Thursday, September 30, 2021

Virtual

ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Thank you so much. Thank you, Ambassador, for making time for this seminal event for USAID’s presence there in Mali and in your efforts.

I just had the chance to talk to Miriam and you should hear what she says behind your backs. She said it is a completely amazing country team, celebrating the talents also of the FSNs, locally employed staff, but Ambassador, also just very specifically your leadership and her excitement and genuinely positive excitement to take advantage of that toolbox to make a difference where we can, and however we can.

So, I’m thrilled to be here and thrilled, as Ambassador Hankins said, that we can send one of our very, very best to a country facing significant challenges but with such enormous potential.

I also want to welcome Leon, who was mentioned, Miriam’s husband of four years. I like to say at these swearings-in that this is my favorite part of my job. And it is. I just want everyone to know this is my absolute favorite—I get to learn so much about the people who do our work out on the front lines. As you’ll hear, it’s a little bit of a “this is your life,” journey through the life of the new Mission Director.

But my absolute favorite part of my favorite part is getting an insight into the love story that brings together the new Mission Director and their spouse, and hearing Miriam and Leon’s story about how their grandmothers were best friends, and yet they managed not to meet until four years ago, to strike up this great romance. Now, for Leon to be there, embarking on this great adventure with Miriam, it warms the heart. So, congratulations to you both on this deployment, and above all on the partnership that you have forged.

Miriam is, yes, a USAID veteran, a champion of humanitarian and public health work across multiple continents. This is maybe one of the most important parts, a dog-lover and dog-rescuer. And now, she will be our Mission Director in Mali. I think it’s fair to say Miriam Lutz was born to do development work—to realize her place in the world and extend dignity unto others.

With both parents serving as Lutheran Missionaries, Miriam’s devotion to development in Africa took root very early, after her family moved to Tanzania from the North Dakota Prairie when she was just ten years old. While her father pastored an international congregation at a Lutheran Church in the heart of Dar es Salaam, Miriam undertook efforts with the volunteer ministry where she crossed paths with hundreds of diplomatic and NGO folks from around the world.

It’s no surprise, then, that Miriam went on to study multiple languages, development, and international public health in college. And she has something that many of us look at covetously, which is a knack for languages, and she actually began her career as an interpreter, first in Chile while also pursuing her first Masters degree in simultaneous interpretation from the Monterey Institute of International Studies. But Miriam soon found her way back to humanitarian work, first as a field officer with UNHCR, where she managed resettlement programs for Bosnian refugees in Croatia and Rwandan refugees in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

I was working as a journalist covering the wars in the region—a rookie cub reporter—and Miriam and I were just talking about how we must have crossed paths when she was helping welcome and care for refugees who were teeming into Zagreb, and I lived maybe two blocks from the place where she was processing those refugees.

Miriam’s nearly twenty-year career with USAID has touched almost every difficult conflict and natural disaster of the last two decades—and as her colleagues attest, her energy and dedication are unmatched. At one of her earliest posts in the Congo in 2002, Miriam was forced to evacuate along with half a million residents from Goma when Mt. Nyiragongo erupted—a disaster that many of you remember, more recently which struck again this past May.

Miriam and her colleagues shifted gears from their day-to-day work to launch a humanitarian response for the displaced, who were not only threatened by the volcano’s eruption, but by the ongoing civil war, creating acute shelter, health, protection, and rehabilitation needs. Miriam’s colleagues only later found out that while she was doing all of that, she had been simultaneously battling malaria when the volcano erupted.

Miriam would later take her energy and expertise to two critical posts—first as a detailee and advisor to the United States’ Mission to the UN with a focus on humanitarian affairs in Iraq, Darfur, and Sudan. And I can’t tell you, Ambassador, how important this multilateral experience is in the Mali context, given the peacekeeping mission, the UN donor community that’s there. So being able to speak multilateral will be a great asset in this post. Then, she went on an additional detail as a liaison to U.S. Pacific Command during the humanitarian response to the 2004 tsunami, which took the lives of 230,000 people in 14 south Asian and African countries. And that too, again, Civ-Mil relations being so critical against the backdrop of such insecurity there in Mali, particularly in the north.

As one colleague put it, “Miriam embodies the type of fearless leadership that makes this Agency great,” noting how, during the 2006 war in Lebanon, Miriam paved the way for USAID Disaster Assistance Response Teams to hit the ground running and provide critical humanitarian aid. On her way to Lebanon back then, Miriam’s first order of business was to prepare the U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon for the incoming DART Teams, reassuring him that they were going to be safe, self-sufficient and ready to save lives. It’s always the case, the DART team is coming in at the same time often evacuations are occurring, and so that was happening just at the time the Embassy was rushing to evacuate 15,000 Americans from the country. It’s sort of defying gravity when you prepare the ground for a DART team in such circumstances.

From Lebanon, Miriam went on to help manage humanitarian relief efforts for Iraqi refugees during the height of the Iraq war before departing for Pakistan to head USAID’s Maternal and Child Health program in the country. Here again, Miriam stepped up amid a crisis. When Pakistan experienced historic flooding in 2010, uprooting one fifth of the population, Miriam was asked to serve as the Acting Officer in Charge of USAID programs in the southern Pakistan provinces, including the flood response and management of the Karachi office.

A colleague of Miriam’s from her latest post in Malawi said, “One of Miriam’s strengths is how quickly she responds in times of emergencies.”

“Clarity of focus, flexibility, and pragmatism is how she will be remembered,” said another colleague from Malawi.

While Miriam is recalled at posts around the world for her fearless and nimble leadership, she is also beloved for her organized—and active—group outings. “Among those outings,” one colleague said, “I swam in Lake Malawi and spent two days and nights climbing Mt. Mulanje … and the next week living with ointments trying to delicately move my incredibly sore muscles.” So watch out, Team Mali!

We’re thrilled to have a leader of Miriam’s caliber take the lead at a critical time for our Mission in Mali. Once an emerging force for democracy and stability in West Africa, as the Ambassador indicated, Mali has endured some tough times of late, destabilizing uprisings by rebel and extremist groups over the last decade. And those have displaced hundreds of thousands of Malians, and left many more dependent on humanitarian assistance to survive.

When I visited Mali in 2014 as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, I remember very well conversations with civil society leaders and activists whose momentum and pressure for reform, whose refusal to accept these darker trend lines, led to the highest voter turnout in the country’s history during the 2013 election. So even when things get rough, the energy and the dynamism and the dedication, and the pride there, and the traditions that Mali boasts on the continent… and the history, the rich, rich history. Those individuals and that civil society often taps that for progress, and won’t give up. There were new signs of hope and democracy at work which led to the 2015 Agreement for Peace and Reconciliation, but again those rich traditions are going to have to be tapped today, because Mali’s transition government and the parties to the agreement remain deadlocked with little political or institutional progress having been made in recent years. And while the status quo has brought some stability, relative to that three-year conflict that ended with the peace agreement, Central Mali has seen a steady uptick in violence and instability, and the country’s overall stability in the country is of course precarious.

But despite the inertia that continues to slow those efforts to secure the fundamental freedoms and the opportunity that democracy affords, our partnerships with civil society and the people of Mali continue to show promise. Miriam was already recounting to me the caliber of those programs, the texture of the relationships that the USAID Mission and the Embassy as a whole have established with various communities across Mail. With Miriam at the helm of our USAID Mission in Mali, we are prepared to build on the progress our Malian partners have made to strengthen health, education, and agricultural systems, even amid the destabilizing effects of unrest throughout the Sahel.

Just this year, health facilities in Mali reported significant increases in average availability of lifesaving maternal, newborn, and child health medicines and commodities, all the more noteworthy at a time of COVID. In partnership with USAID, Mali’s Pharmacy and Medicine Directorate has enhanced data systems and built staff capacity to quantify and forecast the national need for these commodities—and we are working as well to strengthen procurement systems for other lifesaving medicines and supplies. Mentorship programs like USAID’s Girls Leadership and Empowerment through Education (GLEE) are enhancing girls’ access to education, supporting nearly 60,000 adolescent girls in the Kayes and Mopti regions. And as Malians continue to feel the impacts of COVID-19, USAID has partnered with the World Food Program to mitigate its effects, providing food assistance to more than 196,000 food insecure Malians and supporting hospitalized patients in quarantine with 14 days of emergency food assistance.

The next few months are critical as Malian officials continue work to align on priorities outlined in the Transition Charter and to prepare for presidential and legislative elections, scheduled for late February. For USAID in Mali, it remains a top priority to support Malian civil society organizations which represent local populations as they navigate complex security challenges and some significant social and political tensions.

I am confident that as Miriam takes the reins at USAID’s Mission in Mali, her versatility and crisis-tested leadership will help deepen the bilateral relationships and international partnerships needed to keep the pressure up so that safe, free, and credible elections can be held for the Malian people.

A return to democratic governance is absolutely possible—and above all, it is necessary so the Malian people can secure the promising development gains that we’ve seen throughout our decades-long partnership.

Miriam, in closing, thank you for taking on such an important role at such a critical time for one of USAID’s oldest partners. Your devotion to the success, safety, opportunity, and prosperity of the Malian people honors that rich Malian heritage that people there are so proud of; a tradition of tolerance, determination, and a desire, above all, for peace and mutual respect.

With that, it is my pleasure to invite Miriam and her husband Leon to stand for the oath of office.

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