Anne Smedinghoff’s family consoled themselves over the weekend with the thought that the young US diplomat who was killed by a suicide bomb while delivering schoolbooks to children, died doing what she loved.
Smedinghoff, a 25 year old foreign service officer, was travelling with four other Americans to donate textbooks to students when the heavily armoured convoy they were in was hit by a suicide car bomb. She is the first US civilian to die on the job since the September Benghazi attack in Libya according to the Daily Beast.
Despite the looming US military exit from Afghanistan making her venture all the more dangerous, Smedinghoff’s family say she was determined to travel to the country to work directly with Afghan people, volunteering her service after completing her first assignment in Venezuela. She was to complete her Afghanistan post as a press officer in July.
US secretary of state John Kerry who met the employee of the State Department during an official trip to Afghanistan two weeks ago described her during a press conference as “everything that is right about our Foreign Service”.
He spoke of her as a “selfless, idealistic woman”. “I think that in this tragedy, there is a stark contrast for all of the world to see between two very different sets of values,” he said.
“On the one hand, you have Anne, a selfless, idealistic young woman who woke up yesterday morning and set out to bring textbooks to schoolchildren, to bring them knowledge, children she had never met, to help them to be able to build a future. And Anne and those with her were attacked by Taliban terrorists who woke up that day not with a mission to educate or to help, but with a mission to destroy.”
Her parents were comforted by the thought she had died in service of a cause that she was passionate about.
“Working as a public diplomacy officer, she particularly enjoyed the opportunity to work directly with the Afghan people and was always looking for opportunities to reach out and help to make a difference in the lives of those living in a country ravaged by war,” they said in an official statement.
Her father said family members often teased her about accepting assignments in less dangerous locations.
“She said, ‘What would I do in London or Paris? It would be so boring,” her father recalled, according to ABC news.
“She really felt she was making a difference”.