Call Her Chief

Michelle Gyles-McDonnough, wife of Jamaican High Commissioner Lorne McDonnough, admits to being a high achiever, and a precocious one, accustomed to mixing with people older than herself.

Asked how old she is, she has to pause to calculate. “I never remember my age,” she said. “I never think about it.”

Born and brought up in Kingston, she went to university in the United States and worked there for several years before going to Trinidad and Tobago with her husband, four years ago.

At 34, she has been a lawyer in Washington DC, legal adviser to the Jamaican Embassy there, and a member of the Secretary General’s Cabinet in the Organisation of American States (OAS).

Today she is Chief of the Caribbean’s Sub-Regional Resource Facility (SURF), in the Port of Spain office of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

She uses terms like “challenge” and “career path” casually. Behind the smile and pretty face no doubt lurk an acute and ordered intellect, and a firm self-confidence and ambition.

She and her husband got married “on a little piece of Jamaica”, the High Commissioner’s residence in Ellerslie Park, soon after he was posted in Trinidad.

They met while she was working at the OAS in Washington, and he, a career diplomat, had been seconded there from the Jamaican foreign service.

They had planned to get married in June, 1999. In January he was told he would be going to Trinidad and Tobago. She decided to follow, and they brought the date forward to early 1999. It was very hectic.

“I decided, well I’d love to come to Trinidad but I need to make sure I find a challenging job,” said Gyles-McDonnough. “I learnt of this position in the UNDP here which they had been trying to fill for some time, so I decided to apply and was successful.”

She went to Port of Spain and opened the SURF office.

The wives of other High Commissioners or Ambassadors in Trinidad & Tobago have complained that they haven’t been allowed to work. But Gyles-McDonnough thinks this hasn’t been a problem for her because it’s as if her posting was done by the United Nations.

Also, where there is a reciprocity agreement between countries, the spouse of an officer in a foreign mission is allowed to work. Gyles-McDonnough believes this must apply to her as a Jamaican.

She and her husband, who is 51, have an eight-month-old daughter, Sydney Greer, who was born in the United States. High Commissioner McDonnough has three daughters by an earlier marriage, Kaili, Lyndsey, and Camille.

“It’s been a good experience here in Trinidad and Tobago,” Gyles-McDonnough remarked. “Having been in the US, I was ready to come back to the Caribbean. I’m one of these integrationists and think the whole Caribbean belongs to me, so it didn’t matter where in the Caribbean I was coming to, as long as I was back here.”

She thinks Trinidad is a very easy place to live. The common Caribbean element made it easier for her to fit in. Even so, she believes there are features unique to individual Caribbean societies and cultures.

“One of the things I’ve found fascinating is how Latin Trinis are in some ways without recognising it, and I am saying this as someone who has worked in Latin America while in the OAS,” she remarked.

It’s something outside of ‘parang’. It’s in attitudes and body language and dress, “she suggested.

In Kingston, Gyles-McDonnough grew up with five brothers and three sisters.

Her father started out as a mechanic and eventually worked for the Jamaican agent for Volkswagen, Nissan and Oldsmobile. He was the manager of branches in Ocho Rios and Mandeville.

Her mother, who died recently, was a housewife while her children were growing up and became a nurse late in life.

Gyles-McDonnough’s brothers and sisters are scattered now, employed in diverse occupations, mainly in the US. One sister is an advertising executive in Jamaica, another is a chemical engineer. One brother is a banker, another is in education, one is a factory worker and another is in printing.

“I keep the surname Gyles because I’d like to maintain my identity as a woman, though there’s nothing wrong with assuming the name of your husband,” she explained. “It was also because I had a professional career before meeting my husband, and with the network I had built previously I was more easily recognisable as Michelle Gyles than Michelle McDonnough.”

Gyles isn’t a common name in Jamaica so everyone with it is probably related. The family has political roots so the name is, “very recognisable among some people”.

Gyles-McDonnough’s father’s cousin, John Percival Gyles, in the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), was Minister of Agriculture in the first post-independence government.

Gyles-McDonnough went to Immaculate Conception High School. After A-levels, including French and Spanish, she went to the US, to Bryn Mawr College, “one of the Seven Sisters”, to do economics and French.

From 1989-92 she was at the Columbia University Law School, leaving with honours in international and foreign law.

In 1992 she sat the New York Bar Exam, then joined Winthrop, Stimson, Putnam & Roberts, and practised law in Washington.

“In January 1994 I went to work on contract with the Jamaican Embassy in Washington as legal adviser and stayed till December 1995,” Gyles-McDonnough recalled. “I was the first legal officer we had in a mission abroad and the first contract person in our foreign service.”

She felt the Jamaica Government saw the need to employ her because its “foreign policy was shifting heavily towards international trade.”

She is a trade lawyer and, “there wasn’t a real breadth of experience in the trade field in the Caribbean,” she explained.

She never had any trouble as a woman in the foreign service because, she said, most people in the Jamaican foreign service are women, a trend she has noticed throughout the Caribbean.

In early 1996, Gyles-McDonnough landed a job she still speaks about with the greatest enthusiasm.

“I was asked to join the Cabinet of the Secretary General of the OAS, César Gaviria, who had been President of Colombia,” she said.

“I enjoyed that job immensely, it was very challenging and called for all kinds of skills – diplomatic, personal and technical.”

Gyles-McDonnough speaks Spanish, so it wasn’t a problem that most OAS member countries, which she had to visit as part of her job, are Spanish speaking.

The job meant another first.

“What helped make the job more interesting was that I was the only female in the Cabinet, and I was also the first ever Caribbean national in it,” she noted.

Her principal role was to advise the Secretary General on trade, as well as Caribbean economic and political issues.

“If you know anything about the OAS or Caribbean-Latin American affairs in organisations where both regions are represented,” she observed, “you will understand that the Caribbean tends not to get the kind of attention it deserves.”

People tend to see Caribbean states as small, middle-income countries that don’t need much assistance.

“I saw my job as an excellent opportunity to have the perspectives of the Caribbean spoken for at the highest decision-making level in the OAS,” Gyles-McDonnough stressed. “I think I was able to achieve quite a lot in the area of trade.”

A trade unit was established in the OAS while she was there.

She had joined the OAS full of optimism because Gaviria had just become Secretary General with the intention of reforming the organisation, which had lost its role, its real place in the hemisphere.

“I think he was able to do that to a large extent,” she maintained, “and it was very fulfilling for me to be able to contribute in many dimensions including trade and the organisation’s role in development.”

One challenge she particularly enjoyed was preparing a proposal to establish a new tourism unit in the OAS.

“It was not only conceptual, to bring out what the unit’s structure, functions and role should be, but also meant selling the idea to the organisation,” she explained. “There was a tendency to see tourism issues as applying only to the Caribbean, and not to one of the largest industries in the world.”

Only when figures on the table caught the attention of the organisation and its members was the tourism unit established, Gyles-McDonnough explained.

“Tourism is, for example, among the top five contributors to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Uruguay,” she pointed out. “Tourism (both domestic and international) is currently the world’s largest industry, producing an estimated 10.9 per cent of world GDP.”

Gyles-McDonnough was also asked to help reform the department that provides fellowships to students across the Americas, and spent eight months doing this.

“The OAS was a challenging experience,” she said, “and I think even just being able to navigate and position the Caribbean within a Latino culture was important.”

Is Gyles-McDonnough worried by crime or reports of terrorism in Trinidad and Tobago?

“Worried, yes, but perhaps in a different sense,” she noted. “I’m concerned at the escalation of crime. I said a couple of years ago that I was a bit concerned that there is quite a disparity here between the wealthy and the poor.”

It is all through the Caribbean, but she has been looking at it here as someone in the UNDP whose business is development.

“There is so much wealth, the economy is growing, but there is little distribution of wealth to the benefit of the poor,” Gyles-McDonnough maintained. “A lot of people who are disadvantaged just see the wealth in front of them but can’t get a piece of it and there is a rising frustration.”

Two years ago, when she first noticed this, she hoped Trinidad and Tobago would be able to address it, or the country would start spiralling down a path it would be difficult to retreat from.

“My concern now is that I see the country going down that path, though it’s early days yet,” she cautioned. “It’s still retrievable, there’s still hope because the means to do it exist here.”