United Nations Greeters Extend Welcoming Hand to Diplomats’ Spouses : New York: The agency’s Outreach Program is intended to help families cope with life in a strange land. It was formed 30 years ago after an envoy’s wife committed suicide.

When she greets diplomats new to the city, Winifred Kagwa hands them an information packet and some advice that borders on a warning.

“Take it home so the wives can read it,” Kagwa says of the packet.

She has her reasons for being stern. She remembers an African diplomat’s wife who was near suicide.

“The woman hadn’t been out of the apartment for three months,” Kagwa said. “Clothes were piled up. She didn’t know how to operate the washing machine.”

Kagwa introduced the woman to another African woman who lived in the building and the two became friends. Kagwa knows the help she offered was crucial.

“I’ll never forget the look in her eyes,” Kagwa said. “Her eyes just lit up.”

Kagwa is one of 45 New Yorkers who volunteer for the U.N. Outreach Program, administered by the New York City Commission for the United Nations, Consular Corps and International Business.

The volunteers greet every arriving diplomat--most of whom are men--and help them and their families with landlord-tenant relations, choosing schools, obtaining health insurance or dealing with the city bureaucracy.

But one of its most important, though unofficial, duties is to help the wives of diplomats adjust to life here.

The U.N. commission was formed 30 years ago after a diplomat’s wife plunged from a window, said Anne Gellert, a volunteer with the agency for 15 years. After that, “the city realized it needed an office that would respond to the needs of the diplomats and their families.”

As host city to the United Nations and an international business center, New York has 181 foreign missions to the U.N. and 92 consulates, which bring 57,000 diplomats, international civil servants and family members here, making the city home to the world’s largest foreign service community.

The foreign nationals spend $1.5 billion a year in the city, and the commission wants to make sure they are happy. That means helping the wives.

“The diplomats don’t need you,” said Gellert, 61, although one asked her advice about acquiring a second wife. But the wives lack the office camaraderie that eases their husbands’ adjustment to a new life.

“Many of them are professional women who come to this country and they are in limbo,” said Gellert, who worked for the Institute for International Education for 10 years before becoming a volunteer after her second child was born.

Gellert once consoled a German woman for three hours. The woman was considering suicide. “We were able to get her adjusted,” she said.

The French-speaking wife of the ambassador from Mauritania had different needs.

“I got her to learn English,” Gellert said. She also tried to persuade the woman “not to stay in the house.”

That kind of advice doesn’t always sit well with the husbands.

“Some husbands are leery” of the influence the volunteers, most of whom are women, have on their wives, Gellert said. One husband even hid in the bedroom to eavesdrop on what Gellert was telling his wife in the next room.

But the commission doesn’t let itself be bullied by the cultural norms of the diplomats it serves. Henrietta Lyle, director of community relations, said the commission knows what it’s doing when it sends female volunteers to greet Asian or Arab diplomats.

“We’re showing them that females are in a strong role in New York,” said Lyle, who added that the tactical use of volunteers goes beyond sexual politics. When a diplomat from South Africa arrived, the commission sent an African-American greeter.

Such strategies can lead to uncomfortable moments. For example, an Iranian diplomat told Sophie Fitzsimmons, a volunteer, that he “could not shake hands with me,” she said. His culture’s rules of social modesty between the sexes would not permit it.

Such incidents notwithstanding, Commissioner Nadine Hack said diplomats display “tremendous gratitude” to the agency. And no wonder. In addition to alleviating family problems, volunteers can inject some fun into diplomats’ often humdrum lives.

Many diplomats are well below the prestigious rank of ambassador and live in New York’s unglamorous outer boroughs, Hack said. And, like the millions of New Yorkers with whom they ride the subways, these foreign nationals come home to apartments where they must “unlock the three locks on their apartment doors.”

So it’s a welcome relief when volunteers acting as host families occasionally invite diplomats to the Hamptons, a fashionable summer resort.

“They thought they were coming to a cold, unfriendly city,” said Hack, whose job it is to disabuse diplomats of such notions.

Still, the volunteers get their rewards.

A friendship Kagwa developed with diplomats from Nigeria continued even after that diplomat was transferred to Venezuela. When Kagwa and her husband visited Venezuela, the diplomats treated them “like the king and queen of England.”