Bernadette Allen: Devoted lifetime of public service

A bulletin board in her high school in the Washington, D.C. area got Bernadette Allen to Central College.

“They used to have these business boards where you tore off cards, and this card asked if you wanted to study abroad at Central College,” Allen said. “I had studied French and Spanish in high school, so I filled it out, Central sent a representative to meet with me, and I enrolled.”

Thus began an odyssey that has propelled Allen through a lifetime of public service abroad. Majoring in French and linguistics, Allen spent a summer and a full year on the Paris program and loved it. Even so, she hadn’t envisioned herself working overseas. “I wanted to work with refugees and immigrants coming into the U.S., helping them get re-settled,” she said.

After graduating from Central in 1978, Allen took advantage of a Central partnership with schools in France where participants teach ESL classes at a French high school. While there, she met officials at the U.S. Consulate who knew her uncle — an employee of the U.S. State Department — and who urged her to look at a life of foreign service.

“At the same time, I’m teaching classes as the first American assigned to this school in Marseilles,” Allen said. “Most of these kids had never seen a black person. I knew I needed to educate them about the melting pot in the United States.”

“I looked at the world differently after my junior year,” she said. “I came home with a different lens.” 

Her contacts at the Consulate continued to persuade her that foreign service needed more women, more minorities. Allen took the written test, passed it and was then called to take the oral examination.

“Before I knew it, I was headed to my first assignment in Africa,” she said.

Over the years, Allen’s work led her to the U.S. Embassy in Burundi, as a Foreign Service Officer in the Philippines, positions with the U.S. Department of State in China and as U.S. Ambassador to Niger. Her knowledge of French helped her immensely.

“All of my Africa assignments were in Francophile countries, and I could go immediately into my assignments without months of French language training.”

She also speaks Mandarin Chinese, for which she attended a language school.

Although her path was not typical for foreign service since she didn’t study political science, she stayed within the State Department.

“As for being an ambassador to Niger — I didn’t envision that happening,” she admitted.

Allen believes Central students and alumni who go abroad will see that the world is a lot smaller than they think.

“We used to be able to be isolated, but it’s impossible to live only with a domestic eye anymore,” Allen said. “We need an international perspective to make it in the future. All of these companies are going global and now our financial situation is so interlinked with the world market.”

What students learn about their own country while abroad is equally as important as what they learn about the country where they’re staying, she said.

“After 9/11, people tend to look at the negative side and think there are so many people around the world who dislike what’s going on in the U.S.,” she said. “But more people want to get here so they can taste a part of democracy. So many young people are dying to get into U.S. universities so they can carry home what they learned abroad here.”

Allen is now retired and spending time catching up with her family in the States. But she considers the beginning of her international adventures her time at Central on an exchange program to France.

“I looked at the world differently after my junior year,” she said. “I came home with a different lens.”