Ambassador Pamela Bridgewater knows a thing or two about keeping the peace.
The Fredericksburg native and Walker-Grant High School alumna spoke about a career spent on the world stage at the Fredericksburg Visitor Center last Sunday before signing copies of her memoir, Bridging Troubled Waters.
A Virginia State University graduate, Bridgewater earned her master of arts degree from the University of Cincinnati before taking teaching positions at Morgan State, Bowie State and Voorhees College, eventually entering the US Foreign Service in 1980.
Over the course of her 30+ year career, Bridgewater would be named US Ambassador to three nations by as many administrations; first in Benin under President Clinton, then Ghana under President Bush and finally in Jamaica under President Obama.
Before her trio of posts abroad, Bridgewater was the longest-serving diplomat in South Africa, including a position in Pretoria, or the “bastion of Afrikanerdom” as Bridgewater referred to it on Sunday.
“Apartheid had not ended when I went to South Africa. My mother said I was one screw a little loose, or one beer short of a 6-pack!” Bridgewater joked.
The career diplomat would next work as Consul General in Durbin under then-President Nelson Mandela during South Africa’s shift from apartheid to democracy.
Bridgewater talked about working in the “killing fields” KwaZulu-Natal with no personal security and efforts to reach out to all of the parties that form the country’s wide ranging demographics.
“My brush was very, very board,” she recalled.
Bridgewater read a passage about her work in Liberia as a Special Coordinator for Peace during the peak of that country’s civil war in the early 2000s. That included a meeting with a rebel leader operating out of neighboring Guinea to encourage him allow much needed aid convoys to reach civilians.
“I became more confident when I saw this young Liberian, responsible in part for so much carnage amongst his countrymen, listen and take note of every word I said,” Bridgewater read.
The Ambassador told the audience she then went “off-script” in questioning the rebel how he would be judged by history before encouraging him to take a “higher course of action.”
That meeting was a success. Bridgewater says that after a mobile call to “his boys,” the rebels agreed to a cease-fire and allowed aid to reach those in need.
“That day’s diplomatic breakthrough occurred in a dark room in a basement in a hotel in Guinea,” Bridgewater concluded.
“Bridging Troubled Waters” is available for purchase now.
