets aren’t comfortable. We’ve figured out a way of doing that. How do you get people to not be corrupt? It’s interesting because it’s often not what you think. It’s not an easy answer to say, “Well, if we tell them it’s not good for you, that’s good enough.” That, in and of itself, almost never is.
	It is, it’s figuring out how do you make that needle move. It’s so hard and we spend millions on it. I think we are getting better at it, but I’m not so sure that we’re still there. For many decades, we never measured it, either. Did more people actually use bed nets? You can distribute bed nets easily. It’s very easy to distribute a million bed nets. It’s the use of them afterwards that makes a big difference.
	On Zanzabar, which is an island right outside of Tanzania, we started with an incidence of about 40 percent of the people on that island every year had at least one incidence of malaria. We had this program that we put in place and after two years, it went down to two percent and it’s still less than two percent. How did we do it? We had a fabulous marketing campaign. We had all the nets that we needed, we sprayed all the houses, we sprayed all the dead areas where the dead water was. We had people trained in doing rapid testing for malaria. We had the clinicians trained so that as soon as a diagnosis was made, they could get treated. It was one of my favorite moments of my career. In fact, I was invited with the Minister of Health there to go to the White House as a reward for this amazing achievement.
	Part of it was just using political voices: the president of the country, Minister of Health, Minister of Education, me, running around day after day, the ambassador – I wasn’t the ambassador at the time, I was the head of AID – but the ambassador, also. We were over there saying, “If you’re a good Zanzabarian, you’re going to use a bed net.” We convinced them. Like I said, 20 years later, it’s still going strong.
Lisa Belisle:	You strike me as a woman that doesn’t like the word no or maybe doesn’t even hear the word no. I’m not really sure that you even acknowledge that “no” is a possible response to one of your suggestions.
Pamela White:	(laughs) My husband’s laughing over there. No, it’s not a word that I use very often or is used with me in the room. It has been tried, but I can almost always find a solution to almost any problem. If it fails, I’m not afraid of that, either. I always tell young people, “Make a decision, make a decision. Evaluate it as soon as you can.” Often, decisions in the developing world are done- Evaluations are done two years a decision is made or a program is started. I’m like, “Don’t wait two years. Start evaluating within a month. Keep it coming, keep it coming.” With technology today, there is no reason that you don’t have a read on what is being done and how successful it is right away.
	I have shut down programs. There was a program in Liberia on literacy. I went and visited some schools that were teaching- It was adult literacy so it was a night. I showed up at five o’clock. I’m looking at the white boards. I’m like, “There’s nothing on the white board.” They’re like, “Oh, well, we haven’t started yet. No, no, we started but we finished it.” I said, “Well, the lesson only started ten minutes.” “Oh, well, tonight we’re going to concentrate more on drinking coffee.” I said, “All right, this does not look it’s working.” It was a 50 million dollar program.
	I went to another school and another school. They were so proud because the enrollment numbers were supposed to be five thousand and they were 15 thousand because everyone’s coming and eating the cookies and drinking the coffee and kibitzing. I said, “This doesn’t look too good to me, so let’s do a rapid assessment.” I had a team come out from Washington, a rapid assessment team, and went around to ten or 12 of these schools and we found out that no one really knew how to read. No one. No one knew how to count. They could count if they had their fingers – one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten – but if you said, “What’s six plus six?” Forget it. They could not get that far.
	I said, “We’re going to close down this program now.” The contract at the time said, “No, we’re not. No we’re not. Our indicator was how many kids were in the classroom.” I said, “Do you know what? Do you really want me to go to national radio? Do you really want me to go to the Congress? Do you really want me to start talking about how 50 million dollars of the US taxpayers’ money is being spent in Liberia?” They decided to play along with what I wanted.
	What we did there was we started tying literacy to skills. If you wanted to rebuild Liberia, if you wanted to be a mechanic or a plumber or a hairdresser or whatever, then we would teach you language skills around that skill area so that meant something to you, you weren’t just sitting in the classroom. Also it meant that you could have a job, which was very, very, very important for the rebuilding. You have to be creative, you can’t say no, and you have to be always one step ahead of failure, which in the third world is very easy to come by.
	You can’t get discouraged, either. It’s so easy to say, “Oh, you know, we spent two years building this thing up and now what?” Well, how can we make it better? How can we make it more sustainable? How can we get people more involved, especially politicians. Corruption in the third world is a huge problem. How do you work around that so you can make sure that the people that you are working for and with really benefit from what you’re doing? It’s possible.
Lisa Belisle:	Pam, it’s really been a pleasure to have this conversation with you. I appreciate the work that you’ve done, really, all over the world. I love the fact that you are from- Well, born in Lewiston, raised in Auburn, went to Edward Little, went to the University of Maine. I have many family members that have gone, including my son, who watched your commencement speech.
	I appreciate the work, also, that your husband Steve did as part of the foreign service. I think this type of work is maybe something that we here, who live in Maine most of our lives, don’t know that much about, but I know that it’s important and I think it’s great that we have someone from our state who was out there really on the ground and doing this. I appreciate you’re being here.
Pamela White:	Thank you so much for having me. I loved every minute of it. Congratulations, great studio here. Keep on the great work.
Lisa Belisle:	Thank you.