The building swayed; a teacup began rattling; shards of glass and ceiling tile sprayed the area. One thought swirled dreamily around my brain as every muscle in my body clenched in revolt. “I am going to die.” I was on the top floor of a high-rise office building that I knew was going to collapse.
Moments earlier, it had been just another Friday morning. Another day, another meeting. I was, after all, the U.S. ambassador to Kenya, and ambassadors meet a lot. This one concerned the upcoming U.S. trade delegation that Secretary of Commerce William Daley would be leading. An advance team was already in town helping with the preparations. Two Commerce Department colleagues had joined me for the meeting taking place on the twenty-first floor of the Cooperative Bank Building in downtown Nairobi next to the embassy chancery, which housed many of the U.S. government staff in Kenya. Like most meetings with ministers, it had begun with a press briefing and photo op, followed by a cup of tea to settle in. The tea had been served.
An explosion from the street below drew us to the window. I was the last to get up, and I had moved only a few feet from the couch I was sharing with Commerce Minister Joseph Kamotho when a loud wave of freight-train force hurled me back across the room. Everything dimmed. Shadowy figures silently moved past me. Then nothing. I woke to find myself alone. Where had everyone gone? The man lying face down on the other side of the room was surely dead, I thought, and in a second we would both be plunging down multiple stories of concrete. I would not be the first U.S. ambassador to die in the line of duty with her boots on, or in my case, Ferragamo shoes—but, oh my God . . .
The shaking stopped. The teacup went silent. The man across the room raised his head just as my Commerce Department colleague rushed into view. “Ambassador, hurry, quick, we need to get out of here.”
We made our way through the smoky debris and deathly calm into the hallway, checking for other survivors as we went. The man on the other side of the room had disappeared. A woman rushed past us and vanished. The atmosphere was hazy, or maybe it was me. I felt like Alice at the bottom of the rabbit hole. Out of nowhere, the elevator operator who had escorted us into the minister’s office appeared.
“Sorry, so sorry,” he muttered, wringing his hands as if he himself had caused the explosion. He showed us to a stairwell, its access barred by the heavy exit door blown off its hinges. I hiked up the skirt of my dress-for-success business suit and climbed up and over, careful not to lose my footing on the slippery steel. My colleague, my purse slung across his chest, stepped over a pool of blood to join me. The minister and others who had attended the meeting were nowhere in sight; they must have already left.
We met only a few people coming out of the top floors, dazed and silent. As we descended, we joined a parade of slowly moving, shocked and bloodied Kenyans, crushed together and morphing into a multiheaded reptile calmly slithering down steps and over doors. “Keep your feet on the ground,” I told myself. “Focus! Hand on railing, feet on the stairs.” I was desperate to keep at least that much control. Now and then someone would cry, “Karibu,” the Swahili word for “Welcome,” to the people who joined us. A woman’s body materialized from above us, and we ever so gently passed her to the people below us. Dead? Unconscious? I had no idea. Another woman sang a Christian hymn. We continued down. Someone began to pray. Blood dripped steadily onto my hair and my arm. Was that my blood? Was it getting into the open cut on my arm? Survival instincts banished idle thoughts: “Keep a grip on the railing and your feet on the floor!” Down we went.
Idle thoughts returned. Then we stopped. “This must be some horrible event. Wasn’t a teachers’ strike going on? Bank strike? We’re in a bank building, yes? Just have to get out of here, and all will be well.” I focused on that: “All will be well. Keep your feet on the floor!”
“Fire, fire! Hurry, hurry, hurry!” a man yelled in panic. We were at a dead standstill, smoke washing over us. No one moved.
“I’m going to die.” This time I knew it. “At least I will be asphyxiated, not burned to death.” The thought consoled me until impulse intervened again. “Think straight.” We had been descending stairs for so long. Surely, we were close to the bottom! Get out of the building, and we will be fine. Our medical unit was in the basement of the chancery, separated from this death trap by only a small parking lot. Once in the embassy, we would be fine. All will be well. Stay focused.
The slow-motion descent resumed, and we soon saw light and felt air. We had made it. A frightened-looking Kenyan soldier hurried us down the few remaining stairs and out of the building.
I stumbled out, astounded to see thousands of people restrained by men in uniforms across the street staring at the bloody parade of people emerging with us. My colleague looked around and hissed, “Quick, Ambassador, put your head down; there’s press.” Who knows what made him think that? “I think I saw it in a movie,” he said months later. The journalists in attendance at the minister’s pre-meeting press conference had reached the street just minutes before the explosion. Many had stayed to record the carnage. I bowed my head, stemming the blood from a gash in my lower lip, and took a few steps forward. I saw the sidewalk littered with glass shards, twisted metal, and puddles of blood. Another step and I came upon the charred remains of what had once been a human being. I felt my head jerk up.
The parking lot we had walked through earlier that morning had disappeared, replaced by hell. Flames rose from burning vehicles as smoke billowed into the building from which we had just exited. Nearby, a large mound of concrete guided my sight into the remains of the rear of our chancery—much of the back wall had dissolved into shattered rock. A few yards away, our neighboring seven-story office building had turned into an even larger hill of smashed concrete precariously supporting hundreds of people digging frantically through the piles of stone debris with bare hands to find anyone buried under the rubble.
In the middle of the usually busy street next to us, a city bus smoldered, most of its incinerated passengers still in their seats. It had stopped for the red light on the corner. The schoolboys in another bus had been taken to a hospital to have shattered glass dug out from their eyes, faces, and upper torsos. Ahead of us, outside the fence of the chancery, an angry-looking American civilian I did not know stood duty, his suit covered by a flak jacket and a weapon in his hand.
Then came shouts. “There she is! Quick, get her out of here. Get her out of here!” Someone grabbed my free arm, rushed us past the front of the chancery, and pushed us into the back of a garishly painted safari jeep I recognized as belonging to an embassy colleague. Another Commerce colleague was in the backseat trying to staunch the blood pouring down his face. The embassy’s senior Kenyan security officer jumped into the front seat. Someone banged loudly on the back, yelling, “Go! Go! Go!”
We shot forward, almost running over a woman who had stepped out from the mass of humanity on either side of us. I was jolted out of my dream state.
“Stop!” I ordered the driver. “We are going to take this slowly.” Okay. Now where were we going? I did not want a hospital overflowing with emergencies when my colleagues needed attention now. A hotel? Why not? The luxury spots that catered to tourists might just have a resident or visiting doctor. I must have been thinking out loud because my companions agreed to the idea, and one volunteered: “I’m staying at the Serena Hotel. We can go there.”
I do not remember the drive. I do remember my colleague once again reminding me to cover my face as we entered the hotel. I took one look at him and thought, forget it. I wanted to see what was ahead. So, bloodied but unbowed, we three Americans scurried through the luxurious lobby past astonished tourists, photo-equipped for a safari. Once in the hotel room, we miraculously located both a doctor and a nurse, who took one look at the wounds of my colleagues and raced off to find an ambulance. As for me, I was scratched, cut, and filthy, but most of the blood on me belonged to other people.
I cleaned up as best I could and started pacing. From the clunky, embassy-issued handheld radio on the bedside table came staccato conversations interrupting terse commands from the chancery grounds. It did not occur to me to interrupt. I was too focused on trying to piece together what in the world was happening. Clearly we were experiencing a catastrophe, but beyond that I had a whole lot to find out. Then I heard a familiar voice: Duncan Musyoka, my driver and the operator of the State Department–issued, fully armored, right-hand-drive burgundy Cadillac with red-orange diplomatic license plates. A former military driver, Duncan had quick instincts and common sense, and he was still alive. I broke into the radio chatter to tell him where to pick me up. The people listening to the embassy radio net learned that their ambassador was still alive. It was hardly a dramatic intervention, but I was working on my to-do list.
The pre-cellular Nairobi phone system—erratic in normal times—was for the moment working, so I could phone my husband, Richard Buckley, to ask that he contact Mom and Dad and stay away from the downtown area. Army veteran, civil rights lawyer, husband of many years, and currently Top Spouse, Richard knew about coping with crises. That done, I was free to pace, waiting for the doctor to reappear and clear me for duty. The wait gave me the chance to continue the mental checklist of things to be done.
I had been in Nairobi two years, serving my first ambassadorship after three years in the State Department’s Africa Bureau (AF), where I had earned my disaster stripes. I had managed the transnational policies portfolio for forty-six sub-Saharan countries. Transnational issues included democracy, development and conflict resolution, prevention, reality, and aftermath. I was a go-to person for kidnappings, political anarchy, embassy evacuations, and, in 1994, the genocide in Rwanda. What I had learned from American missionaries escaping a Hutu militia helped in the rescue of an American Peace Corps volunteer in Central African Republic. The Africa Bureau team had taken care of a head of state overturned in a coup d’état who sought asylum on a U.S. Navy ship. Communicating via a radio station, we had negotiated the release of a diabetic American. Not one American citizen had died on my watch, and I was proud.
This was different.
Time slowed and expanded against a backdrop of urgency as my to-do list got longer. The doctor returned to declare my vital signs okay and my split lip something that could wait to be stitched. Stunned but uninjured coworkers from another part of downtown met me in the lobby and drove me to the suburban office building that housed the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), now the only large chunk of office real estate the U.S. government had left. Now high on adrenalin, I bounded up the stairs to find the control center I knew someone would have cobbled together. Sure enough, Linda Howard and Sheila Wilson, Foreign Service office managers who ran my life by day, already had started organizing. Neither of us knew the other had survived until we threw ourselves into one another’s arms, and I asked for a steno pad. I simply had to get the to-do list out of my brain!
I do not know into whose hands I thrust our embassy telephone book. “Get teams and find every person in this book,” I ordered. Volunteer bomb-response teams formed of Kenyans and Americans from various U.S. government agencies searched hospitals, neighborhoods, and morgues until we accounted for all of our people. It would take days.
A Kenyan colleague described the chaos we were facing at ground zero:
Around 10:30 I was right in front of my office. After talking to this lady, then I was—I went back to my office, was trying to send an email, and then I heard the first explosion. It came like a tremor. And I don’t know, I thought it was something outside the embassy. So, somebody asked, what was that? Then I said, I think it’s a bomb.
Then people were rushing to the window. Then I thought about locking my office before I could also join them. So, I was heading towards the open area, which was on the Budget section, to see what people were going to see. And on my way, there was a computer room, which was a sealed room. On my way there, just reaching the corner, that’s when the second deadly explosion came.
I didn’t know where I was . . . the ceiling came on me. I was thrown down. The house was dark. It was dusty. It was smoky. Choking because the duct smoke somehow choked me, and I could not open my eyes. I could see nothing. Then I went down. I was thrown down. Then the bodies were burying me. Then I heard people cry and some of them were—I could hear, I could get their voices and could know, that’s so-and-so’s voice, but I could not open my eyes.
I could not breathe. I could not do anything. Though I prayed. I said a prayer, about three seconds, that, Lord, just take my soul. Then I remembered, I fumbled for my I.D. because I remembered my dad and my brothers loved me so much that I would want them to see my body. And so, I was looking for a form of identification where if I’m found, they would get an I.D. It didn’t occur to me that an I.D. would burn if the house burns.
I started crawling after that when I could feel like I was alive. I started crawling because I was choking. I started moving towards a place I could get fresh air. Then all of a sudden, I felt a breeze come from a direction. I didn’t want to open my eyes. I didn’t want to breathe. I started crawling towards that place. I didn’t know where it was. Then after reaching that place, I realized there was a cold breeze coming from outside. So, I started moving towards that side. It was the window that had been blown. So, as I moved, and I wanted to like keep moving, I realized that I was at the edge. Then I slept there for some time. I was shaking. When I opened my eyes, I saw the garden, a green garden. I said, where am I? As I was moving toward the window, I could feel people’s—could feel bodies of the dead people.
After that, then I realized that I was looking for an I.D., I could not get it, I would like my dad to see my body, so I have to jump, to die outside. So, I looked at where I was going to jump. It was far, and I closed my eyes because I didn’t know where I was going to die. I wanted my body to be found by my dad. So, I just closed my eyes and then jumped through the window. I was not conscious for some time. When I raised my head, I realized that I did not die.1
Like other survivors who had crawled through smoke and dust, debris and bodies, George Mimba joined those who organized themselves into rescue teams to go back into the building to help others. We had no 911, no fire and rescue, no emergency and police assistance. We were on our own.
The area around the chancery was chaos. At what was a seven-story office building next door, Ufundi House, hundreds of people were clawing through the rubble with bare hands to locate survivors. As an American colleague later reported:
Meanwhile, a crowd of perhaps 10,000 had quickly formed in front of the embassy. Most, shocked, were just gazing; many others wanted to help, while scores of looters started to swarm into the building through its gaping holes. With the surviving embassy marines—one was dead, another wounded—and a few Army servicemen who were on temporary duty at the embassy, we set up a security perimeter around the building. Part of the crowd, however, suddenly surged forward. They had spotted an embassy guard who had made it from the back of the building to the front and was trapped behind the security fence that fronted the building. His clothes in shreds, his face and body a welter of bloody gashes, he gripped the bars of the fence gate, wailing pathetically.
The surging crowd threatened to sweep our cordon away; had that happened, we would have been engulfed in a sea of humanity, and any attempt at an organized rescue would have been futile. A couple of us stepped toward the lead group of angry young men, urging them to let us continue our jobs. Others meanwhile scrambled to find the key to the gate. Feigning calm, we argued with the front line of the crowd. Glancing over my shoulder, I understood why our words carried such weight and the mob stopped: A marine and a soldier stood three feet behind us, their faces a mask of grim determination, their weapons leveled. We found the key and rescued the guard.2
The marines had been off duty, waiting in a van for Cpl. Jessie “Nathan” Aliganga to cash a check and begin weekend festivities, when the bomb went off. Their training kicked in as they grabbed their gear and faced down the growing crowds, and I was very proud of them. The view from the Kenyan side was different, as I would soon learn.
The control room was almost set up by the time I got there, with a large table in the middle for the twenty-four-hour crisis team Linda and Sheila were organizing, and meager communications equipment had been plugged into outlets along the wall: two satellite phones, one photo copier, and a few handheld radios tuned in to the one embassy channel. Someone using the phone yelled that other U.S. embassies in the region had been attacked. Ethiopia? Uganda? No, Tanzania. Our embassy in Dar es Salaam, five hundred miles southeast along the East African coast, had been bombed just minutes after Nairobi, the casualty count yet unknown. This was not something local; these were terrorist attacks, and we were the target.
I made one of the small adjacent rooms my office, but remained in the control room to direct volunteer traffic until we sorted ourselves out. People with medical skills rushed downtown, and USAID drivers formed an emergency motor pool. A senior executive took care of the burst water main, while a contract engineer risked his life to keep electrical wires from reaching rising water and generator fuel in the chancery basement. Position descriptions meant nothing; personal leadership, everything.
I was on the radio with someone at ground zero when a colleague in the control room called out, “Ambassador, Susan Rice is on the phone.”
The assistant secretary for African affairs at the State Department, Susan Rice, had formerly served in the National Security Council on peacekeeping and African issues. We had gotten to know one another well, and we shared respect and affection, if not agreement on policies.
“Pru,” she exclaimed, “are you okay? What’s going on? I had no idea your embassy was so close to the street!”
“Susan,” I replied angrily, “I wrote you and the f––ing secretary of state all about it!” Susan was the one person with whom I could use such words. Profanity was a wonderful stress release, but I usually held back. Not this time. I was suddenly really, really angry.
I had in fact written a personal letter to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright because two years of efforts to draw attention to the security vulnerabilities of our embassy had provoked complaints of “nagging” and accusations of being “obsessed” but offered no positive response. Like all other U.S. ambassadors, I had received a machine-signed letter from the president of the United States underscoring my responsibility for the security of all Americans in Kenya (except those under military command). I took it seriously enough to go outside of the chain of command to address Albright directly. She had not answered the letter, but Undersecretary for Management Bonnie Cohen did reply to a letter I sent her. Her note advised me that there was no money to relocate from our dangerous downtown location (a senior State Department official had waived the requirement to have at least one hundred feet of offset from a public street), and we were considered at only “medium threat” of a terrorist attack. That letter had arrived two months before the truck bomb.
I had barely gotten the words “secretary of . . .” out of my mouth when someone behind me interrupted. “Ambassador, the Secretary of State is on the line.” I told Susan I would call her back and hurried to the other phone.
Madeleine Albright and I had met on a trip we had taken through conflict-ridden African countries when she was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. The trip had included a stop in Rwanda, where we visited the mass grave of people I remembered trying to save. Now we were dealing with American and Kenyan bodies, not Tutsi and Hutu.
Like Rice, Albright commented that she had had no idea the embassy was in such a vulnerable spot. “Madame Secretary, I wrote you a letter,” I said grimly.
There was long silence. “I never got it,” she replied.
There was no point in arguing and not much to say after that, so I got back to work.
Finally, in midafternoon, ground zero was under enough control to allow our team to regroup in my new office at the USAID building. Most of the senior team had been in the weekly Friday staff meeting in my real office when the bomb went off and had made it out alive—all except the head of our consular operations, Julian Bartley. No one had seen him since early morning. Where was he?
We pieced together what information we had: A truck with two men had driven into the rear parking lot and tried to get into our underground parking garage. The Kenyan contract security guard had stopped it. One of the perpetrators had thrown a grenade, and some gunshots were fired, giving the guard time to run, desperately calling the marines on his radio as he fled. Seconds later, the truck had exploded.
In my office, someone’s radio crackled. “We’ve just found the body of ****,” the voice announced. “Do not relay the names over the net, understood?” snapped our regional security officer (RSO).
One-third of our American colleagues had arrived less than a month ago, and he was one of the most recent. As I listened to the exchange, I recognized that a part of my brain had been checking people I had seen against a mental list. Better to keep focused on the to-do list. Then I thought about Julian again. He was African American; white skinned Americans were easy to identify in this African city, but Julian could be mistaken for Kenyan. Where was he? I resumed working down the to-do list:
Bring out the dead and find suitable ways to take care of the bodies (the morgues were overflowing).
Find the missing and locate sniffer dogs to help search for survivors at the embassy and the Ufundi House next door.
Tend to the wounded and secure assistance for overwhelmed local medical facilities.
Inform families of the status of their loved ones. Keep people informed with steady radio net broadcasts, although most people in Nairobi were watching events live on television and probably knew as much as we did.
Organize for the hundreds of people headed our way.
Manage Washington.
Deal with the media.
Someone said that the State Department rescue team was not coming as planned because of airplane problems. A few minutes after that, another report alerted us that the Fairfax County rescue squad with the sniffer dogs would also be late because of mechanical problems with their plane. I was getting a headache.
“Ambassador,” someone yelled, “the president wants to talk to you.”
I waited for him to come on the line, thinking about what I would say. Bill Clinton picked up: “Pru.” I could visualize the briefing: “She calls herself ‘Pru.’”
“How are you?” he asked.
“Mr. President,” I replied, “my heart is bursting with sadness at what happened and glowing with pride at the way our people are responding.” Corny, maybe, but it was the best I could come up with at the time.
“Pru,” he continued, “I want you to secure the perimeter!”
What? Really? I could hardly believe my ears. Where was the famous “I feel your pain”? We could have used a little of that.
“Ye-es,” I answered hesitantly, thinking, why is he talking about this? “Mr. President, we’re still bringing out bodies.”
“Oh . . . well . . . okay. But as soon as you can, secure the perimeter and . . . hold on a second . . . and you need to secure the perimeter of the building next door, too.”
“But, Mr. President,” I argued, “they are digging out bodies there, too, from the rubble.”
“Oh, okay. But as soon as possible, secure the perimeter!” he ordered.
Wow, I thought. What a help. I should have told him that the bloody perimeter was already secured by a few good U.S. marines with help from a British military training team, but it did not occur to me. I was far too dumbstruck by the instruction. Was no one reading the list of growing casualties, including two of our six-member marine detachment? Why in the world were we being harassed to keep giving the same information to different people in Washington if they were not passing it on? Who the hell was in charge back there? As to securing the perimeter, what an irony! That was what I had been trying to do for the previous two years.
We hung up without further conversation.
At the corner of Moi and Haile Selassie Avenues, the area around the former chancery and the Ufundi House was now secured by Kenyan security forces; marine guards remained on the perimeter of the embassy. Thousands of wounded had walked or been carried by Good Samaritans to Nairobi’s now-strained medical facilities. The attention had shifted to creating makeshift emergency units throughout the city and picking up the bodies of the dead. The toll would not end until it reached 213 dead—46 were killed in our chancery—and 5,000 wounded. A local businessman had donated a piece of construction equipment that was being hauled into place to begin removing the concrete pieces of the Ufundi House rubble. A team of Israelis with sniffer dogs were on their way to locate survivors.
At the USAID control room, we were keeping a list of the dead and injured. They had found the body of Julian’s son, Jay, who was one of our summer interns. Nearby, outside the cashier’s office, were the remains of everyone waiting in line to cash a check before the weekend began, but still no Julian. He had not appeared for the staff meeting in my office, perhaps stopping to greet people or tell one of his endless array of good (and bad) jokes. It was not like Julian to miss a staff meeting. Where was he?
Julian had arrived with his wife, Sue, and Jay the same summer that Richard and I moved to Kenya. As our consul general, he was responsible for the services provided to the substantial resident and tourist American communities in Kenya. He had directed efforts to find a lost college student who had wandered away from her group for days on Mount Kenya and so impressed her that she vowed to join the Foreign Service. Her sister, whom I met years later, actually did. Julian also directed our visa operations. I happened into the consular section one morning as a church group of gospel singers waited for their tourist visa interviews. With a twinkle in his eye, he asked the group to demonstrate their talent for the ambassador, and the waiting room filled with song—and yes, they got their visas. Julian had accumulated a network of friends that reached to the top of Kenyan officialdom and beyond.
Eventually I ran out of tissues to staunch the bleeding lip and left the control room in competent hands to get stitched up. Before leaving, I made an announcement on the embassy radio. I knew that everyone in the community was glued to their sets, and we had been sending out information as we could, but I wanted people to hear this message from me personally. “We’re going to get through this, and we’re going to get through this together.”
Duncan and I drove to my residence in silence. He had been on an errand outside of the area when the bomb went off and, unscarred, looked a lot better in his trim gray suit than I did in my blood-spattered green one. He soberly radioed the guards the words “two mikes” so they would have the gates open and ready for us to enter in exactly two minutes. We swung into the circular driveway surrounded by tropical greenery and stopped under the awning that led to the front door of the white stucco house. It had been the talk of the neighborhood when it was built by a doctor in the mid-1930s, and it had served as the British East Africa military headquarters during World War II before the United States purchased it as an official residence. Surrounded by five lush acres that included a swimming pool and tennis court, the house was unassuming and very pleasant. It was home.
Behind us the gates opened again, and Richard drove in with a close neighbor. They had been following events through the live broadcasts from ground zero from the moment that the bomb went off, watching the uncensored horror all day. Quick hugs, and I raced upstairs to change into slacks and a long-sleeved red T-shirt. I thought it might hide any blood stains missed in the cursory clean-up earlier that day. My neighbor insisted on accompanying me to the Nairobi Children’s Hospital next door, where a doctor was waiting to stich up my split lip. A large and formidable matron greeted us and led us into an examining room, where a young physician waited.
I climbed onto the gurney and took my shoes off. “Did you wash your hands?” my friend demanded as the doctor put on gloves, and she rubbed my bare, cold feet. When it came to formidable, she was a good match for the matron. “Pru,” my friend continued, “I’ll make an appointment with my plastic surgeon first thing tomorrow.” (Really? I thought. Not sure I’ll have time.) As she talked, the matron hovered solicitously behind the youthful doctor. “Is that thread as thin as you can get?” “Let me see the needle; is it the right one?” The doctor ignored the women and the scrutiny, sewing me up with a steady hand. A few minutes later, Duncan dropped my friend off and drove me back to the USAID building, again in silence. His brown face was beginning to look as weary and ashen as mine.
By 10:00 p.m. I was exhausted and becoming numb as the list of casualties grew. We could now account for the Americans who were in the chancery when it blew, but not Julian. One of our wounded American colleagues had been mistaken for Kenyan and found herself in a small clinic with a needle poised to go into her arm when she regained consciousness. With extraordinary presence of mind, she had asked to be transferred to the hospital that the embassy used. Is that what had happened to Julian? Was he unconscious in an unknown medical facility?
By now, Julian’s friends in the Kenyan military had joined the search efforts. Our bomb-response teams were still combing through morgues and clinics for Kenyan co-workers. Finding them was the priority among an extensive list of objectives I reviewed with the night shift in the control room before announcing, “I’m going home to cry and then get some rest. I would like everyone in this room who is not part of the night shift to do the same. See you tomorrow morning.”
I know, I know. Leaders do not say they are going to cry, but I did so deliberately. I wanted people to have permission. The stiff-upper-lip, real-men-don’t-cry, feelings-are-for-sissies State Department culture invites burnout. I knew this from months of leading the weary Washington task force in 1994 that was stuck with a policy of nonintervention in Rwanda as almost a million people were slaughtered in one hundred days of genocide. I needed people to take care of themselves now. The work we had to do was overwhelming. Anyway, women can get away with saying they are going to cry, and we all certainly had reason.
Actually, I did not cry that night. I did not even take a shower; I was far too tired. Instead, I lay on my bed with strangers’ blood still clotting my hair and listened to the soothing voice of a local radio broadcaster advising listeners how they could help. She gave a call-in number for all employees of the U.S. embassy; the search for our missing continued. My eyes went to the bedside table and this week’s Nairobi Roar, our community newsletter. The front page declared this to be Friendship Week. A thought popped into my head: “My life is never going to be the same.”