Foreign Soil

Tomorrow, Suzanne will be sworn in as a Peace Corps volunteer. Her two-and-a-half-month training program is over. She has improved her French and begun Bariba. She's taught students at a model school and learned that when Beninese children want to get their teacher's attention, they snap their fingers and say, "Madame! Madame!" The day after tomorrow she begins the two-day trip to the village in the northern part of the country where she'll spend much of the next two years.

As she leaves behind the seacoast, the airport and other easy forms of egress, I worry about her more. But I trust that her training has been true and useful — and that she will temper her kindness with common sense.

I think of these things even more after the killing of four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi. Although there have certainly been enough world events to convince me otherwise (especially the Iran hostage crisis), I persist in thinking of embassies and consulates as safe havens, as foreign soil, our soil, in the host countries.

Now that feeling of safety and ease has been violated. That doesn't mean I'm going to let these feelings get the better of me. Ambassador Stevens was a former Peace Corps volunteer. He wasn't afraid of "rough" travel, of arriving in Libya (then still in the throes of revolution) on a cargo ship. I still believe in the "peace" in Peace Corps.

But world events are making that harder to do.