My assignment in 1993 to the U.S. embassy in Algiers, Algeria, lasted only about three months. During that brief period, I served as notetaker on an official trip to the western part of the former French colony in North Africa.

We traveled through rounded brown hills that reminded me of the wheat growing region of Washington State’s Palouse. However, an occasional abandoned farmhouse scarred the landscape, left from the bitter civil war between Algeria and France from 1954 to 1962.

Thousands on both sides lost their lives. Torture was common. After the French defeat, the French settlers in Algeria, some of whose families had been there for more than a century, left and wandered France like the exiled Acadians of Longfellow’s poem, “Evangeline” They were called Pieds-Noirs, “black-feet,” a sometimes derisive term that denoted their farming background.

Our official trip in 1993 was shortened when we learned of a terrorist incident in Algiers. Though we did not know it then, the incident foreshadowed a second reign of terror, this time  by insurgents against the native Algerian government. An election which threatened to put an Islamist party into power had been cancelled by the government.

A few weeks after our official trip, our embassy evacuated many of the staff, as the insurgency increased, making travel difficult. I left Algeria and never returned.

Some Christian monks who had remained in Algeria were murdered by extremists in 1996. The French movie “Of Gods and Men” is a fictionalized account of the tragedy. The Algerian farmers who were there for so long were mostly Catholic, of course, though the monks served their mainly Muslim neighbors.

I remembered our passage through a village on our long-ago trip. I noticed a building which could only have been a church at one time but wasn’t anymore. I wondered when the last Christian service was held there. Who attended? Where did they go?