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In this episode, Messellech “Selley” Abebe sits down with Maury Mendenhall to discuss what happened when USAID – the United States Agency for International Development – was suddenly dismantled, how that decision rippled into the daily lives of children around the world, and what it means for families who lost life-saving support overnight. Mendenhall is a longtime humanitarian and former USAID leader who spent nearly two decades helping communities access food, safety, and critical HIV care. Together, Abebe and Mendenhall explore the human cost of abrupt policy change, the resilience of local partners who continue the work against all odds, and why protecting global child welfare remains urgent and essential.

To learn more about Maury Mendenhall and her work, you can keep up with her emergency campaign A Crisis in Care.

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Transcript

Selley Abebe  0:01  

What happens when a critical program designed to save millions of lives suddenly disappears?

Maury Mendenhall  0:08  

This was so abrupt. This was so abrupt. No one was prepared for this. And the project that gave me this information, they just feel such guilt and such pain because they think this is something that we could have fixed. There are so many children that are getting more sick that are not getting the services that they are needing, and are dying in ways that we could have prevented. And that is just so frustrating. It is so frustrating, it’s so sad. It just is such a helpless feeling.

Selley Abebe  0:40  

Hey, ambassadors, welcome back to Speaking of Kids. Selley here today, we’re talking about what happens when politics and policy collide with children’s lives, when the safety nets we build to protect kids around the world are suddenly pulled out from under them. It’s easy to think of foreign aid as something far away, like numbers on a spreadsheet, dollars sent overseas, but for families depending on that help, those programs are a matter of life or death. That’s our conversation today. If speaking of kids helps you see how the headlines land in real homes with kids just like ours. Share the show. Help us reach more listeners. Today’s guest is Maurie Mendenhall. Maury spent nearly two decades at USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, helping families around the world access, food, medicine and safety. Earlier this year, after a sudden political shift, she and her entire department were let go overnight, and as you’ll hear, that decision didn’t just end careers, it ended literal lifelines. Maury’s story is about what happens when systems evaporate, and what it looks like to keep helping anyway.

Selley Abebe  2:13  

Welcome Maury, I’m so happy to have you here.

Maury Mendenhall  2:16  

I’m happy to be here. This is great. You know, I’m a huge fan. I already said I was a huge fan. I

Selley Abebe  2:21  

I appreciate it. I appreciate it. We need more ambassadors and folks like you tuning in. You know, so I just, I want to jump right in. In January of this year, you, along with really, the rest of the nation, learned that USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, was dismantled and your role was terminated, which must have been devastating. And you know you said that after USAID programs were abruptly halted, children began dying. And kids you had spent your whole entire career trying to protect were no longer getting the support and aid that you worked so hard for them, you know, to build. You and so many. What did that moment feel like for you?

Maury Mendenhall   3:08  

Ooh, yeah, that was quite an interesting and very confusing time. So in early January, I was in Ethiopia, and I was working on this new project that I was really excited about. I just found funding for this. We were working with the Ministry of Health. We were working with partners that PEPFAR was supporting, and they had already hired these great case managers and social workers, and we were trying to find a way for those workers to be on call at health facilities when children were abused. And so this was kind of a new move, something that we were very excited about, and we were kind of starting these conversations, we were ready to get things going. And the day after the inauguration, then we were told that we were supposed to cancel all meetings. We were not allowed to talk with our partners, to talk with anyone outside of the United States. And then I was told that I would have to return to the United States more quickly than I expected. And when I arrived back to the United States, I arrived in the morning, and I remember I went straight to the office because I just wanted to know what was going on. And at that point, half of the staff in my office had been fired, so the office was empty. By the end of that week, I received an email at 4:50pm in the afternoon on Friday, and was told that I had 10 minutes to grab, you know, whatever I needed, and then I would be escorted from the building. I felt so isolated because we no longer had access to our work phones or our work emails or our computers. It was very, very difficult to know what was going on. I learned after a while that the reason that my team was one of the first to be put on administrative leave was because we had gender in the title of our job description. The work that I was doing to support children orphaned and made vulnerable by HIV AIDS, and girls ages 10 to 25 who were at a very high risk of HIV AIDS but were not yet HIV positive, support for mothers who were HIV positive, but trying to make sure that the children that were born to them were not going to be HIV positive as well. That was something that was no longer a priority for the US government. So not just for PEPFAR, but for the US government. But then after that, of course, everyone at USAID was put on administrative leave as well, but it was just hard to know what was going to happen to all of these different projects that I was so committed to. I’m very committed to medication for people who are HIV positive. That is something that we need to get to people as quickly as possible, but it took a long time for that medication to become available to people when you shut the US government down, when you tell them that we need to stop programming immediately and, and sit on it for 90 days. So what happened was, in many of these countries, is some people were provided just half of their medication, which meant that it was not sufficient to keep HIV from becoming non virally suppressed, and so people were getting progressively more sick.

Selley Abebe  6:25  

Wow. It’s hard to imagine. You know, USAID has been around for, you know, since the early 60s. 

Maury Mendenhall  6:33

Yes.

Selley Abebe  6:33

You know. And when you talk about cuts like this and foreign aid being cut so quickly and so fast, a big part of what we’re trying to do as part of this body of work on the podcast is helping people understand how decisions made in Washington and in state capitals around the country really have real implications, not only on citizens domestically but globally. You know, when you look at what happened now in terms of kids losing access to medication, food, vaccines, does it feel a little bit like the US government has turned its back on some of the most vulnerable in the world?

Maury Mendenhall   7:09  

I feel that way. When all of this happened to me, I went through like, all of those five stages of grief, like all at once. I feel like in other parts of the world, this process is, is taking a little longer. I think there’s a lot of confusion, and then there’s a lot of hope, too. That this is a mistake, and people in the United States are going to realize what’s happening, and they’re going to change their mind, and the United States will be back. And we just need to be patient, and we just need to wait. USAID has been part of their family for such a long, long time, it’s just so hard to believe why anyone would kind of end that relationship, particularly when things were going so well. It just doesn’t make sense. It seems like a cruel thing to do, and they do not know the United States as a cruel country.

Selley Abebe  7:59  

What led you to working for USAID?

Maury Mendenhall   8:03  

I didn’t know anything about USAID until I was about 20 years old, and I was in Guatemala. I was learning Spanish, I was providing support to children who were not getting enough food. And I remember seeing those bags, those USAID bags with hands on them, and it says from the American people. And I thought, wow, this is so awesome. The United States is so awesome. I am so proud to be American. And I didn’t know at that point very much about what the United States was doing in the United States or internationally. It was very exciting to know that the United States was doing good things that I didn’t know about. And, you know, it took me a while to get to USAID. I was a missionary in Zimbabwe right after I graduated from college when I was in Guatemala, that was the first time that I’d seen children living on the streets. And I thought, Oh, well, that’s not good. That’s what I want to work on. That’s what I want to, what I want to deal with. And I thought, Well, I think that’s what social workers do. So I did a master’s of social work, and then I worked as a presidential management fellow under President George W. Bush, and I worked at the Department of Labor, and I worked with children who were involved in child labor, and kind of dangerous child labor. I moved on to a lot of work that I really loved with, with UNICEF, with the International Rescue Committee, but when there was an opportunity to go to USAID and to do this work with children, I just jumped at it. I felt like, Yes, this is where I want to be, and I want to be here for the rest of my life. I worked for, it was a great relationship. I worked for USAID for 17 years. 

Selley Abebe  9:42

Wow.

Maury Mendenhall  9:42

Much longer than I ever imagined. And I never, never imagined leaving.

Selley Abebe  9:47  

You know, just to kind of take a step back here, for people that have never heard of USAID before, how would you explain what the agency did?

Maury Mendenhall   9:56  

Well, kind of the goal of USAID is pretty fundamental. USAID was providing humanitarian support, was providing economic strengthening, trying to help, particularly people within countries that were facing really difficult situations, to get to a point where they could support themselves. We did a lot around health, and I think that’s what we hear most about now, because we want the entire world to be healthy. Whenever, you know people aren’t healthy, then all of us are at risk of not being healthy. The United States was doing just some really fundamental things. Things that I think that would make a lot of sense for people if they knew a little more about it.

Selley Abebe  10:38  

Yeah, you know you talked earlier about, at the top of this conversation about doing a program in Ethiopia. My family’s from Ethiopia, and I spent some time during college. I had done a few fellowships there. And, you know, the work is remarkable. And, you know, I remember one of my favorite aunts is originally from Mississippi. If I talk to her, sometimes about international affairs, or especially, you know, around African development, she would always remind me that, you know, well, you don’t really need to go outside the US to really see extreme poverty, and, to your point, to see kids living in the street. And I think right now, there’s a moment where so many Americans are feeling like, you know, we have a lot of stuff to unpack domestically. For people that are grappling with how to balance global child welfare and domestic priorities, what would you say to somebody wrestling that question?

Maury Mendenhall   11:34  

That is a tough one, and I hear that one a lot lately. I mean, this is a really challenging time for the United States. I mean, I’m unemployed now, and my family is really having to, like, you know, cut corners. But one thing that I think that we need to remember is that we share this world with people in a lot of different places outside of the United States. We talk a lot about health, and I’m going to talk about HIV AIDS again. I mean, I grew up in the 80s, and I feel like I heard about AIDS all the time. And it was, it was my Boogeyman. It was the thing that I was most afraid of. And one of the things that USAID and the United States government has done really well is PEPFAR. When I was in Zimbabwe in the 1990s, I remember arriving to Zimbabwe, I remember there were friends there that were healthy, and then they had died by the time that I left Zimbabwe. I mean, people were just dying all the time. It was just kind of the way of the world. And then to be a part of PEPFAR, this program that just changed everything, and all of a sudden, people who were sick and people who were thin, and they were becoming healthy and happy and smiling. I mean, the changes with that medication is so dramatic, but what I see happening right now, and which just terrifies me, is the things that, again, that have been cut by PEPFAR, that are no longer a priority for this government are things focused on prevention. And so one of the things that we we are seeing now it’s and it’s hard to get that information, because a lot of the data that we were collecting those systems were shut down as well, and so it’s hard to kind of keep track of that. But I think by the end of the year, we might have a much better understanding of how many people have died and how many people are now HIV positive, but the rumor is that more and more people are becoming HIV positive, and as people are not able to get access to the medication that they need, they’re going to get more sick and the medication is going to become less useful. I mean, we’ve seen this happen so many times, right? When people in other parts of the world get more sick, that sickness comes to us. It doesn’t just stay in those places. We are a global world, and we move around all of the time. I know that here in the United States, we are trying to isolate ourselves. We are saying we are going to focus on the United States. We’re going to focus on us, and we want everyone who’s not a part of the United States to get out. I’m a foster parent, and so one thing that I have learned a lot from the youth that come into my house, sometimes for a short time, sometimes for a longer period of time, is, is things that have been challenging for children here in the United States for a long time, the things that they are facing are not recent problems. These are children that have nowhere to go. A lot of them have been living on the streets and working with them to get their IDs, to graduate from high school and to get jobs and things like that. That’s so exciting, and that happens because there are things in the United States that do work well. And one of the things I’ve loved about being a foster parent is learning what works in the United States. I mean, there’s always room for improvement. But I think people around the world know that there are things that work in the United States. And as long as that is true, and I hope it will continue to be true for a long time. We will be the country that people want to come to. And the really brave children in other parts of the world, the ones that aren’t afraid to leave their homes and leave their families, they come to the United States because they want more and they feel like they have more to offer. And one of the things that I felt like we were doing at USAID is kind of building those systems that we know of here in the United States and other parts of the world so that children don’t need to come to the United States. They can get social workers. They can get case managers there. They can get support. And if we want to keep the United States as kind of a small place where we won’t necessarily need to welcome more people, then we need to build these things in other countries so that people won’t need to come.

Selley Abebe  15:43  

When governments step back, people on the ground don’t just give up. They find ways to keep going anyway. After the break, Maury shares how she and her colleagues picked up the pieces and what it takes to keep kids alive when the system disappears, stick around. Welcome back to Speaking of Kids. Before the break, Maury shared what it felt like to see USAID her life’s work shut down overnight. Programs vanished, families lost support, and people she’d worked with for years were left to fend for themselves. So my next question for her was simple but heavy. When all the funding dries up and the government steps back, what do you do next? How do you keep on helping?

Maury Mendenhall   16:32  

You know initially that when we were put on administrative leave, we didn’t have access to our phones, we didn’t have access to our email addresses, we didn’t have access to our computers. We were given kind of a brief period to return to work, just two weeks, because our union, you know, wanted to give us an opportunity to kind of wrap things up and make this a little less abrupt. So when I did have access to my phone, when it did have access to my email addresses, I wanted to reach out to colleagues, knowing that we had limited time and we needed to figure out what was most important. And I thought, we need to figure out ways that we can continue to have relationships with each other, that we can communicate with each other. And so I sent out my email address, my personal email address, my personal phone number, to all of my colleagues, and so many wrote back, and we put together a list of people that we could continue to keep in touch with. And so when I realized what was happening, I first reached out to my, you know, my team here in the United States. I work very closely with debbieel, and she’s fantastic, and she’s also very committed to local partners. They were our priority. One thing that we also learned when all of this happened is that there were a lot of kind of global partners that worked with USAID, that had lawyers and they had press, and they were able to talk about what was happening in a very convincing way to people here in the United States and all over the world. But local partners couldn’t, and local partners were often the first to be terminated. And they were doing a lot of the work that I worked on, so working with communities, with families, things like that. And so I reached out to my Foreign Service Nationals. These are staff at USAID that were born and raised in the countries where we were working, and they had been working for USAID forever, and when I was put on administrative leave, and when my colleagues in different countries were put on administrative leave as well. And so the Foreign Service Nationals, they were the ones that were kind of stuck with the with the project of shutting things down, which is a really difficult process. So I reached out to them. I wanted to know what was happening, and then I also wanted to say, you’re going to know better than anyone, which are the partners that you are really concerned about, and which are the projects you’re concerned about, you know, projects that you think are offering really important work and are not able to provide that now. And I just got a long list of different partners, and they selected the cream of the crop. They said these are solid partners. They’ve been around forever. They do wonderful work, and now they’re they’re having to shut down. They’re having to fire all of their staff. And so the next thing that, that Debbie and I tried to do is find a way to get money to these different projects. It’s hard to get money from the United States to other places around the world, but we reached out to Global Giving, which is a fantastic organization that supports programs here in the United States and internationally. And we thought, you know, the United States is making these decisions to shut things down, things that I think are important. And I suspect that there are other people here in the United States that think this is important too. I want people in the world to know that this government doesn’t speak for me. I believe in you. I believe in the work that you do, and I don’t want to leave you behind. And it was really exciting to see how many people felt that way. A lot of the funding that we’ve been able to raise, and it’s been minimal, but it’s been, you know, more than expected. A lot of them used to work for USAID. So these are people that know these projects as well and and know about the impact. But then they’re also people, you know, my family, people that have really never had an understanding of what this, what this is that also are learning to believe in it as well.

Selley Abebe  20:23  

How has this shift from federal agency to grassroots efforts changed you know how you talk about this work to families, to funders, to even friends? And you know, I’ll just know again, making this like a First Focus connection, one of our signature publications is the Children’s Budget Book, where we track money that the US government is spending for children and families. And maybe about three or four years ago, we started tracking what the international share is. And so even when I share with people that domestically for all things you know, focusing on children and families, the share is around 8%. Kids make up 25% of the population, they get 8% of resources, they’re 100% of our future. When you look at international aid, it’s a sliver of that. I believe it’s less than 1%, I’m actually going to fact check it. However, when you’re talking about less than whatever this fraction is of the US government, to your point, it’s still a sizable amount in terms of what it can translate to, to programs and supports on the ground. And so how has this shift really change the way that you talk about these programs?   

Maury Mendenhall   21:43  

That is a really good question. All of that is great information. Yes, I mean, the work that USAID did was, I think it was a very small percentage of US money. Just 1% was provided to USAID, and the work that we did, and then much less of that was provided specifically for children. I think it looks like a very small percentage. And I think if people knew more about that, they would realize that canceling USAID is not going to give the United States Government significant money to do very different things. Absolutely, it’s very minimal, but it was significant internationally. I mean, there are countries that the percentage of money that they provide to support services in other parts of the world is much more, but we are such a big country and we are such a wealthy country. I mean, you still see USAID all over the world. Our name is still on hospitals and bridges and schools and things like that. USAID was everywhere. A lot of the work that that we initially provided was through a lot of global partners. So you know, some of the partners that people might be more familiar with, like save the children or the International Rescue Committee, a lot of these really significant international partners that I, you know, very committed to as well. I think they’re amazing local partners. That was kind of a big push just, you know, a few years ago, it was an agreement that everyone kind of was pretty passionate about. Let’s shift to local partners, because they’re more efficient and they’re very effective. And also our local partners, our international partners, have been working with local partners for a really long time. These partners are not new to us. We know them very well. We’ve been working with them forever. Now we just want to work with them directly. And I think the important thing to remember is that, you know, again, these partners have been around for such a long time, and when they started their programming, they started because of something that people within their communities and their families and their, their neighbors, people in the country said was needed, and so they exist because of a need that was identified within the Country. It wasn’t identified here, within the United States. And when we pull out, they will still be there, and they are still there now. Working with them has been such a pleasure because I’m so inspired when all of this happened, they did better than I did. They saw the writing on the wall and they said, okay, all of these staff, we can’t pay for them anymore, but the staff still show up every day, and they also they get calls all the time from from mothers, from families, from people in their community that say, I don’t have enough, I don’t have enough money to go to the hospital to get my medication, or my children don’t have enough food. I don’t get those calls. I think a lot of these, you know, international partners, they don’t get those calls, but our local partners do. And so they’re kind of left, kind of holding everything together, and they’re doing a pretty phenomenal job, but I’m not I worry. I don’t know how long they’ll be able to sustain a lot of. Yes, one thing that I was going to say is a lot of these local partners you’d asked about, you know, how to, how do they see the United States now, what is the kind of their perception of the United States? And when I talk to local partners, and I’m talking with these local partners much more frequently now than I had before. I mean, you know, before, I had a very kind of distant relationship with them, but now I just feel like they’re my best friends, and they are just wise and they’re brave, and they’re all these things that I want to be. And a lot of them are really missing the United States. And so when there is funding that the United States makes available, then they will always ask for it, and they will always do whatever the United States wants them to do, because they want to continue to have a relationship with the United States. But what I hear from some of these partners is that the funding that they’re provided isn’t enough to provide the services that the US government is is requiring these partners will provide these services, even when it means that they will have to pay for this out of their pockets to kind of, you know, meet these different needs, because they want to continue that relationship with the United States. They still believe in the United States. They still believe that that this could continue to be a better relationship, but it’s not good at the moment.

Selley Abebe  26:21  

You know. I think that’s what happens when there’s any level of a power dynamic, right? Is, you know, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard this, and it makes more and more sense the older I get and the deeper I get into this work, because it’s expensive to be poor, you know. And I think whenever you have power dynamics, you know, like even me working in philanthropy and nonprofit fundraising and pitching to prospect funders and foundations. Like, there’s always that power dynamic, right? And so in some cases, you do like to think of it as best as you can and as it should be, as a partnership, right? Like, these are goals that are mutually beneficial, or at least it’s helping to achieve priorities, right? Like, whatever those may be, but I think that those are all really interesting observations. And you know, for our listeners, there’s a lot of technical terminology in the aftermath of all of these cuts. You know, people hear words like disenrollment or exclusions, you know, but when you strip that all away, what does this really mean for children and families on the ground like I think stories are so powerful. Is there a story that you can help our listeners understand in terms of what does this mean? 

Maury Mendenhall   27:36  

Right, I have several stories. I heard just a couple weeks ago about a young girl in Botswana who was living on the streets, didn’t know where to go, didn’t know how to contact her case manager, didn’t know how to contact her colleagues, the people that she was working with, and ended up returning to an ex-boyfriend who was very abusive. It was her children’s father, and then they learned at the kind of early this summer that she had been killed by her abusive boyfriend. So when we don’t provide services, people cope as best they can, and sometimes the choices that they make are not safe choices and and we shouldn’t blame them for that. I mean, this was so abrupt. This was so abrupt. No one was prepared for this, least children and the project that gave me this information, they just feel such guilt and such pain about this situation because they think this is something that we could have fixed. There are so many children that are getting more sick, that are not getting the services that they are needing, and are dying in ways that we could have prevented. And that is just so frustrating. It is so frustrating. It is so sad. It just is such a helpless feeling.

Selley Abebe  28:58  

Wow, oftentimes, in certain situations, you’re really left with the least of bad choices, right? 

Maury Mendenhall  29:06

Yes.

Selley Abebe  29:06

And it’s really unfortunate that sometimes those those choices cost you your life. You know. Maury, as we wrap up this conversation, we like to end by asking our guests for a song, and I’m going to mix this with another question that I really want to ask you, because I think you’re going to have some really to have some really interesting insights, is, USAID as we know it is gone. How is it that you reimagine it? And as a, I guess, as a plug for the song, is, is there a song that helps you kind of tune out, to help you reimagine it, to get to a slightly positive place?

Maury Mendenhall   29:39  

Right, okay, I’m going to think about that song for a second, but first I want to say that I think there are a lot of things that we can do, a lot of things that we can do. Now, you’d asked me a question, and I ended my response by saying I feel so helpless, which is certainly not the place where I want to end this conversation, because I do think there’s a lot that we can do. One thing that we can do now, a very easy. Easy thing that anyone can do is go to a crisis in care through global giving and support. A lot of these partners that have been vetted by global giving that used to work for USAID that are with a little amount of funding that we’re providing, just really doing some really clever and very impressive things. So one of the really fun things that we’re trying to do to raise money for these organizations, because we don’t want this to be all depressing and say, oh, there are just so many needs. We want to find ways to get together, to support each other, to laugh, and to come up with, you know, new and brilliant ideas ourselves. And so one of the ways that we’re trying to do that is to have a comedy show on November 7, and we’re doing it with grassroots comedy. And we have some really phenomenal comedians who I think are also committed to the same things that I’m committed to. Some of them have worked for USAID before. Some of them are really just fantastic comedians that you may have heard of before, or maybe you haven’t, but you should. And then I think what we also need to remember is these kind of last minute, sort of, you know, appeals that we’re sending out to provide support to these local partners can only go so far. The US government really needs to step up and have a better understanding about what we have lost and what the world has lost, and we need to talk with our representatives and remind them that this is something that you’re committed to too, and that we should all be committed to. And there are opportunities to change this. It’s going to be very difficult to kind of reboot USAID or something like USAID, but I still think that we can, but the longer we wait to kind of, you know, go back to that really important work that we were doing, the more difficult it is going to be to kind of resurrect that, but in terms of songs. So I think I just kind of confessed to you all that I’m a child of the of the 80s and the 90s. So the song that just comes to mind is, I will survive, which, you know, Gloria Gaynor. I mean, who doesn’t love that song? That’s a fantastic song. And I do believe that, you know, I will survive. I like to believe that the rest of the world will survive. I’m remembering that one of the things that Gloria Gaynor says is to, you know, just go and walk out that door. And I want to be very clear that the US government is welcome to, you know, open that door and come back through that door at any point. We are not saying don’t come back. In fact, we would love to continue to have a relationship with, you know, something like USAID, the State Department, something new, something better. This is a relationship that was broken in the past, but I am, you know, ready to kind of improve this relationship.

Selley Abebe  33:01  

I love it, and I love that we’re ending on a note of hope, because it’s possible, right? And it’s necessary, it’s needed. So Maury, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you so much for your stories, for your insights, and for really, all the work that you have done and that you continue to do for kids around the world.

Maury Mendenhall  33:19  

Well, thank you. This has been a lot of fun. 

Selley Abebe  33:23  

You know, what I keep thinking about after talking with Maury is this idea that even when systems fall apart, the relationships don’t have to. She reminded me that local partners, community workers, even families themselves, kept showing up, sometimes without pay, sometimes without backup, people just refusing to let progress slip away. So often we talk about the government or foreign aid like they’re abstract things, but really they’re people. People who care, people who show up, people like Maury. If this episode got you thinking about how decisions made far away can change a child’s life, share it with a friend. That’s how more people hear about stories like Maury’s and how change begins again. Speaking of Kids, is a podcast by First Focus on Children. It’s produced by Windhaven Productions and Bluejay Atlantic. Elizabeth Windom is the supervising producer. Julia Windom is the editor and Jay Woodward is the Senior Producer. For more about this episode, visit first focus.org.