Our ambassador at the U.S. embassy in Tunis, Tunisia, summoned the American staff on August 7, 1998, to tell us that terrorists had bombed two U.S. embassies in east Africa. Over 200 people were killed and thousands injured in attacks in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. As we sat, stunned, we had no way of knowing that these tragedies, carried out by an early al-Qaeda, were a prelude to the even more horrible attacks of 9/11 in New York City.

The daughter of U.S. diplomats serving in Kenya in 1998 recently wrote of her experience on that day. Only five, she was in the embassy with her mother when the attack occurred. She and her family escaped physical harm, but imprinted in her mind is the memory of a Kenyan man, crimson red on his ebony skin, “mouth wide open in agony . . . I understood then that I shared with that man an experience of terrible, hateful, unfair violence.”

She speaks of later interactions with scarred survivors, families now without spouses and parents, other men and women left handicapped, and of their amazing resilience. “Together, we built a memorial park; we prosecuted the guilty; we moved forward; we learned to dance again. . . . Together, we live serendipitously.”

Read her article in Foreign Service Journal.