Joan / Sukie

Joan at graduation in front of Lowell House with her parents, Ambassador Dwight J. Porter and Adele R. Porter.

Joan with Barbara Porter in front of the Parthian clay coffins in the Basrah Gallery during a trip in October 2019 to assist with the English language labeling of the display cases.

Joan in her front kitchen garden at the Baythorne Mill.

Sukie with Belgian hedges.

If you had told these pals that they would one day find peace and fulfillment living in the country, they would have laughed you out of the Lowell House courtyard. Surprise! Fifty years on, Sukie, calling from the idylls of Duxbury, MA, catches Joan Porter MacIver during a break from picking and preserving the bountiful harvest on her ‘smallholding’ in East Anglia, England, where she and her husband David have planted 2,000 trees and installed 60 solar panels.  

Far less surprising is Joan’s other project of passion:  helping Iraqis transform Saddam Hussein’s Lakeside Palace on the legendary Shatt al-Arab, the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates, into The Basra Museum, to house cultural treasures recovered from decades of looting, war, and the destruction of heritage sites by ISIS.  Joan’s fascination with the art and archaeology of the Middle East dates to the 1960s, when her father was the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon.  She recalls “scrambling over ruins” near Beirut as her mother, an artist, painted Lebanon’s magical landscape.

During her years in banking, in Bahrain, Joan maintained an unswerving interest in the preservation of antiquities-- as secretary of the Historical and Archaeological Society, and now, as vice-chair of the British Institute for the Study of Iraq.   For those of us who could use a little uplifting these days, check out the wonderful--and inspiring-- short film about the collective efforts of Iraqi and British scholars and volunteers (including Joan) as they create a place of beauty, pride, and refuge in The Epic Story of a New Museum for Basra: Humanity Always Wins.