Tea and diplomacy
I am having tea with the US Ambassador to the Philippines. Tea and a chat, no specific topics, though cats and tennis will probably be mentioned. Ambassador Kristie A. Kenney is svelte, youngish, vivacious and blonde — in the movies, she would be cast as the friendly neighbor who organizes swap meets and bakes cookies for the kids. We are, in fact, having cookies. I imagine her sunny demeanor must be slightly disconcerting to hard-nosed old-boy politicians. Which is not to say that Ambassador Kenney is a softie. A career diplomat, she is the first female US envoy to this country. Before she was assigned here in March 2006, she was the Ambassador to Ecuador. Her husband, William R. Brownfield, is currently the US Ambassador to Colombia.
“It’s an embarrassing story,” she says of her start in the foreign service. “After college I worked three years for a member of the US Congress, then I went to graduate school. I was in graduate school on a scholarship, with a bunch of friends who were also on scholarships, so we had zero money. We were very eager to get jobs when we graduated, and one of our friends said, ‘They’re giving tests for diplomats. Why don’t we take it, it’s free?’ So I went and I passed the test. It was one of those things where you just kept going. Then I got called in for an interview.
“Thousands of people take the test, a thousand pass, and it takes a long time to interview them because they’re scattered all over. Then you go for your medical exam, you’re put on a roster, and rank-ordered for a job. One day I got a call for a job. I thought, I’ll try it for a year or two, and it’s been 26 years. It suits me because it’s always different, always interesting.”
Her stint in the Philippines has met all expectations, with a couple of surprises. “I don’t think I realized how easy it would be to talk to Filipinos of all sizes, persuasions, ages, professions. I didn’t realize how easy it would be to walk into Starbucks and make friends. Americans are friendly, and Filipinos are double that.
“I didn’t expect Manila to be as green as it is. The pictures I’d seen were of the Makati skyline or very poor neighborhoods like Tondo, and I didn’t realize until I got here that there are pockets of greenery everywhere. There aren’t that many big parks, so I’d expected it to look very big city-concrete, but it’s not.”
I note that the Philippines has a bit of an image problem: many foreigners have no idea what it is, and they seem to think it’s somewhere near Hawaii. What do foreigners know about our country? “A lot of people I know in the US remember Ninoy and Cory Aquino,” Ambassador Kenney replies. “I’ve had friends visiting me who aren’t really savvy about international politics, and they all bought the ‘I Am Ninoy’ T-shirt for Christmas gifts. Everybody remembers the events of 1986, and even if you weren’t paying attention, you remember.”
Whenever she has guests, she usually takes them to Corregidor and to the pearl market in Greenhills.
“I find that the good news about the Philippines doesn’t get out very much,” she adds. “Every visitor I’ve had is astonished by the creativity here, the things people do with fibers like piña and abaca, the furniture-making. People have heard of Boracay, but they haven’t really heard of the other tranquil, beautiful sights. And the sophistication of Manila surprises them — all the shopping malls, you could be anywhere in America.
“The international news media tends to pick up stories about poverty, crime, or terrorism, so people are surprised to get here and find the huge numbers of restaurants. And to find that a lot of well-known people in the States are Filipinos, designers like Josie Natori.”
We are joined by a glossy black cat named Junior, aged nine. Later Emily, a sweet, black 10-year-old moggie with white markings, peers into the Ambassador’s living room to see if her dinner is served. The Kenneys’ cats Emily, Junior and Niles were all rescued from animal shelters. Niles got stressed-out by the constant stream of visitors to the ambassador’s residence, so he is chilling out in Pampanga. The three cats have traveled with their humans from Washington, DC to Quito, Ecuador to Manila.
I ask the Ambassador if Quito is anything like Manila. “The only real similarities are the old Spanish churches,” she says, “And the love of family, the extended family that often lives together. Ecuador is much poorer, much less sophisticated.” She adds that Quito is a world heritage site, and its churches are similar in style to the old churches of Ilocos.
The US is always a topic of great interest to Filipinos, and this interest seemed to grow exponentially during the recent American presidential election. Was she surprised at how interested we were in their elections? “I was and wasn’t,” the diplomat replies. “I wasn’t because we were all the same way. Presidential elections don’t always capture the American public’s attention: sometimes they’re dull or boring or the candidates aren’t exciting. For this one we all became political junkies.
“I wasn’t surprised that people were interested, I was surprised at how interested they were, and I was thrilled about that. It was a good election with a great variety of candidates and this great use of new media. It’s good to see people thinking about issues. It was great to see so many youth in America turning out to vote for the first time.
“Credit goes to President Obama and his team for getting people passionate about the issues.”
The other big story about the US has been the financial meltdown. “The gloomy news is all people report on. All I have is anecdotal evidence. I was in Hawaii for a week of vacation in January, and everything was packed,” Ambassador Kenney recounts. “Same time I was hearing on the TV and reading in the papers that the economy is a disaster, I was finding that you couldn’t get a table in a restaurant because if you don’t reserve ahead, they’re full. There clearly are lots of people who are still going out and leading pretty normal lives. The real question, I think, will be how quickly the United States and the rest of the world can turn this around, use our combined efforts to stimulate economic growth.
“One of my friends was saying that a lot of this is a confidence issue,” she adds. “It’s a vicious cycle. You have all these stories about how you’re going to lose your job, things are bad. People get nervous, they think, “I won’t spend, I won’t go out,” which (eventually) leads to people losing their jobs.”
Does this mean fewer Filipinos are going to the United States these days? The Ambassador says the numbers remain constant. “Filipinos of all sectors continue to travel to the US for business, vacations, school. And immigration — we are the largest issuer of immigrant visas in the world. You can’t go anywhere in the US without finding Filipinos.” The Philippine government estimates that there are four million Filipinos in the United States. According to the US Embassy, there are about 250,000 Americans in the Philippines. These estimates, the Ambassador notes, might not have even factored in dual citizenships.
For people with a horror of staying put, being a diplomat sounds like the ideal career. Is it tough breaking into the diplomatic service? “I got in,” Ambassador Kenney laughs. “It’s competitive, but no more competitive than anything else. There’s a lot of scope to do so many different things. You can take a lot of different talents. Some of my colleagues are much better at negotiations — you wouldn’t call on me to negotiate a treaty, I don’t have the patience — some people are better writers and speakers, some people are better at development work.”
What would be her particular specialization? “I’ve jumped all over. I’m always interested in our development projects, but the environment particularly interests me because there’s so much to protect here.
“One of the things we’ve been doing is teaching fishermen to fish in a way that gets them a higher value yield without taking the fish they don’t need — the little baby fish — and supplementing their income. We’ve worked to train aquarium fishermen in how to pick fish and how to package them so they don’t die on the way. We’ve helped them organize a cooperative so they can pool their resources.” She talks about clean energy and environmental protection in her blog, which she recently launched on the US Embassy website. “I get to see amazing things, but I don’t have the chance to talk about them,” she says.
This is Ambassador Kenney’s third year in the Philippines, and she expects to get word of her next post fairly soon. “I’ll be disappointed to leave,” she smiles. In the meantime there are meetings, trips, briefings, and cats to attend to.
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