A former Fairbanksan with a distinguished career in the U.S. Foreign Service has been named consul general for the U.S. in the Netherlands Antilles and Aruba.
Valerie Belon, a 1983 graduate of Lathrop High School, is the daughter of Fairbanksans Al Belon, a retired geophysicist from the Geophysical Institute and Shirley Belon, a retired public health nurse.
Valerie has a sister in Fairbanks, Nancy Sonafrank, and a brother in Texas, Dennis. She has a 4-year-old daughter, Lucy.
She assumed the consul general position in the Caribbean last week, according to a story in Aruba Today. Belon will be the senior U.S. representative during the process this fall in which five of the islands will be creating new government relationships with the Netherlands.
After completing high school about 30 years ago, Valerie went to college at Princeton and graduate school at Stanford and UCLA. She worked in the office of the late Sen. Ted Stevens in Washington, D.C.
In her most recent job in the State Department, she was the Senior Desk Officer for the Netherlands and Luxembourg, but she has held a variety of other positions in such places as Belize, the Congo, Panama City and Paris. She is fluent in Spanish and French.
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