My name is Wiwan, and I will be your guide today."
Working as a guide has provided a unique experience to hundreds of women and–beginning in 1977–men from around the world. It entails intensive training, daily encounters with the public, and collaboration with other internationally spirited individuals.
The Guides
Since the beginning, guides have come from around the world, held deep interests in international affairs, and wielded impressive communication skills. There have also been musicians, athletes, actors, and academics in their ranks. Who could be a guide has also broadened–most notably with the inclusion of men and pregnant women in the 1970s.
Life, October 4, 1954
Magazine cover of Mary Leela Rao, Span, June 1962
Wiwan Worawan, the daughter of Thailand’s foreign minister and UN delegate, worked as a guide in 1954, hoping that the experience would help lead to a career in diplomacy.
Every day, she told a reporter, she tried to “send visitors away a bit more optimistic about the world’s future than when they arrived.”
Mary Leela K. Rao was an Indian track-and-field star, representing India at the 1956 Olympics and breaking her country’s record for 80 metres hurdles. She also excelled in academics, winning the prestigious Coro Foundation Internship in Public Affairs and completing a master’s in communication from Stanford University. It was a natural transition to becoming a guide. Rao told a journalist: “My job starts each morning in the classroom with a briefing on UN happenings the day before. I’m always learning. Nothing is static and it’s never boring.”
Tina Baensch-Raver
Tina Baensch-Raver, who was born in 1938 in Germany to an American mother and a German father, was always interested in attaining an international career. Before becoming a guide, she founded an international students club as an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and studied French at the Sorbonne in Paris.
“Whatever it was that I could do to further international relationships or international peace was at the forefront of my goals.”
Yuichi Takamatsu [Photo Yuichi Takamatsu]
It was a mention of the UN in a social studies textbook that sparked the interest of Yuichi Takamatsu, a Japanese national, while he was in high school. Later he said to himself, “I’d like to be a part of this organization,” striving “for the betterment of the world.”
Silmara Roman [Photo UN/VSS]
Brazilian guide Silmara Roman is one the new guides who joined in April 2022. She has a master’s degree in theatre that she didn’t realize was an asset for the UN. “When I came in I didn’t feel like I could even use something like the theatre” in this job, but I started to make “the connection in my own heart.”
Herta Maria Engelhart [Photo UN/VSS]
Herta Maria Engelhart, from Austria, became a tour guide at the UN in Vienna in 2004, before moving to New York in 2013. As a student in Geneva, she recalled, the esteem of the organization was so high that “never would I have dared to approach the UN.”
Papa Thiecoro Dembele [Photo UN/VSS]
Papa Thiecoro Dembele, a Senegalese tour guide since 2015, discusses how being a guide has given him an opportunity to understand how the UN system works. “I honestly think this is one of the best jobs I ever had and that I will ever have in the future”.
The Best Education in International Affairs
For most of the guides, their experience at the UN transformed them–whether it was the weeks of intensive training, the daily briefings updating them on the UN and the world, or the international encounters that working at the UN enabled. It was, a French-American guide from the early 1960s noted, “the best education in international affairs that you can get anywhere.”
Photo UN/Yutaka Nagata
Before beginning to take visitors on tours, guides must undergo a multi-week intensive training session in which they study the UN, its history and its day-to-day operations, as well as the headquarters’ architecture, the gifts from member-states, and various other topics that come up in tours.
Karen LeShufy, an American guide from the mid-1960s recalls:
“They really took us from the very concept from the very beginning of how the UN got founded, why it got founded, from the League of Nations onto the UN...”
Photo UN
Pat Fagin Scott, an African-American guide from the early 1960s, discusses the daily briefings.
“You had to be up on what was going on in the world.”
Pat Fagin Scott [Photo Ebony Magazine]
Pat Fagin Scott discusses the experience of working at the UN after growing up in a segregated city in the United States. “For me to come from this world and plant my feet in the United Nations world where nobody saw my color, my skin color, and my hair texture as a reason to push me to the side or to discredit me, or to diminish me as a human being. Oh gosh. It gave me a feeling of a aliveness and openness and freedom that I didn’t even know I wasn’t experiencing.”
Adeyemi Oshunrinade [Photo Adeyemi Oshunrinade]
Adeyemi Oshunrinade, a Nigerian/American guide from the early 2000s, discusses the “rigorous” training that guides undertake.
“That is one thing so unique about the Guided Tour Unit. Unlike every other department at the United Nations, they know everything about the organization.”
Kevin Kennedy [Photo UN]
Kevin Kennedy, an American guide from the late 1970s who later became a briefing officer, explains the aim of the daily briefing for the guides.
“There were three things that drove them: The first is the news of the day. The other thing was the UN’s agenda [...] The third thing was how to deal with people.”
Forming Friendships in New York and Beyond
Streaming into New York from around the world, guides have formed their own international community. Cohort after cohort, guides have become acquainted with one another–in the guides lounge, on the job, and in the big city.
Because of the location of the headquarters, guides experienced New York life—from the good to the bad.
Judith Steiner [Photo Judith Steiner]
Judith Steiner, a Canadian guide from the 1960s, discusses the experience of coming to New York as a young woman.
“It was bright lights and big city and glamourous.”
Abbie Krasne [Photo UN]
Abbie Krasne, an American guide from the 1950s, discusses how some guides faced racial discrimination in housing.
“Even New York was not that liberal.”
The guides lounge has been a place of community, camaraderie, and much needed relaxation.
October 1964 [Photo UN/Yutaka Nagata]
Pat Fagin Scott [Photo UN]
Jonathan Mishal [Photo UN/VSS]
Jonathan Mishal, a UN guide and an urban explorer from Chicago who grew up in Israel, describes what the lounge means to him: “There is no other place like this in the world.”
Judith Steiner [Photo Judith Steiner]
In the photo above on the left, guides partake in a game of bridge between tours. Above on the right, a group of tour guides relax in their lounge between tours. Pat Fagin Scott, an African-American guide from the early 1960s, discusses how the job enabled intimate international friendships.
“I was vicariously traveling the world through the experiences of my friends.”
Judith Steiner discusses the camaraderie that guides felt for one another.
“The experience that men used to have from being in the army.”
Christine Murdoch [Photo UN]
Christine Murdoch, an American guide from the 1980s, discusses how being a guide brought her lifelong friends from around the world.
“For a lot of us, it was our first really big job. Those are very formative years... We just grew up together.”