In Memoriam

Ahmed Ghailani is nicknamed "Fupi," not "Foopie," as some news reports want to phonetically report it. The word is Swahili for "short." Maybe he's short. But he can't possibly be anything cute and cuddly and rhyme with "Snoopie."

His arrest, coincidence or not, is long overdue. May the Pakistan government and ours glean much information from him and the computers they captured with him. (Please, may they also do so honorably--although I have my doubts about that part.) And then may he be brought to public trial and punished for his crimes.

Why do I give a rat's patootie? My memories of the embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam are fogged by time, but I never laid eyes on the World Trade Center. I have passed through New York City a couple times, probably met a couple of people from New York state in my lifetime. I lived in Kenya for 14 months, in Tanzania for 21 months--and I knew a lot of people in both capitals. When the Towers fell, I was horrified, sickened, angered. When the embassies were bombed, I grieved.

I only visited the Nairobi embassy a couple of times. I was young and thought all our embassies were like what I saw in the movies. This one was just an office in an office building. Nothing special at all. I registered my presence in the country and set off on my more or less merry way. It was great fun to receive a letter some months later, inviting me to the Ambassador's Fourth of July party in Nairobi. You bet, I went. Didn't know a soul, but found other young Americans there and enjoyed the hot dogs. After months of wali na mchuzi, mustard can be a fine thing.

If I didn't see much of the inside of the embassy, I was certainly aware of the busy streets of Nairobi. My work was on the coast, in a Muslim area. I went to Nairobi about every 3 months for a couple of days of R & R. There I could be with other young people, go dancing, enjoy the cosmopolitan atmosphere of a wonderful city. Then I would go back to the coast and immerse myself in the local communities that I lived with.

The streets were filled with vendors. Food. Goods. Beggars. Foot and bike traffic. Wildly driven cars and taxis and buses. There would have been a lot of people in the office building where our embassy was located. There would have been a lot of people on the street outside. Fine people. Building their lives. Building their country.

And Ghailani (allegedly) blew them up.

Ten years later I found myself in Dar es Salaam. My contacts with the embassy were not much more direct there either--except that I lived in town and I drove past the embassy every day on my way to work. There were two things to look out for on that drive. One was the really big pothole (sinkhole) that could break an axle on a good day. The other was the flag. Tanzania was not, at that time, quite the happy experience for me that Kenya was, so I was much more homesick, much more aware of what I had left behind when I left the United States. It was incredibly comforting to see our flag flying--day and night--on top of that concrete bunker of a building.

The local scuttlebutt was that the embassy building originally belonged to the Isrealis, but the Tanzanians kicked them out for some reason, so we took over the building. This building was set away from the downtown area. It was fenced in. I remember one of my rare visits to the embassy, seeing a delivery truck parked inside the fence. There were cases of Hawaiian Punch under the tarp. I was so jealous. A marine greeted me from behind bullet proof glass and asked for identification and my business before admitting me.

This time around, I had a husband in tow for the Ambassador's Fourth of July picnic. Yet, again, we loved the hotdogs--mustard was just as hard to find in Dar--and all the hokey state songs played for the folks in attendance. And, embassy or no, there were only two real choices in town for the movies. One was to go to the drive in, which we did. The other was to go to the Marine House, which we also regularly did. There we sat on folding chairs and watched almost current movies projected on a white sheet, drinking Australian beer, and munching popcorn in the midst of a raucous group of clean cut young'uns and very tired expats.

This embassy was a harder target, but Ghailani still (allegedly) did his best to blow it up.

I don't know anyone who died in those attacks. But I feel like I do. I know the kind of people that they were--Kenyan, Tanzanian, American. Even Ghailani.

He would have been a child when I was there. And those were hard years. Whatever was being preached in the madarasas, the same bile was being spewed from the national government. The economy was a shambles. Bodies were stacked in the morgue like piles of cordwood--and the acronym for "AIDS" had not yet been coined while the virus ate away at the heart of the country. Infrastructure was crumbling. The border with Kenya was closed. Trade was limited. Food staples were in short supply. Corruption was everywhere. We were pretty much on the front lines of the cold war.

Still, if we had to have a "coincidence" "just in time" for the Democratic National Convention, I am very pleased with this one. I still see that flag in my mind's eye. We have our own flag--the one we didn't have to go out to buy on September 12, 2001--and, while it has to hang on the side of our house, when I look at it, I see it flying high, from a pole, on top of our embassy in Dar, lighted against the night sky. And my eyes tear up.

May they rest in peace.