Word: bertini
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...just days before Easter and housewife Laure Bertini walks the aisles of the Manor supermarket in downtown Geneva, looking for holiday treats. "Chocolate will always be at the top of my shopping list, regardless of the economy," she says, filling her cart with gold-foil-wrapped chocolate bunnies from the Swiss maker Lindt...
...bombs started falling, around 2.5 million Afghans had fled 20 years of war and four years of drought and crossed into neighboring Pakistan. Of the 22 million who remained in their benighted country, around 4 million depended on food donated by foreign charities. World Food Program executive director Catherine Bertini said last week that the WFP needs to ship around 52,000 tons of wheat a month into Afghanistan to feed the hungry. "If there are serious impediments," she warned, "then we could be looking at a humanitarian catastrophe." Bertini's apprehension was shared by six international aid agencies...
...Bertini is a novelty in many other respects. A lifelong self-styled "Republican feminist," she was initially backed by the Administration of George Bush the Elder for the U.N. job, but she also won the endorsement of the Clinton Administration after her first five-year term. Senator Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont, urged Clinton to keep her in Rome after her first term. "She's shown extraordinary ability with no sign of partisan activity, and as a result, she's been enormously effective," Leahy says. When she took over, Bertini had never been to Africa and did not speak...
Growing up in Cortland, N.Y., Bertini originally wanted to be a music teacher but then got interested in government service. She majored in political science at the State University of New York in Albany and later did a fellowship at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. She jumped at the WFP post "because jobs like this come once in a lifetime." Since 1988 she's been married to Thomas Haskell, a photographer who enjoys globe trotting with her (although he once got separated from a WFP motorcade in Mogadishu and was held at gunpoint...
Bernd Kaess, a German who was Bertini's chief of staff for 3 1/2 years, credits her with making the WFP known and appreciated by donor countries. Under her tenure the operating budget dipped from $1.6 billion to $1.2 billion, but is now nearly $1.9 billion, an all-time high. "She found the money," Kaess says, "and she put WFP on the map." Kaess also credits Bertini with decentralizing the WFP. Says he: "If we were in El Salvador 24 hours after the earthquake, that was because of decentralization." More than 80% of the WFP's 6,000 employees work...