Barbara Atherley has no regrets for a career...
“Given my background in dealing with emergencies and disaster management, they asked me if I could assist. They said they needed me like yesterday,” she said.
Syria
Syria was an active war zone.
To get to Damascus, she flew to Lebanon because civilian flights could not go into Damascus.
During the chemical bomb issue in Syria, Atherly was among those who were evacuated from Damascus to Lebanon.
“While we were leaving, we saw some children with backpacks. We stopped and interacted with them. Those children were going across the border to Lebanon with their school books. It showed the high premium they placed on education. I’ve seen a school bombed out in which children died. That school was cleaned for other children. Hurt and torn… you have to encourage children to go to school and when they go, they get killed. You struggle with that but the resilience of community and the people themselves to return to school has really left an indelible mark on my mind,” she said.
Because Syrian children who moved to Syria were taught in the medium of education that was being used in Lebanon, Atherly returned to the Escuela Nueva programme and worked with a team at the education ministry in Syria to develop instructional guides to help the children to continue learning in their language when they crossed the border.
“It was not just about impacting the children who were internally displaced but those who left the country to continue their education,” she noted.
She left Syria in 2015 and retired from the UN system in 2016, having worked with UNICEF for 20 years.
In 2016, the APNU-AFC government appointed her as Guyana’s Consul General in New York.
“I went and I did my duties. I was happy I had a team that was equally interested in modern technology which was what we tried to focus on with the work at the consulate. I am a field person, and at the consulate, we did a community outreach programme to forge unity among Guyanese,” she said.
Then came the Covid-19 pandemic. She said, “I thought I’d worked in difficult duty stations with all the challenges. But with Covid-19, I was in a war-torn situation where I didn’t know the enemy. In Syria, you know when you hear a bomb, you see the smoke, you know the enemy. You know you’re being attacked, and you know where to go. I’ve been in bunkers and I’ve been evacuated. With Covid-19, you didn’t see the enemy. You didn’t know who was attacking, and when and where to retreat. It was one of my busiest periods in terms of work. Apart from all the consular work I was doing, I had to respond to the constant calls of Guyanese living there who had many challenges.
“Thank goodness [for] my UN experience which prepared me for dealing with emergencies… I had meetings with the staff, and we prepared the office for manning the telephone lines and operating from home as though we were in office. We set up a post office box at the consulate,” she recalled.
She was at Consul General from 2016 to 2020. Atherley is a member of the Georgetown, D’Urban Park Lions Club. “Through that I am able to work within the community, especially with the education and health related projects that we do. I am always with the church. In Mozambique I was on the Anglican Diocese Church board. When I came home, I was on the vestry for St George’s Cathedral. Now I am a member of the Mothers’ Union.
The mother of one and grandmother of three said, “I made my move to work internationally because at the time my son had completed school in Guyana and he had just started university overseas. For me, it was always a way of trying to manage and balance work, family, my community calling in terms of Lionism and my religion. It was not always perfect but I’m satisfied with every step I made.”