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Following is an excerpt from an interview with late Betty Atherton, who accompanied her husband, Ambassador Alfred Leroy "Roy" Atherton Jr. in his assignment to Egypt 1979-1983. This interview by Mary Louise Weiss, took place in Oct 1987 for the Foreign Service Family Oral History Project. The topic explored the creation of Community Services Association in response to Betty’s interest in mental health issues in the Foreign Service relating to families.

ATHERTON: … When we went to Cairo in 1979, I told Roy my dream for that fast-growing community was that all my thoughts and ideas about a full support program overseas, similar to what one has here (in the U.S.), might come to fruition.

The first thing I did was get to know as many of the leaders of the community as possible, not only within the Embassy but the entire American community which was growing by leaps and bounds at that point. I learned that there had been earlier attempts to start some kind of a counseling program but that it didn't have enough support and had fallen through. In due course I met the people, the leaders, who could make things happen.

We came back to D.C. in February of '80 right after (President) Reagan had been sworn in, for the Sadat state visit. I went to check in, with MED, as I always do. The executive director of MED, Jerry Rose, asked me, "Are you going to get that mental health program off the ground in Cairo?" I said, "Well, I haven't even been there a year yet, but I am meeting the people who are going to."

Q: It had been started when you first arrived?

ATHERTON: No, they had tried it. There had been a survey of a small part of the community, not the official community.

Q: Had you received the seed money yet?

ATHERTON: No, no, nothing. The Department had nothing to do with that survey. It was strictly the Maadi Community Church and people from the non-official American community who had seen the need for such a program, but it had not gotten off the ground at all. So Jerry said, "You know, there is a couple leaving Kuala Lumpur where they have been doing a very similar program to this for four years. You ought to grab them." And I said, "But we don't have any money. We don't have anything." And he said, "Well, you better get cracking because they'll be finding a place." We returned to Cairo, and by April I had talked to the people again, Roy had written a letter to the heads of the different businesses, we had a meeting of the business people at the Embassy with Roy presiding, and we showed "The Kabul Experience". The business people's mouths fell open when they saw Cyrus Vance (Secretary of State) sitting there, listening avidly and really caring. We had follow-up discussions, and by May we were able to borrow some money from the Cairo American College, [ … ] on the condition we'd pay it back right away. With that money, we brought the couple in Kuala Lumpur to Cairo for a week's visit. We had a look at them; they had a look at us. There was instant mutual understanding and appreciation. In September (1980) they returned to start the new program. I spent a whole summer writing letters to all the American corporations with representatives in Cairo, asking for contributions. We got the money. Gale Metcalf and Joel Wallach were the couple. They came with their son Joshua, who was eight months old when he arrived in Cairo. They have just left (Oct. 1987) after all these years and are now in Taiwan where they are establishing a similar program for the community there. It was the Community Services Association, as we called it.

Q: Of Cairo?

ATHERTON: Just Community Services Association. It is for all English-speaking people in Cairo and environs.

Q: Tell me more about it. What services did it offer?

ATHERTON: Well, it started out in a nice modest way while Gale and Joel got to know the people, to build the confidence of the community in Gale and Joel, and for them to identify the community's needs. So it started out with a little continuing education program--Arabic lessons.

Q: Was this at the college?

ATHERTON: No. The Embassy gave us, rent-free, two apartments until the inspectors came along, and then we had to pay the rent. The apartment on the second floor was for Gale and Joel, the other, on the ground floor, was the CSA office. These were apartments that nobody wanted to live in, after the new embassy apartments were built, so they had gone begging for some time. The Embassy had continued paying rent on them anyway, so it seemed an ideal use for them. The Embassy also helped furnish them. With the money from business contributions, we hired a secretary. So we started out with Gale and Joel and a secretary. From the beginning, the continuing ed program paid for itself--people paid to attend classes, and the teachers were paid from the tuition fees. The classes were held at CSA and at Cairo American College, which is about only a ten-minute walk from CSA.

Q: Did Metcalf and Wallach run only counseling services, or did they run other courses and programs?

ATHERTON: They started out with the continuing ed because that was a good way to acquaint people with the program and not scare them off because of the preventive mental health aspect. Gale and Joel were quickly accepted by the community. They taught part-time at Cairo American College, a course on human relations. So that way they got to know the children and the teachers when they were on the campus. They did counseling, they developed orientation programs for newcomers, an orientation program for new students and staff at Cairo American College, and eventually counseling. There were people who asked me, after we started Community Services Association, “Why? After all, Cairo is a wonderful place to live. You've got the pyramids, and you've got the sphinx, and it's very exotic.” It's a fair question. Cairo is, on the other hand, a very congested city. Maadi, in the suburbs where most of the foreigners live, is also quite congested. In '79 and '80 traffic was unbelievable; it would take as much as an hour and a half to drive ten miles from Maadi to Cairo. There were a lot of little annoyances which, in isolation, were not stressful, but when you put them all together they were. Also, the American community grew from about 35 Americans in 1974, when diplomatic relations were restored, to over two-thousand Americans. The Embassy alone, including AID and the military missions, numbered about 600 employees.

Q: Isn't it the largest AID program in the world?

ATHERTON: It is, and because the military are also part of the Embassy, Cairo is the largest mission in the world. The people in the whole American community are extremely diverse, so that you don't have, as you would in a small post, quite the same kind of homogeneity. There were and are many needs to be met. We had a large number of oil company people, where the men were in the oil fields of offshore sites for two weeks and came back to their families for two weeks. That's a disruptive kind of life, a very stressful life. [ … ]

Q: Were there many teenagers there while you were there? What did they do doing the summer? Were there any employment opportunities?

ATHERTON: Eventually there were. Some of the businesses and the Embassy and CSA had an employment program. Also, Community Services Association ran a summer program where the teenagers were involved, with adult supervision. This was a program for children from first grade through sixth grade. It was a very good program. For two summers I offered a summer studies skills program similar to the one I did down at Kingsbury Lab School for junior-high students in a one-on-one tutoring. We developed, working very closely with the Egyptian Government's Ministry of Information, a series of telephone tapes, so that one could dial a number, like a hotline, and ask for a particular tape. Some of the tapes were: "Being New in Cairo," "Signals of a Heart Attack," "How to Deal With Depression," "Hepatitis," "Problems With Young Children," "Coping With Stress," "Animal Bites," "Finding and Employing Household Help." These were one to three-minutes long, and said for further information, come to CSA. It was wonderful for a person who was feeling lonely to just dial CSA and say, I would like to hear tape No. 99 on being lonely.

Q: Who was managing the tapes?

ATHERTON: Gale and Joel did all of this ....

Q: Was it certain hours of the day or evening?

ATHERTON: There were about eighteen hours; we had the office open about eighteen hours a day with volunteers. When I left in '83, there were something like fifty volunteers, and I'm told there are over a hundred now.

Q: You were keeping a lot of people busy who otherwise might not know what to do.

ATHERTON: The other thing I guess that might be somewhat unique about Cairo, (certainly there are many other countries where this would apply), and that is the language. Arabic is not an easy language to learn. There is an extra isolation factor if you don't speak the language. So, finding someone who speaks English or who hears English on the telephone, can be very, very helpful.

Q: Was there a large business community? American...

ATHERTON: Very large, very large. American, British and French.

Q: And they helped support CSA?

ATHERTON: Yes, they did, from the beginning. I would say they provided about 90% of the support. I should add that what also got us going besides the money we borrowed from CAC (Cairo American College), was the seed money that we received from the State Department Mental Health Grants. Those grants continued every year, usually a little less each year, and that was the State Department's contribution to CSA.

Q: Do you remember how much the first seed money was?

ATHERTON: Twenty thousand dollars. Out of that we were able to repay Cairo American College and pay part of Gale and Joel's salaries. Then we got contributions. We increased the tuition fees for the continuing education and the other programs, trying to keep them reasonable but still making them cover the costs. For counseling there was a fee, except for children; there was no fee for counseling children. And the programs--I was just looking at the 1983 budget which is quite different from what it is now. Our programs income covered 50% of our costs, with 32% from grants and donations from the business community, 16% from the grant from the State Department, and 3% was other monies we got. Today I believe the program income takes care of about 70% of the total budget with grants, and contributions covering the balance.

Q: Do they depend on fund-raising programs or efforts in order to supplement any of this?

ATHERTON: To start with we did. We had barbecues (chuckle), largely barbecues because those were very popular there, but most of the money came from getting the corporations to have their home offices make a donation every year through their own foundations.

Q: Was there any resistance to setting this up originally?

ATHERTON: No. The Ambassador was for it, so not too many people were against it. If they were, they were awfully quiet. No, there really wasn't, what we did do was to make sure that the Egyptian Government was informed all along the line. [ … ]

Q: So the government did not resist, but were supporting you in their own way, helping you.

ATHERTON: Yes, absolutely. With the telephone tapes we wanted to be sure that we weren't running into any difficulties or showing insensitivity of the Egyptians. Many of the volunteers wrote the original drafts, and at least three of us reviewed them and put them into final draft form. We then submitted them for approval to the Ministry of Information where there were two Egyptians who were very interested in this who had lived in the States and understood what this was all about. Anything that they felt should not go on the telephone tapes they recommended that we put out in pamphlet form. For instance, in a country where drinking is frowned on because of religious taboos, our information on alcoholism we didn't put on tape; we just prepared the brochure. Eventually, we prepared brochures on all the teletape topics.

Q: Were those printing costs part of the budget, or were there any volunteer printers?

ATHERTON: No, we paid for the printing, but printing was not all that expensive -- as long as we had it camera-ready. So it was going great. I was chairman (of the board) for the first three years. The Director of AID then became chairman, followed by the head of AMOCO in Cairo. The fourth chairman was the head of the Office of Military Cooperation at the Embassy. They were looking for his replacement when I was out there in July, and they were hoping they could persuade the new AID Director to do it. I don't know if they have or not. CSA has clout and it's very well recognized. About 2,000 people attend the continuing education courses in any given year.

Q: You get a lot of credit for that. You really launched it. I also want to put in a little kudos for Roy Atherton who was Ambassador. In this article on Foreign Service families in the State News of June '81, it said, "Ambassadors must be community leaders."

ATHERTON: Hear! Hear!