The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2003

ship of the U.S. ambassador and the foreign minister and, to a large degree, the U.S. embassy and the Foreign Ministry. Not necessarily other parts of the Chilean govern- ment, but we developed that shared sense of having been through a crisis together, having agreed on an objec- tive, and having achieved it. Even though there had previously been some differences and antagonisms which did not disappear on certain issues, nonetheless we had this shared and positive experience which you cannot discount. At that point I was Tony to the foreign minister, and he was Don Felipe to me. It was pos- sible, then, to deal with a lot of other issues in probably a different tone of voice than might otherwise have been the case. C ynthia Perry describes some of the challenges of serving as U.S. ambassador to Burundi from 1989 to 1993. I was not the first female American ambassador [there], nor the first black American ambassador — I was the first who was both black and a woman. Although the women embraced my strength and felt empowered by my presence, the men J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 3 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 53 “So there was the American ambassador holding hands with a group of nuns and priests praying for the overthrow of the Reagan administration!” — Amb. Tony Quainton