Cherie, Management Officer
The day that mattered the most for me in my 19 years in the Foreign Service has been—or was September 11th, 2001. And the reason for that is that I had been in Mexico City for less than one month. We—my husband and I — were a tandem couple. We had arrived there in August 2001. We had tremendously high expectations during our tour.
We had word of the first acts, which everybody thought at that point was a tragic accident and as we got to work, it became apparent to all of us in the press section that this was no accident. So, I assembled my staff and I said this is a very this is a very unusual event. We’re going to have to work very hard here all day, so I want all of you together with me. We’re going to be huddled in my office preparing whatever we can in terms of press guidance, in terms of information for the public.
There was no clear guidance from Washington at that post, so we were extracting information from Washington as we could, translating it as soon as we could and releasing it, and working the phones as well with the Mexican press, which was already starting to get a little bit frantic for news.
So as the public assembled and as the press assembled, we drafted a short statement for the ambassador. He went out and he delivered that statement, and he turned to me and he said, okay, you’re on your own. You go out there and you need to continue feeding the press the information that it needs and the public to let them know what is going on and what we are doing.
And I went into the middle of what seemed to be thousands of people with cameras clicking, tape recorders whirring, people with pen and pencils, just flying, and a million questions at the same time. And I just thought, okay, this is a situation where I can really make or break, and I thought this is where being a Foreign Service officer really makes such a difference, and that you can be cast into situations where you never would have expected to be in the middle of.
I graduated from college and I worked for a year and a half as a program manager at the Organization of American States. And my husband was a Marine, a Marine pilot, so we lived in a military base for about five years. And one day he looked at me and I looked at him and we said, we should really take the Foreign Service test. It’s something we were always interested in and we did, and much to our surprise, we kept passing each section of the test. And I came in shortly after he came in, and it’s been it’s been quite a rollercoaster for the last 19 years. We’ve been able to make it work. It’s been a wonderful career for both of us.