Last winter, four people talked about how to bring remembrance and meaning to the anniversary of the August 7, 1998 al Qaeda bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. We each contributed what we had to offer over the spring and early summer. Shaun Dorman, editor of the Foreign Service Journal, and her team elicited stories from 40 survivors and printed them in its July/August edition using informal networks which John Lange, my counterpart in Dar es Salaam, and I had maintained over the years. To make those stories real, Katie Speckart, archivist from the U.S. Diplomacy Center worked with her colleagues and other museums to create a public display of artifacts from both … [Read more...] about Commemorating 20 Years Later
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Surviving an Attack on Our Community
My heart goes out to communities in our country that are in the process of creating a new normal (for themselves) in the wake of a violent attack. That challenge confronted the Kenyan and American community in 1998 after al Qaeda blew up the U.S. embassy in downtown Nairobi, killing 215 and injuring thousands more. This is some of what I learned: Two skills and one value are essential. The skills are 1) asking powerful questions and 2) listening to the answers. When the hormones cut off and the honeymoon phase ended, life was just plain hard. The only way I knew to work in sync with the community as we moved ahead was to ask questions and pay attention to the … [Read more...] about Surviving an Attack on Our Community