A Moving (Fabulous) Story from the Field

Skeptical about what diplomats, federal employees, or other government workers can do? Read about a great good deed done in Bolivia in 2003 by my friend and former colleague Pete Harding.

Cynicism in our public life may have roots in the reality of unresponsive institutions, but as a casual reaction to current events it can also be deeply corrosive and is often the easy way out. What might we do to make things better? That’s a different and more difficult matter altogether. If many of our current political problems are structural and systemic, our public institutions are also made up of people who can choose to do the right thing. Or not. For this inaugural post of Unbreaking News, I am choosing to retool and expand a brief reflection that appeared several years ago in the pages of the Foreign Service Journal. On that note, I commend the FSJ to all readers (whether you think you might be interested in the work of American diplomacy or not) and paste a separate link here to a story in the July-August, 2024 edition of the FSJ that embodies the best of the off-the-beaten track (literally in the ocean) foreign service reflection. https://afsa.org/swimming-whales-tonga

But now, on to my story about Pete’s heroics in Bolivia…

Photo by Azzedine Rouichi on Unsplash

Señora Luna’s Cooking Pot

For my friend and former colleague Pete Harding, working “in the field” was his vocation, a way of life, what he loved to do.  He had served as an enlisted man in Vietnam and done two winter-overs in remote research outposts in Antarctica, among other original and offbeat experiences, before joining the Foreign Service.  As a diplomat, he had done the gamut of work from “blue collar” facilities management to “white collar” political reporting in the span of a wide-ranging 30-year career spent mostly in Africa and Latin America.  So Pete had a few stories to tell; and at times he liked to tell them.  But the one I tell here about our shared time in Bolivia was one I myself saw unfold before my eyes over the course of several months.  Full disclosure: at the time of the story’s unfolding, I sat in the office right next door to Pete’s and played the role of dutiful bureaucrat who (at the time) couldn’t quite see why what he was doing mattered a lot more than the tremendously trivial tasks that were probably —as the bureaucratic saying goes—wrapping the rest of us around the axle. Unsurprisingly, I can’t quite recall what those urgent tasks were.  Sometimes, what seems important is not, and vice-versa. So here goes:

One afternoon in late November 2003, Pete Harding, then serving as a human rights officer at the U.S. Embassy in La Paz, Bolivia, was returning to his office after a working lunch with one of his social sector contacts.  (Contrary to stereotypes, diplomats don’t deal exclusively with so-called elites. To get a deeper understanding of politics and societies, particularly in places where inequalities are glaring, it is important to take the pulse of the actual people.)  As Pete entered the chancery lobby and made his way toward the elevators, he noticed a middle-aged woman of ethnic indigenous origin stepping away from the cashier’s window of the Bolivian bank that was located there.  She was dressed nondescriptly: jeans, a long sleeved white t-shirt, and blue vest.  But Pete immediately sensed that something about her was off.  She held a large black cooking pot in her arms, and she was crying — tears streaming down her face.  This was an unusual sight, even in an exotic place like 2-mile high La Paz in indigenous-majority, landlocked Bolivia.  Harding’s curiosity was piqued.  Why was she here?  What was going on?  He also felt the stirrings of sympathy.  She was crying after all.  So he introduced himself, and guided the distraught woman toward the couch in the back corner of the lobby.  

Harding discovered that the woman’s name was Señora Gaby Luna Velasco and that her home had recently been destroyed in a fire.  Señora Luna lived in a two-story home that doubled as a small business in the Eloy Salmon commercial neighborhood of the city.  The structure’s ground floor was a shop from which she and her family sold domestic appliances.  Her home, that shop, all the merchandise in it, and most of her family’s other belongings were now gone.  Reduced to charred rubble.  Everywhere she went for help, she was turned away.  And she had gone to many places before Pete had given her the courtesy of listening to her story.  Not surprisingly, Bolivian Government Ministries, the Central Bank, and all other local institutions had been totally unresponsive.  The Bolivian bank branch located in the chancery lobby had just told her ‘sorry, nothing we can do’ for a second time.  Pete soon found out why.  

He peered inside the cooking pot, and saw a pile of blackened ashes that smelled like burnt paper.  He looked more closely.  It was several seconds before he realized what he was seeing, and smelling: the charred remains of U.S. one hundred dollar bills — only distantly recognizable as such — arranged in several misshapen clumps.  Señora Luna explained that the contents of the pot were the only thing left of her family’s life savings, which included the money she had recently collected from neighbors to pay for merchandise.  $45,000 U.S. in cash, she said, that had been hidden beneath her mattress at the time of the fire.  Señora Luna was seeking help to convert the ashes back to viable legal tender.  Her hopes dashed, she had found no takers so far.

———

Señora Luna’s story rang a bell: Pete recalled having read about the devastating night-time fire not long before in the local papers.  And he knew it was plausible.  The “informal” sector represented two thirds of Bolivia’s economy.  The country’s growing cholo commercial class — ethnically indigenous but culturally urbanized — ran the street stands and lunch stalls, small bric-a-brac shops, hardware stores and food markets, as well as the thriving commerce in mostly contraband consumer electronics.  And they administered this substantial informal economy almost exclusively in cash — often in U.S. dollars.

Señora Luna needed help.  She had nothing left, owed money for the merchandise destroyed in the fire, and had intended to pay off that debt with the cash whose charred remains Harding had glimpsed in the cooking pot.  Of course she had no insurance either.  She was desperate.

Harding asked Señora Luna to wait in the lobby while he went inside to consult with Embassy colleagues in the economic and commercial section and confirm whether there was anything he could do to help.  When he returned half an hour later, he agreed to do what he could.  From his professional point of view, helping a woman of Señora Luna’s background would have precisely the kind of political impact we were seeking.  We cared about all Bolivians, not just the mostly white political and economic elites.  More importantly, it was the right thing to do.  Harding could not stop asking himself: what if it was my own mother in this situation?  They transferred the contents of her cooking pot into several thick industrial-style plastic bags.  Back in his office, Pete placed these bags into a cardboard box, secure-wrapped it, and dispatched it via the then-Army Post Office (APO) – a network that enabled US overseas diplomatic missions access to the US postal system – to the U.S. Treasury Department’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington DC.  

————

The Office of Currency Standards within the US Treasury Department’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing is responsible for examining claims related to “mutilated” currency.  The Bureau handles thousands of mutilated currency claims each year.  Currency notes are defined as “mutilated” when they are “not clearly more than one-half of the original note and/or in such condition that the value is questionable and special examination is required to determine its value.”  As it happens, among the most common ways currency notes become mutilated is in fires.

In the months that followed, Harding made scores of calls to Washington to seek updates and to press for progress on Señora Luna’s claim.  (It turns out the box from Bolivia had arrived just as the Bureau was responding to a surge of work stemming from large-scale forest fires in California.  The office’s expert currency examiners were working full throttle.)  When the disconsolate Señora Luna would call Pete pleading for news of progress, as she did almost every afternoon, he assured her it was a matter of time.  He explained the bureaucratic process in Washington DC; that currency examination cases were complex and time-consuming; that accurate calculations were critical; and that the workload of currency examiners in Washington was heavy.  

In short, Pete was performing the diplomat’s quintessential task, mediating between two otherwise separate worlds.  He was the bridge, the interpreter, the sole point of intersection between those worlds — doing his best to bring them together to solve a tangible problem.

———-

The solution came in early June, 2004, more than six months after he had posted the box of burnt bills to Washington.  It arrived in the form of a U.S. Treasury Check in the amount of $17,100.  When Harding called with the good news, Señora Luna was overcome with emotion.  Pete himself was filled with joy for Señora Luna and pleased that his persistence had paid off.  He was also privately relieved that he could not be accused of bluffing or failing to follow through, always a risk in diplomacy when one’s best efforts don’t bear fruit.

To commemorate the event, the Embassy’s public affairs office organized a special media ceremony in the chancery lobby.  Señora Luna and several of her family members and friends participated.  The high point was when Harding and then-U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia, David Greenlee, formally presented the US Treasury check to Señora Luna.  Greenlee received a grateful kiss on the cheek from the tearful woman — a gesture that was broadcast on national TV that same night.  It also appeared on the front pages of Bolivian papers the following day, above feature-length accounts of her travails and their successful resolution — with the help of the American Embassy and Mr. Pete Harding.

Pete may have been a bit of a renegade, resistant to the tedious but often necessary job of pushing paper, but he was a pretty good diplomat.

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