Meeting the President

It’s not required, but it is considered a courtesy for directors of international organizations playing a major role in the country’s development to meet with representatives of the government upon undertaking their duties.  Though I was here last year as a project director and had already met the Ministers of Health, Agriculture, and Foreign Affairs, the previous ADRA director and the current board chair both strongly recommended I present myself to the president of the country as a diplomatic gesture.  This way my first time meeting a sitting head of state – I have previously met Kenneth Kaunda, the former president of Zambia, and attended a speech by former president Bill Clinton at the University of Florida, though I did not personally meet him, but I had never met a president while he was still serving in office.

The local ADRA board chair took me to the president’s house to introduce me, having attended school with the president when they were both boys.  The presidential mansion is a stately pink edifice in the center of town, surrounded by a tall, black, wrought-iron fence and armed guards posted at every gate.  Hardly anyone checked our credentials upon entering.  Either the board chair is well-known, security is lax, or they don’t dare question anyone entering while wearing full suits for fear of embarrassing themselves with foreign dignitaries!  In any case, getting in was easy.  Getting an actual audience with the president was a much slower process.  We sat in the waiting room, the president’s benign visage gazing down charitably upon us from an oversized portrait on the opposite wall.  The furnishings seemed well appointed – beautiful Persian rugs, ornate wood and glass coffee tables, fresh cut tropical flowers adorning vases throughout the room.  Forgive me if I’m a stickler, but I did see chipped paint on one corner of the wall!  It just jumped out at me, given that this was the president’s mansion!

Suddenly, the doors burst open and we were escorted upstairs past an enormous tapestry depicting traditional Saotomean dances, past fancy marble colonnades, and into a spacious room fitted with the finest and fanciest furniture to be seen anywhere on the island – furniture befitting a president.  After a brief wait in this (which turned out to be the receiving room), a side door burst open and in strode the president confidently, extending his hand to each of us present in the room.  After greetings and small chit-chat, I was presented as the new ADRA director by our board chair, and the president followed up with a few appropriate questions which I answered with ease in Portuguese.  Then, his attention turned to our board chair, his old childhood buddy, and they dominated the rest of the half hour conversation with reminiscences of old times and catching up on what’s been happening recently in each others’ lives.  Our board chair is also the president of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in this country, and the president of the republic had LOTS of questions about our beliefs and our evangelistic intentions here.  “Do Adventists permit a man to marry more than one woman?”  “Do Adventists believe in the end of the world?”  “Why are Adventists and Pentecostals growing so rapidly in numbers in this country, while Catholic numbers are languishing?”  His questions fired rapidly upon one another, and our board chair did his best to keep up the pace with his answers.  Finally, the president said, “I could never be an Adventist myself!  I cannot keep myself to one woman!  That’s the life of a president!  But I really appreciate what the churches are doing in our country.  The government cannot do it all.  We do not have enough money.  It’s hard being the president of a poor country.  Yet the churches have the ear of the majority of the population, and you can reach people in ways that we cannot.”

The rest of our visit was uneventful except for the power outage that occurred in the middle of our conversation!  Apparently, even the president’s house is not immune from the fickle power supply of EMAE (the national electricity company)!  I would have thought they’d have an immediate backup, but we sat in at least 10 seconds of absolute darkness (it was after sunset) before the generators kicked in.  Nobody seemed the least bit concerned and kept chatting away as if nothing had happened.  Again, either a serious security breach or implicit trust in our delegation not to engage in any 10-second shenanigans while the power was out!

(Photo authored by Ricardo Stuckert/ABr and produced by Agência Brasil).