Still Stitching
A written narrative of Anne Gore by Savan Kong
I didn’t know Anne before the interview. I first talked to her over the phone while I was waiting at the airport, flying back from a business trip in Tennessee. We only had maybe twenty minutes. I don’t know what she made of the call.
We spoke properly a few days later, over video. Anne was in Madison County, Virginia, in the house her father built, a renovation somewhere audible behind her. There’s a moment near the beginning where I can tell there was a shift in the energy.
She’s describing her final deployment at USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance…the food pipelines, the refugee camps, the work of getting assistance to people the world had mostly stopped watching. Then she says, almost quietly, that the hardest thing she read after her termination was about babies.
Infants in Sudan. Children, her team had named in their funding documentation, whose feeding mechanisms they had called out line by line, because without those mechanisms, those children would starve.
“Makes me really angry,” she said, “to know that these children are dying and they don’t have to.”
She comes from a long line of people who were asked to leave places they loved. I don’t know if that’s why the anger sounded like something she’d been holding carefully for weeks, or if calm is just how she carries this particular thing.
A Holler in the Mountains
Anne grew up in Madison County, in the Appalachian foothills. The house she lives in now is the same house her parents organized and built in 1976. She came back to it after years at military commands, after nearly a decade at USAID, after a humanitarian career that took her to some of the worst crises on the planet. She came back and started replacing floors and fixing AC units.
But the story begins before that house. It begins with her grandmother, Lois.
Lois’s parents were migrant farmers, following the wheat harvest west through the 1910s and 1920s. Lois was born in Saskatchewan, Canada, on one of those westward trips. The family’s home was a holler in rural Appalachia, just outside what would become Shenandoah National Park.
Then the federal government decided it wanted that land.
Eminent domain moved through those mountains under Teddy Roosevelt’s parks projects, and the families who had farmed the hollers for generations were scattered into communities with different dialects and different customs. Five-year-old Lois among them.
“Internally displaced people,” Anne told me. “That’s what we’d call them today, in my work.”
I don’t know what Lois made of that scattering in the years after it happened. What Anne told me was that she made apple butter. She taught Anne how to find a quartz crystal in a creek bed. She showed her how to bake chicken and make sweet tea and whose job it was to stir what and when. She fell in love with Anne’s grandfather over letters while he was at war. She eventually buried her firstborn son.
What held those families together after the displacement was each other and the church—not the doctrine, Anne was careful to say, but the ritual. The chance to be seen by people who remembered where you’d come from.
“Her name is Lois,” Anne said. She said it mattered. That saying the names out loud keeps people alive.
The Man Who Closed the Road
Anne’s father died when she was nine. He was 41.
Anne is 46 now. She said she sometimes pauses on that.
He was the kind of man who lit up a community. Anne used the comparison herself: John Candy. When he died, they closed six miles of road in Madison County so the procession could move from one church to the other without interruption. I don’t know what nine-year-old Anne was thinking, standing at the side of that road. What she told me was that she’s been uncovering the mystery of who he was ever since.
“I knew him through nine-year-old eyes,” she said.
She gets pieces of him back through stories. Through people who remember. His death left her mother in a difficult place, navigating grief in a small rural community that did not always make it easy. Anne described her teenage years without decoration: peacekeeper, quiet, keeping things from falling apart.
“When I tend to myself,” she said, “when I need to look inside and go, who’s actually hurting right now … it’s that teenager Anne.”
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The Geography of Disaster
Anne did not plan to work in crisis response. She became a teacher, stood in front of high school classrooms in Virginia teaching geography and ancient history and earth science. She was working toward national board certification.
Then a friend overheard her talking about using GIS mapping software in her classroom (almost no other teacher was doing this at the time) and connected her with a job at a military command in Hampton Roads. The hiring conversation happened over burgers across the street from her school. The salary doubled.
What followed was eight years at the joint level: strategic planning, studying peer adversaries, developing frameworks, eventually teaching the frameworks to colonels and lieutenant commanders. And then, one disaster response after another. First, Katrina in 2005, Ebola in Liberia, major task force work across regions and humanitarian contexts.
USAID was where the work got specific.
“The military kind of hid from some of it,” she said. “The really hard questions. Whether the pallets sitting on the tarmac can actually be used by the families you’re trying to reach.”
At USAID, there was no hiding. You had to get it right, or people didn’t eat. She learned to work across sectors: food, shelter, water, medicine. She spent years deploying to disasters, managing operations under conditions she described without sentiment.
“The magic,” she said, “happened when the leader saw and heard the people on their team. When skill was connected to a human being, and those two things weren’t treated as separate.”
I’m not sure I understood everything she meant by that.
The Day They Came for the Mission
On January 21st, Anne lost access to her computer.
She didn’t receive a termination letter until February 25th. Her last official day was March 10th. DOGE had arrived at USAID.
She is angry. She said so.
The dismantling cut funding pipelines that had kept people alive. Sudan, where she was working her final deployment, lost US food assistance. The humanitarian community is going through what those still inside it call “the reset” which means the largest donor in global disaster response has withdrawn, and people are dying in the gap.
“Communities are forgotten,” she said, “not by the implementers on the ground, not by the NGOs or the locals trying to help. They’re forgotten by the organizations that provided the funding to make any of it possible.”
After her termination, Anne and two colleagues created a Signal group and held weekly calls. They connected legal resources for terminated employees. They tried to start a nonprofit for suddenly stateless Americans stationed abroad, people with children and mortgages and no legal right to stay in the cities they’d been calling home. She personally coached younger colleagues through their resumes, helped them think through what they wanted next, celebrated when they landed.
“We were like that,” she said. “Like the elephants that circle the baby.”
The Angry Quilter
Anne came back to the house her father built because her boys were there and her mother’s health needed attention and USAID had allowed her to work remotely. New floors. New AC. Old things made better without erasing what they were.
“This house is almost naturally healing for me,” she said. “And I think I’ve been healing it in return.”
Her grandmother made quilts. I don’t know if Anne makes them. What I know is that she talks about her own life in patches: vivid ones, weathered ones, what she called the crazy quilt squares, the ones made from scraps that don’t seem to fit any pattern.
The anger she carries isn’t bitterness. She named the distinction herself. She called it sacred anger.
What She’s Passing to Her Boys
Anne has two sons. Mason is into boxing. Owen is into golf.
The first thing they hear from her in the morning is that she loves them. The last thing they hear at night. Whether they’re with her or not.
“I want to raise heard, validated, resilient young men,” she said. “Young men who, when they’re frustrated, know how to communicate that. Not just absorb it.”
She talked about the young officers she’d seen late in her military career, sons of celebrated generals, walking into institutions that already knew their fathers’ names. She wondered out loud what that inheritance costs a kid still trying to find his own.
When I asked what she hoped her boys would hear if they listened to this conversation ten years from now, she paused.
“I hope they see that I led with them first,” she said. “That they are my motivators to be better.”
Then, after a beat: “I want them to know their mom had a lot to give. And that she’s still trying to figure out where to plant it. And that she wants them to be proud of her.”
Still Stitching
Anne doesn’t have a title for what comes next. She is a month and a half into a role she already knows isn’t quite right.
What she said she wants is to work for rural Appalachian Virginia, the counties whose problem sets don’t translate into the solution sets being offered out of DC or Charlottesville. The food pantry down the road. The free clinic in the next county. The families right outside her window.
“The problem sets of our rural community do not equate to the solution sets being offered,” she said. “I want to be an advocate for that story.”
When we got off the call, I thought about what she said about her grandmother, that saying the names out loud keeps people alive. I don’t know if that’s literally true. What I know is that Anne has been saying names her whole career, people no one else was watching, people the systems had already moved past.
She was in the house her father built when we spoke. I could hear a floor being worked on somewhere behind her.
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