Washington, DC
[Remarks as Prepared]
ADMINISTRATOR SAMANTHA POWER: Great to be here, and I hope you can hear in Tajikistan. And, we are really, really grateful to our Ambassador there, for not only attending, but for seeming already to know what he's getting in John Riordan. How did that happen? John, just been planting, you know, already writing for the Ambassador.
I really want to thank you, Ambassador [Manuel] Micaller [Jr.], truly, also for the partnership with USAID, for making time, you know, in mid-August, to be part of this celebration, and for really seeming to recognize, you know, why these occasions matter so much. There are days like this in our lives that are few and far between, and we should seize them and enjoy them and share them. But, thank you for making time. Thanks also to Deputy Chief of Mission [Valizoda] Pirumsho, and thanks for all the efforts to strengthen the U.S.-Tajik partnership.
I also want to mention – welcome, I should say – the friends, family, and colleagues that John has attracted here today, both virtually, and, you know, actually in this room, from all around the world. Would encourage friends and loved ones to turn on your cameras, if you can, so that John can see who's here with us today. It's a wonderful feeling, just so you know, from within this room, to look up and to see all of your faces. This is your life procession.
Here in the room, we have John's amazing parents, Bill and Kathy. We have John's wife, Olena – who I will come back to; their daughter, Sophia, who’s incredibly well behaved; their son, Daniel, who is nine.
We normally spend 15 minutes before these sessions digging into really substantive policy matters and reform issues that our new Mission Directors will be taking on. For the previous 15 minutes, we talked only about tennis. Because the entire family is a tennis playing family. They play every day. They've already checked out the Tajik tennis facilities. Apparently, there’s a tennis court at the Embassy, Ambassador, that nobody else will be using for the next several years. They've got coaches lined up. And, Daniel recently won a major tennis tournament in Romania where all the winners of all the other tournaments came together, and Daniel was the one who slayed them all. Go, Daniel! Look at this, we got some confetti in the house for Daniel. That's for you.
John loves to take Sophia and Daniel to museums, walks in the park, and they love, again, hitting this ball together. Many adventures, Daniel and Sophia, are awaiting you in Tajikistan. I think you're going to have a blast together as a family. They start school, if you can believe it, next Wednesday, so no rest for the weary. Luckily, it's a really short flight, so you'll be all good.
We also have here with us, John's sisters, Meg, Katie, and Annie, as well as Annie's husband Josh, and their daughter Patty. Welcome. And, we are joined by a multitude of other extended families, too numerous to name individually. This is, after all, a family named Riordan. So, it would actually be impossible for any family named Riordan to name all the individual members – such are the Irish! But, we're really delighted all of you could be here in person and online.
I do want to recognize Olena, who is also a public servant and has served both as a political officer at the State Department and as a project management specialist for economic growth here at USAID. But, Olena, you know, thank you for your service.
Olena is originally from eastern Ukraine, which is why I'm here in my Ukrainian colors. But, when the war started, Olena and John brought Olena's parents to Moldova. She's from Eastern Ukraine, and really, really difficult to witness, you know, what her family and their neighbors have endured because of Russian aggression, but they opened their home. Her parents came, several extended family members came, who are, again, fleeing Putin's violence. John has a deep personal connection to Eastern Europe. They live what is at stake in this war every day. And, I think, you know, part of the intensity of the commitment both Olena and John bring to public service derives from really understanding how fleeting freedom and security can be. And so, we are just really grateful to both of you for harnessing your pain, honestly, into, again, the intensity of effort that you both bring. So, thank you.
John grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, raised by public school educators in a hard-working middle class family. It's his parents who instilled that commitment to service, encouraging him to shovel the neighbor's snow in the winter – of which there was a lot – and taking part in serving food to disadvantaged communities in the city.
This passion for service continued through his time at Marquette, and through a service program, he spent the summer of his junior year building houses in a disadvantaged community in West Virginia. His friend Joseph Kelly recalled, “When most of the others just wanted to be at the pool, I remember John up on the roof in 90-degree weather. He was grateful for the experience to meet people and help out, and he had that grin and the cock of the eyebrow that showed he really relished it.”
After college, John followed his older sister Meg's footsteps and joined the Peace Corps. She had served in Kazakhstan, and when applying, John ticked Eastern Europe/Central Asia as his top preference. He arrived in the Kyrgyz Republic in 1998, seven years after the fall of the Soviet Union, and was fascinated by Central Asia's emerging, independent nations and their paths into the future. Even after his Peace Corps service ended, he stayed in the region, taking a job with an educational exchange program. His friend John Morrisroe noted, “He was happy as a clam there. A lot of us went over, but only a handful of us stuck around. Not that many people have his level of inquisitiveness, and he mastered Russian, which you don't learn that well without diving head first into the culture – hangovers and all.”
In graduate school, John pursued Russian, Eastern European, and Central Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, securing a Fulbright grant to return yet again to Central Asia, this time to Uzbekistan, where he collected oral histories from elders to better understand the formation of – attempted formation of – Soviet identity in Central Asia. During this time, he met some USAID Foreign Service Officers and Foreign Service Nationals in Tashkent and learned about their work to improve people's lives. This inspired him to join USAID as a Foreign Service Officer, and we are so fortunate that he did.
Early in his career, he was posted to Iraq back in 2006 – a very difficult, turbulent time, violent time – amid what was an increasingly deadly insurgency that severely impeded USAID’s ability to operate, among other things, with rockets raining into the Green Zone not far from the U.S. compound. He soon replaced an officer who had been injured in the line of duty and became acting director of what was a really critical team, the Mission’s Governance and Provincial Reconstruction Team. John took on a staff of dozens of people and a portfolio worth about $1 billion – the size of which he would like to have replicated in Tajikistan, but will not be happening during his tenure, but it is a growth area for this Mission, for this Agency, for sure, and for our country.
As a young Foreign Service Officer in Iraq, here he was, joining very senior level interagency meetings among ambassadors and generals, and making the case for why development progress was so crucial and why stability and security would not be possible without it. John's ability to hold his own in these meetings caught the attention of interagency leaders. John began to serve as the sole USAID officer on the new joint interagency task force, sharing recommendations for stabilization, economic development, conflict resolution, humanitarian assistance. At the time, he advised and worked closely with General [James] McConville, now a four star general and retired Chief of Staff of the Army, who said – and I have to just – this is a quote, “John Riordan is the finest and most talented USAID development advisor that I have ever seen. He has improved interagency coordination 1,000 percent. Clone him and make more of him.”
So, smartly, USAID gave John a promotion and named him Country Representative in Belarus, where his life changed forever during a trip he took to Kyiv. While out on the town one night, he met a woman named Olena. She was not immediately charmed. She had not seen his forehand at that time, but John wooed her by taking her on dates to the local art museum, and later by impressing her parents with his excellent language skills.
He then was assigned to be USAID’s Country Representative in Uzbekistan in 2014, a time when our office's budget was modest, and USAID was still building relationships with the government. Some in Washington questioned whether we should further reduce our efforts, leaving John's team worried that their programs might be cut entirely. Morale was low, but in this challenging environment, John's optimism and his determination thrived.
He started a threefold campaign in the office. First, he focused on communications, so that people in Uzbekistan and Washington alike would better understand what USAID was actually doing in the country and why it mattered. John led the USAID team to ramp up our press outreach, and, within a year, local media coverage dramatically increased. At the same time, John ramped up communications with Washington, sending regular updates to keep Uzbekistan on the radar. And, in 2017, amid really drastic and unfortunate budget cuts for our missions in Central Asia, Uzbekistan's budget actually increased.
Second, he intentionally cultivated the Mission's sense of shared purpose and optimism – a recurring theme. John worked with the team to think creatively about how they could make progress despite limited funding, and he began the now famous Mission Uzbekistan tradition of talking shop while eating melon together in the office.
Third, John pushed a ‘progress beyond programs’ mentality before we had the term or mindset – formal mindset – for it, focusing on strengthening donor coordination and building relationships to pool resources for greater impact, even when we had limited funding. For instance, he organized the first in-person meetings between the International Organization for Migration and the foreign minister, which paved the way for IOM’s formal registration in Uzbekistan and the opening of their office there. As Ilgiza Sharapova, a Foreign Service National colleague in Uzbekistan, put it, “He was always on the forefront of innovation, of creativity, you name it. When others would just be starting, he'd already be doing it.”
According to Ilgiza, through all of this work, John prepared and laid the seeds for the country office to evolve into a full-fledged mission. Our Mission Director in Uzbekistan, David Hoffman, said, quote, “Those of us who work in Uzbekistan today are reaping the benefits of that Riordan optimism, a tectonic optimism that subsumes everything in its way.”
On his most recent tour, where I first got to see John in action, he served as the Deputy Mission Director in Moldova. Upon his arrival, the team noticed a certain obsession. As his colleague Andrew Segars put it, “He walks around the office with honey. The guy keeps a selection of honeys in his office. He's a honey proselytizer. He'd extol the virtues of Moldovan honey to anyone who would listen.”
Moldova produces some of the most amazing honey in the world, so John was excited to be there. But he was ecstatic to learn that USAID has helped Moldova protect their apiaries from poisonous pesticides. John dove into helping Moldova reduce the use of these pesticides, and in just two years, his team reduced the number of apiary poisonings threefold, from 20 cases in 2022 to just seven cases of apiary poisoning in 2023. Well done. There's not a specific award for the person who brings about the most significant apiary poisoning reductions, but, if there were, I think you would win that award. But, actually there are profits, there are cleanup costs, there are collateral effects of these poisonings, and reducing pesticide use is amazingly important, of course, for the environment.
As Russia started its horrific, full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Moldova faced unprecedented challenges. It may be the obvious challenges of being potentially a target itself, certainly a target of disinformation and all kinds of interference, but other challenges that are maybe less visible even to those of us who have worked a lot on trying to advance development in Moldova. USAID in Ukraine had provided crucial operational support to our small Mission in Moldova for about 30 years, and there was no blueprint for transitioning Moldova into a self-sufficient mission when, of course, the team in Ukraine had its work cut out for us – you know, first dislocated entirely from Kyiv, and then responding to the challenges of a vicious conflict.
So, here's Moldova, long supported by the Mission in Ukraine, trying to figure out how to make do at a very, very difficult time for them in terms of the economy, energy, the number of displaced people coming from Ukraine. They needed people to fill the new gaps that had been created, so John advocated fiercely with Washington to get that support. By the time his work was done, the Mission had increased in size from 31 positions to 56 plus another 25 still being filled as we speak. USAID/Moldova is now an exporter of support services to other missions in the region.
I know the team in Moldova is very sad to bid farewell to their honey-eating, wisdom-spouting John Riordan, as they call him, but they know, as we do, that Tajikistan is gaining a true leader, a convener, a catalyzer, a friend – and it is facing a significant juncture in its history.
One of the world's youngest countries with a median age of just 23, Tajikistan is home to a surplus of young people hungry for good opportunities. They are eager to fulfill their potential at home, rather than abroad. And Tajikistan is forging stronger relationships with its Central Asian neighbors to work collectively to improve their security and boost regional economic growth.
Challenges remain: more than 27 percent of the population lives on less than $2 a day. Food insecurity is very high. It's a country prone to significant natural disasters, and Tajikistan is particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. We are continuing, of course, as the United States, to make clear our concerns about the repression of civil society, independent media, freedom of expression, all of which, when opened up, will actually enhance and steepen the development trajectory, and which are critical for long term economic development.
Despite these challenges, the Tajik people remain resilient. USAID is going to continue to support their work to build a more stable, sovereign, and prosperous Tajikistan with greater protection for their rights and for civil society. Under John's leadership, we will help Tajikistan consolidate the benefits of regional connectivity by boosting trade opportunities and economic independence and by strengthening energy and water security. And, I must say, I was at the meeting that President Biden had with the leaders of the Central Asian countries at the UN General Assembly last year, and this was the number one cris de coeur from Tajikistan: water, water, water. Energy, energy, energy. And, all of the leaders, of course, embracing the importance of regional connectivity. We continue to push for advancing transparent, responsive governance, and as we work to connect more of Tajikistan's businesses to new export markets, to help them grow and create new jobs, we will help the people of Tajikistan to be a more resilient participant in a changing world economy. And, we know that the young people of Tajikistan have so much to offer. It is a matter of figuring out how to unlock that potential.
In John, team Tajikistan – as it seems like you already know – you are gaining someone with enormous creativity, deep love for the people and cultures of this extraordinary region, and that legendary Riordan optimism. He also has a really unusual record, you know, even in an agency of people who get things done – that is their life, that is their daily bread, getting things done – John really stands out for the amount that he gets done per day, per week, per year, when he gets to don the USAID badge and work for the U.S. government family.
We can't wait to see what this small but mighty team in Tajikistan, and this small but mighty portion of the Riordan family, does when you all come together. We couldn't be more excited for you, more grateful to your entire family, John, for supporting you in this endeavor, and we know we'll be hearing from you, filled with ideas for how we make our resources go further and make the biggest possible difference for the people of Tajikistan.
Thank you, all. Congratulations.