The Resilient Ambassador

Yemen -- Almost 10 years to the date after Barbara Bodine emerged from the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait following a 110-day siege by the Iraqi military, she found herself in the middle of another crisis in the region -- the bombing of the USS Cole.

   Speaking to the international press just days after the bombing, Bodine -- the U.S. Ambassador to Yemen -- praised the crew of the Cole for their enduring, positive attitude through the tragedy. Her words echo those she said after the siege in Kuwait had ended, nearly a decade before.

   "We persisted and we survived. What was good was being able to see how human nature can endure," Bodine, who was deputy chief in the embassy at the time, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

   A career diplomat, Bodine embodies endurance. "Bodine fought her way up the ranks of the State Department during a time when women seldom advanced," reports the Post-Dispatch. "Now, at the top, she is U.S. Ambassador to a country where men are just now letting women out on the streets."

   For much of her career, she has been forging new ground. Just the fourth woman in foreign service receive Chinese language training, Bodine is the first woman to hold a diplomatic post in Yemen.

   A graduate of Tufts' Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, she says her career gives her a close understanding of the issues facing the women of Yemen. "If I sit with a Yemeni woman and she's talking about breaking through barriers, the resistance, hostilities and all of the problems she's going through, I know what she's talking about," Bodine told the St. Louis newspaper.

   But it is the political conflicts in the region that often dominate her time. In 1999, she negotiated for hours to release three Americans kidnapped in the country. Most recently, she has begun to rebuild relations between the US and Yemen.

   "We've been working well with the Yemenis," she told the Irish Times just a week ago. "[The bombing of the USS Cole] has not damaged this relationship. If that was one of the goals of the people who did the attack on the Cole, they have failed." As she proved a decade ago in Kuwait, Bodine has the endurance to survive just about anything.

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