Worldly Americans Sought ‘Safe’ Post at Embassy in Kenya

Molly Huckaby Hardy liked to start up social dance groups. Sherry Lynn Olds was an enthusiastic explorer who often went out into the bush on safari. And Prabhi Guptara Kavaler, born in India, chose a second tour in Africa so she could introduce her two young American daughters to the exotic wildlife that she so loved. Army Sgt. Kenneth R. Hobson II chose the posting in Kenya because he thought it would be the most perfect place to take his family, said a longtime neighbor in Missouri.

Among the common threads that wound through the lives of these people were an appreciation of other cultures, and, after many years abroad, a shared belief that Kenya was as safe a foreign outpost as anywhere in a world often rocked by terror.

All those lives were lost in an instant Friday. They were among the 11 Americans killed by a terrorist bombing at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi.

“These jobs in foreign service are not for a mournful person,” said Marsha Bates, Hardy’s best friend for more than 30 years. “Away from home, you often have to make your own family. But I know Molly loved what she did.”

Indeed, the test for foreign service is personal. Those who volunteer to leave to work for the U.S. government abroad give up the familiar for the adventure of something new. An abiding interest in other cultures and willingness to serve are only the beginning requirements.

“Molly was never afraid,” said Bates of the friend she first met when both were freshmen at Valdosta State University in Georgia in the 1960s. “She never talked about any risk in Kenya and traveled freely.”

Hardy, 51, a 26-year veteran of the State Department, got a taste for foreign travel when she accompanied her then-husband to Laos in the 1970s. She returned to the U.S. in 1974 to give birth to a daughter, Brandi.

After a divorce, Bates said, Hardy struck out on her own career, holding State Department administrative jobs in Washington and Brazil before taking an assignment to Nairobi three years ago.

Bates said that Hardy was last home in Valdosta 14 months ago, returning to the U.S. for the birth of her granddaughter. Two weeks later, Hardy’s only sibling, Patti, was killed in a traffic accident.

“That was the last time we saw her,” Bates said. “She was due to leave Nairobi in June, but she stayed over waiting for her replacement.”

For Air Force Senior Master Sgt. Sherry Lynn Olds, 40, the Air Force was a career that allowed her to see the world, just as the recruiter who enlisted her out of a Panama City, Fla., high school promised. She served in U.S. embassies in Saudi Arabia and South Korea and several times had been sent to Washington for temporary assignments at the Pentagon.

But she may have loved her two-year stint with the Air Force Security Element in Nairobi best of all. Home this summer for a visit with her parents and an extended family of northwest Florida relatives, Olds said that she had declined an offer to return to the Pentagon and had extended her tour of Kenya for another year.

“She loved it there,” said her aunt, Pat Casey. “She went on safaris, had visited the plantation of the “Out of Africa” author” Isak Dinesen.

She often came home on leave with pictures of herself with the U.S. ambassador and visiting dignitaries. “This summer she had a picture with Jesse Jackson,” Casey recalled.

‘No Problems’

The day before Olds returned to Nairobi on July 1, Casey said she had asked her niece if she considered her assignment dangerous. “Since she was at the embassy, and I think embassies are targets all over the world, I asked if she was frightened,” Casey said. “ ‘No,’ she said, ‘Kenya has no problems. Most people are pro-American.’ She thought the security was sufficient.”

Olds, who was single, told her family that after another year in Nairobi she could choose reassignment to Tyndall Air Force Base, just a few miles from the family compound where she had a trailer, and look toward retirement, Casey said.

U.N. ecologist Howard Kavaler, 48, and his wife, Prabhi Guptara Kavaler, 43, a State Department employee, were both at work in the U.S. Embassy, several rooms apart, when the bomb exploded. She was killed instantly.

“My son is in total shock; he is unable to talk about it,” said Pearl Kavaler of Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. She and her husband, Leon, a retired dentist, received a telephone call from their son three hours after the blast ripped through the building in downtown Nairobi.

“It was my 5-year-old granddaughter who told me, ‘They are looking for my mommy. Bad men made a bomb.’ ”

A husband-wife team who had made a career of foreign service, the Kavalers had arrived in Nairobi just 10 days ago for their second tour in Kenya, Pearl Kavaler said. Along with a stint in Nairobi seven years ago, they had served together in the Philippines, Pakistan, Israel and France after meeting in her native India in 1980 when she worked for the Voice of America.

Pearl Kavaler said her son and daughter-in-law decided to return to Africa, in part to introduce their two daughters, ages 5 and 10, to the wildlife.

“I was very concerned about my children going there,” Kavaler said. “But Prabhi told me it was one of the safer posts.”

Howard Kavaler and his two daughters were en route to the U.S. Saturday. Prabhi Guptara Kavaler is to be buried in Washington.

“He was just so proud to be a Marine,” Associated Press reported Clara Aliganga as saying of her son, Marine Sgt. Jesse N. Aliganga.

“He was so proud he made it through boot camp at Parris Island,” the Tallahassee, Fla., resident said, referring to the South Carolina training center. “It was something he was really good at.”

Aliganga, 21, was killed while on duty with the Marine Security Unit.

Arlene Kirk returned to Kenya on Wednesday after a six-week vacation in the United States, visiting her parents in South Bend, Ind., and a sister in Chicago.

After the long flight from Chicago to Nairobi, the 50-year-old Kirk was exhausted, and came in late Friday to her job as a civilian accountant in the Air Force’s budget department.

“She got there just before the bomb hit,” her sister, Patricia Bradley Williams, said Saturday from their parents’ home in South Bend.

Set for U.S. Return

After more than two decades working in government jobs across Africa, Kirk and her husband, Robert, a project manager with the U.S. Agency for International Development, were preparing to return to the U.S., family members said.

Kirk met her husband when the two were set up on a blind date while students at Indiana University. Shortly after marrying, the couple joined the Peace Corps and headed for Africa.

They returned to the U.S. on several occasions over the next 25 years--for more schooling and new jobs--but were always drawn back, to Botswana, to Cairo, and three years ago to Kenya.

“She didn’t just love her children, she loved people,” Kirk’s brother, Dennis Bradley, 58, of Chicago, said Saturday. “They would invite the world over to their house if they could.”

“She was just a terrific mother and wife,” Dennis Bradley said. “She was terrific.”

His sister’s most recent visit home was punctuated, as all her visits were, by shopping trips, as Kirk loaded up on coats, cookware and special surprise gifts for the people of Nairobi. The couple rented a Chevrolet Suburban, Bradley said, in part to transport all their purchases to the airport when they flew out of O’Hare International Airport on Wednesday, headed home.

Said Bradley: “They loved this life.”

Hobson chose the posting in Kenya over a host of other openings around the globe. He was 27, had a new family to think of and figured his days of military danger had come and gone with his service as an engineer during the Gulf War.

“I saw him off when he left to go to Africa,” recalled Babe Doyle, a longtime neighbor of Hobson’s parents in Lamar, Mo. “And I said to him, ‘Kenny Ray, what are you going to Africa for?’ He said it would be the most perfect place to take his family. He thought it was going to be nice.”

Taking a Collection

On Saturday morning, the 72-year-old Doyle performed a duty she has performed for years in the neighborhood. She knocked on each door, taking up a collection. Kenny Ray was dead.

Born in Lake Tahoe, Hobson grew up in the small towns of Lamar and Nevada, Mo., where his father, Kenneth Hobson Sr., is a dispatcher for the Barton County Sheriff’s Department, and his mother, Bonnie, is a homemaker. Before he graduated from Nevada High School in 1989, he already had enrolled in the Army. The military would be his ticket to college, family and friends said, as well as a pass to adventure.

Kenny Ray was always something of a renaissance man. He painted and drew “anything and everything,” debated political issues and played a serious game of tennis. He built his daughter, Meghan, 2, tiny wooden chairs in his dad’s wood shop.

He learned to bake, his grandmother, Vera Mitts, said, figuring kitchen skills would come in handy when he retired from the service and opened a bed-and-breakfast in Virginia.

Of course, the bed-and-breakfast could wait if the ambassadorship he dreamed about came through.

“He was intelligent,” Mitts said. “He was a wonderful boy.”

Although he chose the post, a sort of office manager’s job, in Nairobi almost entirely because Kenya seemed to promise safety for his wife, Debbie, and daughter, he made clear what should happen if he were killed.

He wanted his ashes spread in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast at Big Sur. That’s where he met his wife, now an Army reservist, while attending a language school in Monterey to learn Arabic. That’s where they were married. That’s where he wanted to be put to rest.

His body had been flown to Europe on Saturday, the family said, and would be taken to Washington for military services Monday. Then Kenny Ray would be taken to Lamar and, finally, to the coast of California.

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Clary reported from Miami, Slater from Chicago.