Reflections on Easter, Terrorism, and Perceptions of Risk

Yesterday was Easter Sunday. We spent it at a joyful thanksgiving service and lunch in a tiny rural Anglican church four hours east of Mukono with our amazing friends, Mike and Monica Chibita. Four days earlier Somali terrorists entered Garissa University College in Garissa, Kenya at dawn and massacred 147 people, mostly Christian students. It seems almost incomprehensible to consider such extremes of light and darkness happening side by side in our world, but it occurs to me that's what Easter is about.

During the original holy week, Jesus came into Jerusalem to celebrate passover as a popular figure, adored by the crowds. Four days later one of his closest friends sold him out to his enemies, and he was arrested on false presences at night while he was praying in a garden with his disciples. He was given a mock trial in which even the Roman governor admitted he knew Jesus to be innocent. He was then beaten, mocked, and subjected to the most humiliating, excruciating death the Roman empire could devise. While he was being crucified he prayed for God to forgive those who had killed him. As Mahatma Ghandi explained it, "A man who was completely innocent offered himself as a sacrifice for the good of others, including his enemies, and became the ransom of the world. It was the perfect act." That was Friday, on Sunday when some of his followers went to his grave to finish the burial they found he wasn't lying on a slab wrapped in burial cloths, he was, astonishingly, alive. Death had worked backward and humanity had been given forgiveness, hope, eternal life. Extremes of dark and light compacted into three days. May the God of Easter comfort the friends and family of those murdered in Garissa. 

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After the terrorist incident in Kenya, an American exchange program here at UCU has decided to send their students back to the U.S. three weeks early. Many of them are flying out tomorrow. I found several of them in tears after receiving the news; they didn't want to leave.

How should expatriates living in places like Kenya or Uganda respond when it comes to implications for their own safety? What does one do when one lives in a situation in which the terrorist threat is red, rather than the orange that has seemed to be the perennial color in U.S. airports? Or, how much should one worry about friends, acquaintances, family in such situations? Here are a few thoughts.

1.  We learn from the field of risk communication that people's perceptions of risk are highly irrational. From 2012 to the present 500 people have been killed in terrorist acts in Kenya. That is frightening--terrifying. At the same time, the World Health Organization's Global Status Report on Road Safety reports official figures for traffic fatalities for Kenya at 3,000 for the year 2013 alone, though the organization estimates that the figure is actually much higher, close to 8,500. That means somewhere between 10,000 and 25,000 people were killed in auto accidents over the same time period that 500 people were killed by terrorists. 

As my department chair here at UCU observes, all else being equal, terrorists in Kenya are 20 to 50 times more likely to be killed on the road en route to committing an atrocity than the average person is to be one of their victims. For a recent example in the U.S. consider ebola. How many people died of ebola in the U.S.? One, last I counted, though I stand to be corrected. What's the entire American population? 300+ million. Other than the families and health professionals working with the infected, how much sense did it make for anybody else to be worried? But again, our sense of risk is illogical. We have to subdue it to what we know cognitively about our probability of harm.

2.  When we hear about terrorist incidents we often can't know context-specific details. Garissa, Kenya, is a town in the middle of a heavily Somali part of Kenya. It is so remote that in years past people never drove single cars there out of fear of banditry. One only travelled to Garissa by caravan, preferably with armed guards. What happened there is horrific and evil. But it happened there, rather elsewhere, for a reason. Consider 9/11. New York City and Washington DC are very different than Grand Rapids, Michigan, Villa Rica, Georgia, or Oviedo, Florida. Oviedo residents (I assume) were not worried that a 747 would crash into downtown Oviedo. It's hard to make those distinctions when things happen overseas. 

3.  Americans and Europeans are among the few people in the world who have the luxury of making their minds to fly out of a place when things get hot. Most of the time the locals have no choice but to stay and deal with their fears. That's not to say it's necessary for foreign nationals to stay in nations that are lapsing into civil war until they are forced flee on foot with just the clothes on their backs to refugee camps in neighboring countries. It might, however, provide a sense of perspective for Westerners to consider how their fears may look to people who have learned to adjust and live with the underlying anxiety for years on end. People in New York City didn't all move out or change jobs en masse after 9/11. As a country we gritted our teeth and collectively said, we're not letting you scare us. We're resilient. We're staying put.

4.  At a personal level, who wants to live your life worried all of the time about what might happen to you? Perhaps being in an affluent society where we have so much control over our lives has made us intolerant of personal safety risks to an inordinate degree. Some people, of course, know they are at specific, personal risk and should take appropriate action. But taking into account points 1, 2, and 3, many of us Americans living overseas and our relatives probably need to loosen up and learn to live with uncertainty. There's something freeing to saying to yourself, I have important things I want to do--maybe things I believe God has called me to do--I don't have time to sit around and worry about whether a terrorist is going to target me. 

So, what about the exchange students' departure? I would argue in terms of their personal safety there's no reason for them to go, and that they could have achieved a better closure on their experience had they been allowed to complete the well-planned activities scheduled for their last three weeks in Africa. Am I criticizing the organizers of the program? No way. They may be full in agreement with every one of the points above. They, unfortunately, have to deal with another type of risk, one that constitutes another major difference between the U.S. and Africa. They have to minimize their exposure to risk of litigation. 

Photos below (unfortunately I forgot my camera for the church thanksgiving service). Regarding risk: breakdown in the middle of the Murchison Falls game park. Leopard walks by in nearby field as we wait to get a new battery. OK, I admit not all that risky. The guy on the left of the car is a game warden with a rifle who was riding with us!