UN Pride

I was proud to work at the United Nations. Proud when I got offered the job, proud when my first consultant contract got renewed, proud most of all when after 20 months of hard work, I was hired as a staff member. I bought UN bumper stickers (for my non-existent car) and a UN peace mousepad. I sailed through the staff entrance (no more security check-in!) proud and thrilled to work there, to be part of something so important, to dedicate my time to an organization that represented all of my most closely held ideals: universality, peace, diplomacy. I marveled at the many languages and cultures I witnessed and how each block between UN HQ and Grand Central brought me back to a more New York New York, from this hybrid and multiple territory. I loved everything I got to learn – it was like school, I said! – and I showed up on time to events for a full year, clutching my notebook and looking around expectantly, waiting for the work to start.

Within this giant and overwhelming behemoth, as I learned and re-learned its never-ending acronyms, navigated around its renovations and shuttered entrances, there was one tiny piece of it I loved the most: my own organization. A difficult mouthful of a name, a confusing (lack of) mandate, a semi-autonomous structure meant it took me six months to figure out what we did, exactly; staff turnover and two offices separated by the Atlantic Ocean and half of Europe meant my responsibilities were constantly shifting and my title never quite a good descriptor of what my actual job was. We were externally facing, tasked with information and communications, with planning events and building relationships and swimming through different pieces of the UN structure depending on what we were asked or who we tried to help. We were flexible, nearly always about to run out of money, all of us on one or two month contracts, with technology that never wanted to function and mountains of work that would never be finished. I loved it. 

And I was proud of my office, too, proud that we straddled one of the most progressive edges of the UN, that we worked on innovative finance and rights-based development and renewable energy. Proud of myself, that when the New York boss left I kept it afloat, along with a colleague I never agreed with who was only a few years older than I.

Most of all I was proud of the relationships I made, of the people I got to know in and around the UN, whose trust I earned and whom I learned from. My work community included all kinds of people, of all ages and from all corners of the world. They were smart people, good people, complicated people, with egos and dysfunctions just like anywhere else. I was proud to be one of them.