THIS REGION IS WHERE HER PASSIONS ARE

One issue that concerns Ishmael is how Caribbean islands are losing their coastlines to foreign ownership

By Kathy Ann Waterman

Sunday Express

February 15, 1998

Page 15

People often think she is a man because her name is Len. And when they hear Dr. before her name, then they are really convinced. "When they see me, they ask if I'm his secretary. Depending on the mood I'm in, I could have fun with that."

Dr. Len Ishmael, a development planner, is the regional director of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (Eclac), with offices on Park Street, Port of Spain. She took up the post in August last year.

When she was living in Barbados in the early Nineties and still married to cardiologist Dr. Richard Ishmael, she got confused with him all the time.

"My name really is just Len. My father wanted a boy."

In her homeland of St Lucia, nobody confuses her with anybody.

They just have to look past the tumble of gold-brown curls at the long face with the pointed chin and pronounced cheekbones, and they know that's Lewis Prudent's eldest girl.

"Ich Prudent?" they ask in patois.

Ishmael has spent more than 20 years travelling the world to work with governments and international organizations on managing natural resources and development planning.

She has been described as "unflappable" and her living room is done up in pastels, with the palest pink leather furniture.

But this is also a woman who likes James Bond movies and "You should see her on the tennis court; she's vicious," one friend said.

Ishmael was living on Long Island, New York with her two sons and working for Lead International, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, before joining Eclac.

Before that, she was an associate professor at the Cave Hill campus in Barbados and running her own consultancy firm.

She took the Eclac job so she could return to the region. "Because that's where my passions are."

Eclac operates as a think-tank, developing research that informs government policy.

It also offers technical assistance and project management.

One issue that concerns Ishmael is how Caribbean islands are losing their coastlines to foreign ownership. "What do we leave to our kids if we no longer own our land?"

While there are a lot of "good intentions" towards sustainable development in the region, the way to "know the currency of those intentions" is to watch how governments allocate resources, Ishmael said.

Her doctorate is in urban planning and development economics from the University of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

But stripped down, this woman is really a geography junkie. It was her best subject in high school and her first degree at Mona, UWI was in geography and economics.

She loves maps. "A map for me is a living thing. It makes every sense to me. It's my compass. If I see a street I don't know, I go up it. I'm curious about how it articulates into a main street. My boys hate it. They say, oh, she's exploring again."

In her three years as director of Lead International, Ishmael did a lot of exploring as she circled the globe.

That organization sets out to promote changes in development policies. "If we have to change the world, we have to change people's attitudes. One way to do that is by bringing people together from different cultures…So a Chinese would meet for the first time with a Kenyan.

The organization would choose 15 to 20 scientists, anthropologists, economists, planners and other professionals and expose them to two years of academic work and field training.

Ishmael got another education in what happens when you put the cultures of the world in one room.

Nigerians complained about people sitting with the soles of their shoes or feet facing them.

The passionate Brazilian and Mexican men would embrace their new friends, offending the Indonesian women, who were Muslim and preferred a hands-off policy between the sexes.

"If a Japanese gives you his calling card, don't put it in your wallet and sit on it. It's offensive. The card is presented ceremonially. And people from Western countries would say, oh, I don't want to work with the Japanese; they never talk. Then the Japanese would say, Len, nobody ever invites me to speak."

In keeping the groups happy and working, Ishmael relied on her own experiences as a child who discovered what it meant to be different.

Her father, who came from the fishing village of Gros Islet, now famous for its Friday night fetes, was a soldier in the British army, in the signals corps.

He was posted to Germany when Ishmael was four. "It was good. I learnt about being black," she said, with an assertive nod.

As the only black child in school, "I didn't know I was different until I heard that word. What do you mean I’m black? I bathed this morning. Am I dirty?

I came home one day and asked my mother what does it mean?

She told me when you go to school tomorrow, look around you. By the age of six, I was conscious."

Her mother, Helen, did not adjust as well, since she didn't speak the language and had to give up her career as a teacher in St Lucia.

So when Ishmael was 11, her mother took her and her baby sister back to Castries. Her father gave up soldiering shortly after and joined the family.

"It was sad. Something in him died. My dad walked like a soldier, talked like a soldier. He was very young looking, enormously popular. My dad was a man's man. The army was his life. He gave it up for us."

She looked awestruck everytime a question about her father came up. "I loved that man," she said, shaking her curls.

She kept mentioning how handsome and popular he was. He died seven years ago at age 63, "with hardly any gray, still looking like the soldier".

Her mother continues to live in Castries.

But St Lucia, with its hills like rumpled emerald velvet, is just about ruined for Ishmael now.

Her youngest brother, Wayne, died in 1995 in a car accident there at 21. "St Lucia for me was him. Just like my father, he was enormously popular. People loved him. I was Waynie Pru's sister."

Most importantly now, she is Terry's and Chad's mother.

Aged 16 and 13, Terry has an American accent, Chad a Barbadian, reflecting their mother's globetrotting life.

Last year, they were with her in Zimbabwe and got to meet President Robert Mugabe.

Ishmael does the mommy guilt thing too. "You always think, what if…?" When she travels without them, she calls them every night and they wait up for the call. "Wherever I go, my sons know they can interrupt me when I'm with anybody at any time. And they do. That's one rule I have in my office: if my sons call, you get me."

Terry was distraught when Ishmael decided to move to Trinidad and take up the Eclac post. "He played tennis for his school, he had a girlfriend, he was going to miss senior prom. I felt pretty bad and ended up making a pact with him." If by December, he didn't like the change, they would rethink the plan.

By December, Terry was installed as a major hunk among his peers and liking it quite well. He attends the International School in Diego Martin while Chad goes to QRC, Port of Spain.

Ishmael likes to think her boys have an appreciation of her work and want to live up to her expectations of them - even if they used to get embarrassed when she picked them up at school in her white BMW convertible.

They said she looked like a Barbie doll.

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