Embassy Living/Living the High Life
The title may sound like it portends good and even great things; for to hobnob with the embassy folk is exactly what it sounds like: hanging out with the bright and social representatives of the many countries around the world. Though working for an organization called the United Nations may give off this same internationalist flavour, the reality is that office politics and internecine pettiness often interferes with the fact of individual’s origins. I sit next to a Danish woman who speaks in four languages throughout the day, perfectly accented, confidently fluent, consistently on the ball as she interchanges without break between English, Danish, French, and Spanish. That being said, the content of what is being said in multiple tongues is not so exciting as the linguistic feat itself. It is more like the emails I write while I am at my desk, where about a half are inconsequential, both to work and in the general scheme of things.
Invited to the recent CPR meeting—a must, according to a former professor of mine, the very one who got me the UN gig—is to see the ambassadorial crew at work. The Committee of Permanent Representatives to the United Nations Environment Programme is where the national politics of the world’s nations are tabled and used to leverage specific results from the organization that they fund. Some wield big sticks though they speak softly and purr over the details that concern them not; others have an axe to grind, and a slow grind at that; while many, mainly the majority, sit back and listen in what appears to be great passivity.
The point man from my end was the Canadian deputy representative, a native Kenyan of east Indian descent who somehow made it to Ottawa and back. For this meeting, his bosses in Ottawa had given him a scant nothing to ask of the Executive Director of UNEP, Achim Steiner. In this situation, he could have sat back and done little other than twiddled his thumbs; he instead took a bit of initiative and asked a couple of pertinent questions regarding the ED’s presentation on UNEP’s work activities and ongoing internal restructuration. It’s a bit depressing to think that the Canadian government had so little to ask of the planet’s only overseer world organization on the environment—one that it supports, case in point—but I would like to say here and now that this reflects the government that currently directs our country. It is in every Canadian’s interest to know that the Harper government does just this much as its modus operandi when it comes to how the UN deals with climate change, loss of biodiversity, protection of wildlife habitat, and all that jazz.
When the English representative grills the ED for a good half hour on particular points—like, for the innocent instance, “what is exactly being done here”—and the ED, a normally suave, polished, and reassuringly self-assured public speaker who has put me to sleep, twice, in meetings, falters in his delivery and visibly begins to sweat, you recognize that the ambassador is operating according to his government’s wishes and interests. It is politics, through and through, and provides great insight into what is going on with each country in relation to its position on the environment. Some countries—Sweden and Norway—are without surprise active participants, and others, like Canada, surprisingly quiet. It is important to have the leader of your organization earn his or her coin; to see them get pushed and show responsibility—and what responsibility they have with UNEP is up to them, given the UN’s rather flaccid reputation for getting things done—for the work done under their watch. In other words, if your country is serious about the environment, the word gets passed onto the representative and the representative then represents. In our case, our representative represented out of professional, perhaps even personal, interest; the chain of command, however, did little to encourage his actions and this I found a little bit more than damning.
The spin-off of this was that I had the great honour of chaperoning the deputy rep’s slim and earnest niece, on visit from England and on vacation from her law school studies, and whom I marched around the complex, showing her the trees planted by various world leaders upon various visits. Other than play hooky from work to listen to her well spoken locution yet eventually repetitive line of conversational life career questions—“do you think that you could ask your colleague for her email address?”—I felt a bit out of place, and maybe more than a bit distant. This was an introduction to the elite set: Michael, come meet the Mexican ambassador, he’s a nice guy; indeed he was, with great hair, great teeth, great complexion, and he even offered me a chewy fig cookie and then pulled out his beautiful card and executed a very well practiced and gentle brush off: “Please email me, and if you will, excuse me.”
As this is the case, I was invited out to the Karibou Club, the monthly drinking and deep-fried best of the orient social held at the Canadian High Commission, located just down the road from work. The name is a double entendre, as the caribou is the northern arctic antlered creature that is not a reindeer and karibu is Kiswahili for ‘welcome’. The long and short of the night was that I ended up sitting at an Italian restaurant surrounded by yet more Canadian embassy daughters; Canadian immigration officers brand new to town; an up and coming Canadian intelligence liaison officer with a PhD in Philosophy, his bored and passive aggressive wife of seven years—a teacher at the international school—unfortunately seated directly across from me, her awfully low scooped shirt exposing two thirds of her breasts before she even leaned forward to eat her meal; American immigration officers; drunk Australians of no known background but of great humour; a lone fun-loving Brazilian in his thirties who is neither embassy employee nor employed, period; and my bill paid for by a young World Bank lawyer, educated at Ottawa’s law school, mastered by the Patterson School for International Relations, and now executing Justice for the Poor (especially women) in rural Kenya.
My benefactor for the night turned out to be a very nice guy, recently engaged to an Iranian from Tehran. He gave some good ribbing to the American immigration officers over dinner, saying that he had heard that they were getting soft on their refugee claim cases, allowing children in the holding cells colouring crayons. It was a good shot, one that the former Peace Corps volunteer had nothing to reply to, her only admission a reddening of her cheeks and a small nod of the head. The discord between what a government wants and does is never so shocking as meeting the people who go about facilitating these desires; such is the high life.
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