74 NOVEMBER 2024 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Kathmandu, and they helped him medically and personally in his last years. His wife, Karen Gerlach, predeceased him in 2011. Amb. Malinowski is survived by his sister, Melanie Olszewski; her husband, John; and their two children, of Ruidoso, N.M.; and many devoted friends. n Terryl “Terry” A. Purvis-Smith, 80, a former Foreign Service officer, died on May 4, 2024, at Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus, of acute myeloid leukemia. Mr. Purvis-Smith was born on Aug. 10, 1943, in Pasadena, Calif. After careening down his first zipline in his 60s, he used it as a metaphor. He reflected that graduating from Covina High School in 1961 was like standing on a zipline tower, scared to take the plunge. But plunge he did, reaching the first secure tower in the person of a local pastor. Their conversations led him to Whitworth University, where he graduated in 1966 and met his wife. He and Virginia “Ginny” Purvis married in 1965. Other secure towers included theological and graduate studies, with a focus on ethics. He earned his MDiv from Andover Newton Theological School in 1969, followed by a PhD from Hartford Seminary Foundation in 1972. His professional focus was pediatric chaplaincy, first at Children’s Hospital of Michigan and later at the University of North Carolina. He reflected that the leap from each tower replicated life’s progression in that one feels simultaneously safe and frightened, change is rapid, and sometimes one is out of control and challenged by ethical dilemmas and questions that don’t have answers. The place he felt welcomed and encouraged to explore those challenges was the church. He was ordained in 1971 and never retired, responding to the call to assist Presbyterian churches in transition around the country as an interim pastor until leukemia robbed him of strength. In 1999 he joined the Foreign Service, which took him and his wife to Senegal, Washington, D.C., and the Bahamas. In all these professional contexts, a guiding value was to express himself with integrity but not to personally demean those with whom he disagreed. As family members recall, his competitive spirit and sense of humor were constants, whether in family games of charades, cards, and chess, or playing baseball and running in the Memorial Day Bolder/Boulder 10K. His sister Patricia and her late husband, Frank, invited Mr. Purvis-Smith and his wife to hike the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain several years ago, and that experience added life-as-pilgrimage to his life-as-zipline metaphor. The couple walked 100 miles of the demanding 500-mile walk, and Mr. PurvisSmith started using walking as meditation. Family, friends, and colleagues are grateful for his kindness and the clarity of his commitments. Mr. Purvis-Smith is survived by his spouse, Ginny; daughter Julie Fouque, son-in-law Guillaume, and their children, André and Mélanie; son Steven AdamsSmith, daughter-in-law Kelly, and their children, Sophie and Ben; a brother, Steven Smith, and sister-in-law Marcia, and their two children and two grandchildren; and a sister, Patricia Eichenlaub, and her two children and five grandchildren. n He worked at U.S. Embassy Kabul during the Soviet occupation when the ambassador at the time, Spike Dubs, was brutally murdered. He spent two years at the U.S consulate in Peshawar on the troubled border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he met many of the combatants. In Peshawar, as a colleague recalled, “Mike rode herd on a bunch of characters, inside and outside the consulate, that rivaled the bar scene in ‘Star Wars,’ to which it was often compared.” Later as an Afghanistan policymaker in Washington, D.C., he would get phone calls directly from Taliban leaders who wanted their message heard in Washington. As he advanced in his career, he was assigned as the deputy chief of mission in the Philippines. Because of the unwillingness of the Senate to confirm an ambassador, he ran that huge mission as the chargé d’affaires for almost two years. In 2001 he was nominated by President George W. Bush to be ambassador to Nepal, a country where he had served before. It was a time of domestic terrorism and civil war, with Maoist insurgents attempting to seize power from a constitutional monarchy. Amb. Malinowski strove to work with both sides toward a resolution to the war. He retired in 2009 and, in 2014, suffered a debilitating stroke that left him in a wheelchair. His gregarious nature continued to make him a magnet for friends, old and new alike. Family members recall that he sought to be involved on the front lines in the making of U.S. foreign policy and succeeded in that goal. He took into his home the family of his former employee at the embassy in If you would like us to include an obituary in In Memory, please send text to journal@afsa.org. Be sure to include the date, place, and cause of death, as well as details of the individual’s Foreign Service career. Please place the name of the AFSA member to be memorialized in the subject line of your email.
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