Friendly Fires

Diplomatic service at its best mixes adventure with duty, bestows education through service, and makes friends out of employees.

On the front cover, Bob is on his first trip to Timbuktu in his capacity as US Ambassador to Mali. With him are Sékou, his driver en brousse as well as in the country's capital, Gaoussou, a senior embassy employee who accompanied Bob on official visits all over the country, and Barbara. Those grooves in the sand were, in the late 1980s, the most direct route north, which lay between the Niger, West Africa's greatest river, and the vast Sahara: "Just stay between the river and the scraggly line of telegraph poles and you will get there," we were told. And we did.

The black rhino (below) is a rare and hard to see species. We surprised her, and vice-versa, in one of South Africa's less visited game parks as she was finishing breakfast and we were returning from a visit to the US Consulate in Durban. Our assignment to South Africa, immediately after the end of apartheid, was an unforgettable end to our joint career as a diplomatic couple.