To view wmv video - Michael Watts
Acceptance Remarks - 2008 PAFSO Awards - Michael Watts
The last time I found myself before an audience at such a Gala event I was actually addressing a 12 lb Haggis reciting Robert Burns famous ode poem at a Burns Supper in Ghana. As Burns never penned an address to a salmon I can spare you many verses of “Fair Fa yer Honest Soncy Face” and the like.
A few years ago I had the opportunity to participate in organizing some of the PAFSO dinners and therefore was able to make a couple of useful observations from listening to many of the speeches. The first: rarely is the longest speech considered the best! short is sweet. I will try hard to uphold this principle. Secondly, almost everyone opens with one variety or another of the question and statement – why me? Surely I don’t deserve this. My case is no different. It’s a heady mixture disbelief, pride and embarrassment. As others have noted before the appeal of this award is that it comes from peers and I am honoured to find myself included among its many gifted recipients.
How on earth did I end up in the foreign service? It is time for a vulgar admission. I was simply an underemployed graduate graphic artist/ historian tending bar at night and seemingly destined to teacher’s college but otherwise in dire need of a better way to manage my student loans – and I hope this doesn’t mean I have to give back my award, but honestly, my thinking at the time in October 1990 was that as I had already blown the best part of Saturday morning writing the Public Service entrance exam. Another hour summarizing a few paragraphs and completing a wee multiple choice test for the foreign service was not going to make much difference – well, so much for teacher’s college - to quote Burns again “The best laid schemes o' mice an' men Gang aft agley,”.
It was impossible to imagine then that this career would be able to offer so many opportunities to be creative, to learn, and to exemplify the values of the public service, values I hope I inherited in part from my mother who was herself a civil servant with UK’s Department of Employment prior to immigrating to Canada.
So what will I talk about tonight – well keeping in mind my promise to be brief let me first express my gratitude to Merle Bolick, Anne Arnott, and Diane Burrows who orchestrated this scheme to have me expose my knees to the wider foreign service community. Je veux aussi rémercier tous mes colleagues avec qui je servais à Londres, New Delhi, Colombo, et Accra, et aussi tous mes amis parmi lesquels j’ai l’ honneur de travailler à l’administration centrale, à la region internationale et particulierment au bureau de formation et aux bureaux Geographiques. Finalement et le plus important je voudrais éxprimer ma gratitude à mon épouse, Jennifer, et mes filles Helen, et Emma. Jusqu’a aujourd’hui je ne peux pas croire encore qu’elles aient accepté une affectation en Afrique!
Working in Ghana….reality and sentiment regarding migration from Africa is frequently contradictory. While African states decry the brain drain of health and other professionals, their economies have become increasingly dependent upon the remittances that follow. Despite the resolution of multiple conflicts across West Africa, the flow of migrants grows in the face of terrible risks from drowning off the coast of Senegal or in the Mediterranean, or being lost trying to cross the vastness of the Sahara in search of a better future in Europe. The contrast in the nature of our work was also frequently surreal. In the same week contriving to attend the FINA World Swimming Championships in Montreal we would receive visa request from a national swimming team – that couldn’t swim. Days later we would try with all means short of ourselves travelling to Dakar to persuade Senegalese immigration authorities that we really did issue the visas in the passports of the young Sierra Leonians transiting Dakar invited to speak at a conference in Canada about their experiences during the brutal civil war. We were not successful. Until coming to Africa I had not worked very closely with colleagues from the US State Department, but I am especially grateful to my US consular colleagues in particular in Monrovia without whom we would not have been able to cope with a very new and challenging international adoption movement. Similarly my colleagues in the UNHCR and the IOM were brilliant working with us to select refugees for resettlement, many of whom had been witnesses to and victims of unimaginable atrocities.
As always there were targets to meet, processing times to reduce, representations to address, and resources to manage. Demands always seemed to surpass available means – the shelves and the desk were covered with piles of files and the unread messages hovered around the triple digits. But we were on the ground – by default we were the experts – it was our teams job to manage the program - and within the file covers, behind the passport sized photograph,s as visa officers we could witness amazing unpredictable complex human stories of hope, fear, ambition, deceit, desperation and brilliance. A few years ago I listened to my colleague David Manicom who on this same podium poetically described what it means to be a visa officer, and for me it has been above all the experiences in Africa that have confirmed his sentiment that to be a visa officer is truly is a wonderful calling and I now more than I can confirm how delighted I am to have sacrificed that extra hour on that fateful Saturday morning in October 1990.
Thank you.
