After attending Simmons College, interning at the World Bank, and attending graduate school at UCLA, she dipped her toes in the waters of the Foreign Service for the first time by volunteering in the Peace Corps. “That just fit best. I wasn’t interested in joining a firm and delivering a particular product. I wasn’t interested in a particular religious or evangelical approach. There are a lot of good people interested in missionary type work — saving souls, that’s good work — it’s not my work,” she explained. After her Peace Corps tour in Fiji (which she admits was paradise, albeit “wet paradise”) she went back and worked on her PhD at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Mahoney confesses she doesn’t like to leave things unfinished, yet when she went out to Tanzania to do her dissertation field research, she was hired by USAID right in the midst of her schoolwork.
Fiji RPCV Roberta Mahoney was recently promoted to director of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Mission in Albania
Stoneham native earns top foreign post at USAID
By Richard Saltzberg/Correspondent
Fri May 22, 2009, 12:10 PM EDT
Stoneham -
Comporting herself far more with the grace and cheer of a diplomat than the introversion of an economist, Roberta Mahoney, who was recently promoted to director of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Mission in Albania, confesses she’s been an incessant traveler all her life and left Stoneham at an early age.
“I was born at the big hospital on Spot Pond. … I certainly think the richness of the Boston area was formative and important,” she said in response to what seeded her international career. “I think one thing that characterized the schools of the area was, at least when I was a kid, that they took advantage of the cultural opportunities of the area.”
“Whether we went to the Museum of Fine Arts or a historical museum for instance, I think it helped create an awareness and a sensitivity to issues of culture and history beyond the borders of the city,” she said.
After attending Simmons College, interning at the World Bank, and attending graduate school at UCLA, she dipped her toes in the waters of the Foreign Service for the first time by volunteering in the Peace Corps.
“That just fit best. I wasn’t interested in joining a firm and delivering a particular product. I wasn’t interested in a particular religious or evangelical approach. There are a lot of good people interested in missionary type work — saving souls, that’s good work — it’s not my work,” she explained.
After her Peace Corps tour in Fiji (which she admits was paradise, albeit “wet paradise”) she went back and worked on her PhD at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Mahoney confesses she doesn’t like to leave things unfinished, yet when she went out to Tanzania to do her dissertation field research, she was hired by USAID right in the midst of her schoolwork.
“I never finished my dissertation,” she said with humored regret.
USAID mission
USAID has “primary pillars” in their mission, according to Mahoney, which include promoting economic growth and development, democracy and good governance, peace and security and investing in people. The organization promotes these areas through programs, commodities and technical assistance. “We do it in over a hundred countries around the world,” she explained.
“The U.S. Mission in Albania was founded in 1992 just after the fall of the Communist regime — there was a very xenophobic reactionary regime in power in Albania up to the fall of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe,” she said. “The [U.S.] government’s truly committed to economic reform and to democratic process so our role in Albania is focused primarily on economic growth activities and on promoting democracy and good governance.”
Mahoney emphasizes Albania is the “glue that holds the region together,” an often politically fractured and fracturing peninsula.
“They don’t call it Balkanization for nothing; it’s a fragile region. We’ve fought two wars in that region — we fought in Bosnia and we fought to protect the Kosovars,” she said.
Mahoney is excited about the Obama Administration and its approach as a “good global citizen” both in the region she works in and throughout the world. And she considers the U.S. efforts in Albania essential for continuing a deep friendship that serves and enriches both republics.
As for Mahoney’s work in Albania, she confronts many obstacles from funding shelters for trafficked women and children to constructing court facilities and commissioning entire industrial parks. She speaks fluent Swahili, some French and Italian, and is versed in Arabic and Fijian. As for tackling Albanian, she found it to be a “very difficult language,” linguistically closest to ancient Illyrian, a dead tongue.
“It’s a very exciting time to be associated with the Foreign Service and it’s a very exciting time to be associated with this administration in our work abroad and we’re hiring — lots of people,” she said, encouraging local residents to apply.
