The Foreign Service Journal, September 2011

68 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 1 Robert Bruce Richardson , 71, a retired FSO with the U.S. Agency for International Development and a for- mer AFSA dissent award winner, died on April 24 in Charleston, S.C. Born in Toronto, Mr. Richardson moved to the United States with his parents in 1957 and attended Hamil- ton College in Clinton, N.Y. After graduating, he taught science and math at the Utica Free Academy in Utica, N.Y., before entering the Peace Corps in 1964. He was assigned to Senegal, where he was seconded to the United Nations International Labor Organization to design appro- priate technology for improving local agriculture. On returning to the U.S. in 1966, Mr. Richardson joined USAID. His first assignments were in Bamako and Kaduna as a general services officer and then in Rabat, in 1968, as a Food for Peace officer. In 1973, he returned to Washing- ton, D.C., where he backstopped the VietnamCommercial Import Program at USAID. In 1975, he drafted the op- erations portion of the new Egypt Commodity Import Program and went to Cairo to help set it up. The next year, he was sent to Kin- shasa to run the Commodity Import Program, and in 1978 transferred to Niamey to create the first Project Management Support Unit, which was later adopted by other missions in West Africa. His next tour was at the Regional Office for Central America and Pana- ma in Guatemala, as regional supply management officer. In 1983 he went to Cairo to run the Commodity Im- port Program, the largest bilateral aid program in the history of the agency. Returning to Washington, D.C., in 1988, he was responsible for the agency’s commodity procurement ac- tivities until his retirement in 1995. Mr. Richardson was the only commod- ity officer to be promoted into the Sen- ior Foreign Service. He was also the first employee of USAID to be awarded AFSA’s Chris- tian A. Herter Award for constructive dissent by a Senior Foreign Service of- ficer, in 1994. After his retirement from the For- eign Service, Mr. Richardson worked with various consulting firms: the De- partment of Human Services of the city of Washington, D.C.; the United Nations Peacekeeping Mission to An- gola, as chief of procurement and con- tracting; and the World Bank, as a certified procurement consultant. In 2003, Mr. Richardson moved to Charleston, S.C., with his wife Made- leine, who had accompanied him to most of his posts and worked in the embassy and department medical units as a laboratory technician. There he became involved in local politics and entertained his friends and former col- leagues with written accounts of his various overseas experiences. Mr. Richardson’s wife, Madeleine, predeceased him in 2010. He is sur- vived by two sons, Christopher Charles Richardson of Daniel Island, S.C., and Nicholas Yann Richardson (and his wife, Dayna) of Burke, Va.; and a daughter, Julie Beatriz Richardson of cFairfax, Va. Susan Ann Sutton Robinson , 66, a retired FSO, died on June 16 in Boston, Mass., following a debilitating illness. Susan Ann Sutton was born and raised in Yakima, Wash. She was vale- dictorian of her high school class and a I N M E M O R Y T HE NEW EDITION OF Inside a U.S. Embassy IS NOW AVAILABLE . Visit www.afsa.org/inside for details. Looking for Additional Reading Suggestions? You can find the AFSA and State Department reading lists in our online bookstore, offering a wide selection of books on the Foreign Service. AFSA earns a royalty for every purchase you make on Amazon.com when you enter via the AFSA Bookstore. Visit www.afsa.org/ fs_reading_list.aspx