The Foreign Service Journal, July/August 2018

38 JULY-AUGUST 2018 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL one point someone from Washington asked if we trained folks to do this. Are you kidding? I called all the counselors I knew in town and asked them to come down. I told them I didn’t know exactly what we needed, but I knew we would need their presence. Someone ordered body bags. There is nothing normal about surviving a bombing that takes more than 200 lives, but staying together and being with folks who shared the experience helped normalize it. I can’t imag- ine rotating to a new post where no one could begin to understand what happened. We became our own family, and we created our own normal. On the USAID side, we received $34 million from Congress to help bomb victims, which meant we con- tinued to do bomb work every day for years after the bombing. This event did not go away. Advice for those who may become survivors and helpers in the future: • Get to know your peers, and become friends with your colleagues in other agencies. Break down the institutional bar- riers. Get to know and respect your FSN colleagues. They are smart, and you never know when they may save your butt. • Each person will react in his or her own way. Don’t hold their reactions against them. They did the best they could do at the time. • The disaster tourists will come and go. They won’t be very helpful. Nothing in D.C. will change because of their visits. You are not obligated to reinjure your psyche by taking them on tours of the blown-out building so you can tell them whose blood is on the wall. Take care of yourself first. • If your embassy gets blown up, accept that all of you are on your own. If you think Washington gets it, you are kidding yourself. Washington is interested in placing blame, not in helping you. You’ve been told your whole career that you are among the best and brightest. For State MED, this translates into “You don’t need help.” If you get PTSD, they’ll say, too bad for you; it means you are weak. But this response denies you your humanity. Guess what? You probably will get PTSD if you go through something like this. You will be on your own to get help. Do so. • Remember: you are human. PTSD is a physiological reaction to trauma. It is normal. It is not a sign of weakness or a character flaw. What is not normal is for the State Department to deny services to its employees who, almost by definition, go around the world collecting traumatic events over a career. It is unconscionable. If you have cancer, MEDwill refer you to a specialist. Will they do the same if you come in with PTSD? No. Can you get worker’s compensation for this? Yes, you can. Docu- ment your trauma, and apply for it. Will you be considered damaged goods by the system? Prob- ably. Will you be damaged goods if you don’t get help? Surely. If you don’t do it for yourself, do it for your family. To this day, my daughter tells me that she lost her mother due to the bombing. Don’t let that happen to you. Coincidences in Life Stanley K. Macharia Senior Security Investigator (FSN) It has actually been 20 years since the bombing incident and 10 years since I retired from Embassy Nairobi. Time passes; and yet all this is like yesterday. But looking at my own children, and now grandchildren, I realize that many years have passed, and I am COURTESYOFWORLEYREED ZWEIFEL/CREATIVECOMMOMS (Above) An issue of the embassy newsletter published 20 days after the bombing. (Right) The memorial erected on the grounds of the old U.S. embassy in 2001.