Calmness at the heart of the storm

Profile: After turning down an offer to work on Wall Street after graduation, American Ann Wyman went travelling, falling in love with a country which she saw descend into violence and chaos firsthand during the Arab Spring, writes Gillian Duncan

Illustration by Christopher Burke for The National

Ann Wyman found herself in Tunis as the revolution kicked off, but the American was there because it was where she had made her home. What helped her through the unrest was strength of character - which comes as no surprise to those who know her, Gillian Duncan writes...

Flying into Tunis on that now-infamous January day last year, one of the first things Ann Wyman noticed was a plume of smoke rising from the city.

Just hours after her aircraft touched down in Tunisia's capital, another took off from the same airport carrying the target of the violence and anger: the former president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

But Ms Wyman's arrival at the peak of the unrest was not a badly timed business trip. The American was returning to a country that had become her home.

"You didn't know what to expect when you arrived at the airport," she says.

"But when you are a mum and you have kids there and your husband is there, you have one thing on your mind and nothing really seems insurmountable," adds Ms Wyman, who uses her maiden name, despite marrying Zouhair Ouakaa, a Tunisian, in 1994.

At the time, she was based in London for her job with Nomura, running emerging-markets research in Europe, but she used to fly back to Tunis every weekend.

The family moved there the previous year to let the children experience the Tunisian side of their heritage and, until protests broke out in December 2010, it had felt very safe.

The catalyst was a desperate act by an impoverished street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, who set himself on fire to protest at the confiscation of his electronic weighing scales and public humiliation at the hands of a municipal official - setting off a wave of unrest that swept across some other parts of the Arab world.

For several weeks the strife remained outside Tunisia's capital, but protests built there in the end.

"Things that happen outside Tunis when you're based in it seem miles away, not only just in terms of distance but they are world apart sometimes," she says.

"The last few days went from just a few people out to loads of people out on the streets," adds Ms Wyman, who has two children, Rayan, 11, and Maya, who is 7.

As things got worse, schools closed and the government imposed night-time curfews.

"That's also a very strange experience, living in a place where you are not allowed physically to leave your home at night time … In the worst days it was even earlier than sundown," she says.

The sense of loneliness was unsettling, but there were moments of solidarity, when people gathered in their apartment building to create phone chains with names of whom to call if someone unwanted turned up. Other residents volunteered to stand guard outside, and a pharmacist who lived in the building stockpiled medical supplies.

Down below, the military patrolled the streets watching for signs of rebellion.

"We saw people dragged out of homes having fled and got caught. We saw some things that were disturbing, not everyday, run-of-the-mill police activity - put it that way," she says.

Ms Wyman reveals these dramatic details only when pushed and describes them in a way that lends credence to a friend's observation of her character.

Two things stand out about her, according to Jeff Shafer, who was once the undersecretary of the US Treasury for international affairs during the Clinton administration, and Ms Wyman's former boss at Citi. One is how smart she is, and the other is how resilient she can be.

"Things happen and she deals with them," says Mr Shafer.

"One of the most impressive things was during the worst of the turmoil in Tunis last year, she was sitting in her in-laws' apartment with the kids, sending emails to her friends around the world giving us a real-time report of what was going on and was very calm, which was remarkable," he adds.

From their own building, the Wymans could see people intently monitoring their radios or televisions across the way, watching and waiting for the symbols of the state to disappear.

"You periodically had people hanging out of their windows yelling something into the street during curfew," she says.

"I don't know how to explain it. It was like an old fashioned village. People would hang their heads out and shout 'he's gone'," she says.

The scene was a world apart from her own upbringing in a commuting suburb of New Jersey. And if it were not for a bold decision she made in her youth, Ms Wyman may have remained in the United States.

Graduating with an international relations and French degree from the University of Pennsylvania, Ms Wyman was presented with an offer to work on Wall Street.

"I kind of accepted the offer and several months before graduation balked and said 'oh my gosh, I can see my whole life in front of me. I know exactly what's going to happen. I'm going to live in New York, meet somebody here', and I thought, 'That's not me,'" she says.

She decided to go travelling - something few Americans do, she says. She wanted to go somewhere in the developing world, so she approached her stepfather, who was working for AT&T doing business development in emerging markets, for advice. He thought about it for a while and suggested Tunisia, giving her a few business cards for people he knew there.

"I called a couple of people and one of them said 'why don't you just come and we'll see what we can do when you get here'," she recalls.

"I just packed my bag and left and ended up finding a job working [in an internship] for Citi, which was nice for a while and then I realised that I wasn't getting as much of the international [experience]," she says.

Ms Wyman left there and volunteered for the Tunisian government for a time, introducing American brands to the country.

About this time, Ms Wyman met her future husband. They later moved to Spain for a time to teach English before returning to the US, where she went to graduate school at Columbia University.

"They brought you in it at the beginning of the programme and said 'for those of you who are interested in international development, you're really special people. It is a noble cause,'" she says. "'But you need to know that it doesn't pay. You will make no money.'"

She then switched to international economic policy and finance - a course that paved the way for her to work in emerging-markets research for major banks. She left her role with Nomura, which took her to Dubai regularly, late last year.

But since leaving she has put her professional - and personal - experience of the uprising to good use.

Ms Wyman has become a senior adviser to Gatehouse Advisory Partners, a strategic consulting firm in London, where she is helping to build a consulting service that helps companies assess the ways in which geopolitics affect their businesses - from both a risk and an opportunity perspective.

"Here in Tunisia, I have joined a private equity/venture capital fund which is raising money to invest in the interior disadvantaged regions of the country," says Ms Wyman.

"The size of the projects are quite small, and the mandate of the fund is not only to make attractive returns, but to invest in the country's future by focusing on areas that were left behind by the previous administration," she adds.

twitter: Follow and share our breaking business news. Follow us

iPad users can follow our twitterfeed via Flipboard - just search for Ind_Insights on the app.