It’s funny, the things you think about when you are facing death.

As La’Nita Johnson lay partially nude and motionless for 15 hours in a dank alley in 2016 in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, while al-Qaida terrorists searched for the living to kill, she thought about her vocation and what brought her there.

Fresh out of Pepperdine University and destined to climb the corporate ladder, she took time off from work as a district sales leader for a major snack food company to go to Africa for two weeks to help build a school in one of the continent’s poorest countries.

But her father didn’t want her to go. The country was too unstable, he argued.

Lying in that alley, with her father’s words ringing in her ears, she made a promise to God:

“If you get me out alive, I’ll go into education.”

“I knew what I was doing in corporate was not fulfilling,” she said.

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Johnson made it out, but at least 28 others, including an American missionary, were killed in the bloody terrorist attack before national and French security forces were able to free 126 hostages and kill four extremists.

Fast-forward five years and Johnson bounced down the stairs of her parents’ Powder Springs home looking every bit like a 29-year-old home for the weekend. Having survived one of the worst terrorist attacks of the past decade, Johnson is still thinking globally, and kept her promise to go into education and has added blogging — specifically about post-traumatic stress disorder and trauma — to her resume.

Smiling, she wore a single braid, which rested on her right shoulder. She was wearing a loose white blouse and a colorful skirt adorned with elephants and flowers.

Her father, Steven Johnson, who was spying on the neighborhood kids cutting their grass to make sure they didn’t touch his impeccable lawn, barely noticed.

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

But her mother, Arlethia Perry-Johnson, who was in the kitchen making thick cheese-filled hamburgers, couldn’t help herself.

“You look so pretty,” Perry-Johnson said, molding the burgers. “You look like you are from Guatemala.”

Johnson, who was visiting from the Central American country, where she now works as a foreign service officer specializing in education, rolled her eyes and laughed.

It is those moments — small and seemingly insignificant — that have become so valuable to the Johnsons.

Johnson was only home for a long weekend, her first time there since Christmas, before she hopped on a flight back to Guatemala.

Johnson grew up in Powder Springs as an only child. Her mother is a retired vice president of strategic communications and marketing at Kennesaw State University, and her father is a talent consultant at Cox Communications, a broadband and cable TV provider. (Cox Communications’ owner, Cox Enterprises, also owns The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.)

Because her middle name is Marguerite, she is known around the house as “Maya,” after the poet, Marguerite “Maya” Angelou.

As a child, she developed a passion for travel, and by the time she graduated from high school, she had already visited and studied in France, Italy, Greece and Spain.

Credit: La’Nita Johnson

Credit: La’Nita Johnson

At Pepperdine, where she majored in Hispanic Studies and International Studies with a specialization in Intercultural Communication, she spent her entire sophomore year in Buenos Aires.

“We taught her to think globally,” Perry-Johnson said.

That is why after she graduated in 2014, it was an easy decision for her to volunteer through the buildOn nonprofit to go to Africa and build a school.

On a mission to help kids

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

In the Johnson home, the television was parked on cable news. Steven Johnson is hooked on it. At least when he is not getting news alerts on his cellphone.

In 2015, he had been reading about a coup in Burkina Faso that threatened to pull the West African nation deeper into political crisis. At the same time, neighboring Mali was in conflict.

“It just seemed to not be the right place to be going,” he said.

Johnson assured her parents that it would be safe in Burkina Faso.

Besides, she was needed. At 41%, Burkina Faso has one of the lowest levels of literacy in the world.

Credit: La’Nita Johnson

Credit: La’Nita Johnson

She arrived in the capital city of Ouagadougou on Jan. 9, 2016.

Besides Johnson, there were four people from St. Louis, a mission trek leader, two translators, two chefs and a driver. The group was supposed to spend a total of 12 days in Burkina Faso, with the days in the middle building the school in the tiny village of Morpougha.

On her first full day in Ouagadougou, Johnson watched a large and noisy crowd surround a thief. She expected police to show up or to intervene, but they never came.

“I was expecting something different,” Johnson said. “Everybody from the African diaspora expects this trip (back to Africa) to be ‘I’m home.’ I didn’t have that. I was nervous.”

Credit: Will Stone

Credit: Will Stone

But once in the village, aside from a bout with food poisoning and showering with a bucket, all of that melted away. They built the school and bonded with the villagers, who threw them a lavish, traditional send-off ceremony when they had finished.

“The celebration they sent us off to was beautiful,” Johnson said. “It was a send-off of blessings.”

‘Last thing I remembered’

With those blessings, the group arrived back in Ouagadougou on Jan. 15, where they would check in and shower at a local hostel, then head to the Cappuccino Cafe, near the popular Splendid Hotel, for a celebratory dinner.

The village’s peanut-based diet had not agreed with Johnson, and she was excited to hear that Cappuccino Cafe had the best Western food in the country — including pizza.

At the same time, Johnson’s parents had just arrived in Puerto Rico for a much-needed vacation. Johnson gave them a quick call to check in before dinner. And because the restaurant had precious Wi-Fi, Johnson was able to send them photos of the village ceremony.

Credit: Will Stone

Credit: Will Stone

“As soon as she hung up, we got the pictures and we were so excited,” Perry-Johnson said. “Then we put on our swimsuits and went to the beach.”

When Johnson’s large group arrived at the restaurant, popular among foreigners, a hostess tried to seat them at a table by the window. But the manager put them in the back, where he found more space at a bigger table.

Walking through the cafe, Johnson noticed “an alarming amount of Western white people” in the restaurant and asked aloud if it was normal.

“We are still on this high,” Johnson said, remembering. “The vibe was super good. The music was good. But something felt off. I don’t know what it was.”

She found a seat next to one of her translators, Ahmed.

As the two chatted, a woman walked into the restaurant wearing shorts.

Before arriving in the Islamic country, Johnson had been told to dress modestly and to not wear shorts.

“I was just having this trivial conversation with Ahmed and asked him why did she have shorts on,” Johnson said. “Ahmed very casually said, ‘Oh, she is a prostitute.’ And that was the last thing I remembered — a silly conversation about a prostitute.”

No help coming

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Almost as soon as Ahmed could get the words out, the sounds of AK-47s ripped through the restaurant.

“I hear pop, pop, pop. Then it stopped,” Johnson said. “They were kids and the gun jammed. Then it started back.”

Johnson was able to slide beneath the family-style table while bullets whizzed over her head.

“I can’t explain it to this day, but something entered my body and said ‘move’ and I crawled to the bathroom,” Johnson said.

She hid under a sink in the crowded bathroom for about 90 minutes. At one point, the terrorists even knocked on the bathroom door. They laughed and left.

“They never tried to get in,” Johnson said. “That was always super confusing to me.”

Instead, they continued to shoot and lob explosives throughout the restaurant.

As the thick smoke poured into the bathroom, Johnson turned to Martin, another translator who was hiding in the bathroom with her, and asked him: “When are the police coming?”

Martin looked at her, and she was immediately taken back to the robbery she witnessed when she arrived in the country.

“They are not coming,” he said.

A harrowing escape

In Puerto Rico, Johnson’s father checked his phone, and a bulletin about an attack in Burkina Faso popped up.

“My heart sank,” Steven Johnson said. “There is nothing that can explain the feeling of helplessness one gets when you know your child is in danger.”

Having returned from the beach before her husband, Perry-Johnson barely had time to open her suitcase to get ready for dinner when Steven Johnson rushed into the room.

“When he walks back in, I look at his face and the look on his face is a gut reaction,” Perry-Johnson said. “I said, ‘What is going on? Is it Maya?’ He is just holding out his phone. I just lose it. I freak out.”

Across the world, Johnson remained calm. She dunked her face in water to escape the smoke and removed her dress to soak it and put it over her face.

She told the people huddled in the bathroom that if they didn’t leave, she was going to suffocate, so she hatched a plan to crawl out of the restaurant.

Like in the old movies and action television shows she used to watch with her father, Johnson and another woman crawled through the restaurant through smoke and dead bodies.

Credit: AP

Credit: AP

At one point, hoping to not get detected, Johnson smeared herself with the blood of a dead woman and played dead. Wracked with guilt, she apologized to the dead woman.

Johnson made it back to the table, where she crawled over her dead driver to find her purse and her phone, which she would lose again trying to escape.

With no shoes and very little clothing on, unseen, she made it outside of the restaurant and hid beneath a car with a woman from her group.

They made it to an alley and hid under a piece of sheet metal. There they waited — for 15 hours.

Out of danger?

Periodically, the terrorists, who had set several cars on fire and sacked the nearby Splendid Hotel, made a sweep of the alley.

Midway through the night, Johnson heard someone call out, “Bonjour, nous sommes la police.”

Johnson yelled twice, but stopped herself.

The voice came closer but the person didn’t see Johnson.

Johnson said the French accent didn’t sound right. It had an Arabic hint to it.

A few minutes later, they heard it again: “Bonjour, nous sommes la police.”

This time, someone answered. The terrorist shot them.

“I was pretty calm for being naked in an alley. I am listening to every noise,” Johnson said. “My parents raised me Baptist, but I never felt particularly religious. But I prayed harder than I ever have.”

‘She is not ours to keep’

In Puerto Rico, the Johnsons were frantic. They called every contact they had with connections to Africa. They talked to the president of buildOn several times. On an early call, he said Johnson was missing. On a later call, he raised the possibility that she might have been killed.

Steven Johnson couldn’t take it anymore and went to sleep, while Perry-Johnson paced, made phone calls and prayed.

At 6 a.m., when Steven Johnson woke up, his wife was ready for him. They still had not heard anything about their daughter. They looked at the pictures she sent them right before the attack.

“‘God let her send us those pictures. She looks so happy and fulfilled. She is enjoying what she was meant to do,’” Perry-Johnson told her husband. “‘We have to accept that he only loaned her to us. She is not ours to keep. We have to release her back to Him.’”

Credit: La’Nita Johnson

Credit: La’Nita Johnson

Steven Johnson didn’t argue or counter, and Perry-Johnson would say later that it was the “ultimate demonstration to our faith.”

“We had prepared ourselves to never see her again,” Steven Johnson said. “And it cuts very deep.”

Strong faith

As the hours ticked by and there was no help from the police, Johnson tried to devise a plan to escape when she heard someone yell, “Stop!”

She waited for gunshots that never came. She decided to trust the voice.

“I said, ‘Bonjour. Are you the police? Are you really the police?’” Johnson said.

The man turned around holding an AK-47.

Johnson froze. But it was the police, who grabbed her and carried her out of the alley to two men from the U.S. Embassy.

Credit: Imagespic/Sipa USA

Credit: Imagespic/Sipa USA

“I have never been so happy to see two white men,” Johnson said. “I asked if this was (an attack by) ISIS and they said it was al-Qaida. Al-Qaida? Where have they been?”

Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) claimed responsibility for the attack, which ended after dozens of French special forces arrived overnight from neighboring Mali, killing four terrorists, including two women.

“It is funny what stuff you retain. You kick into a level of badassness,” Johnson said. “There were times when I did give up. At one point, I was praying under the sink and stopped and asked, ‘Why? I’m gonna die anyway.’ But I got out of the bathroom and said this isn’t happening today. God kept showing me that this is not over.”

Credit: AP

Credit: AP

Johnson was taken to the local hospital, an experience that she says she doesn’t remember. Both of her feet were severely cut and her body was covered with bug bites.

By the 16th, just a day after the attack, Johnson was on a plane to America. Her parents, who wouldn’t leave Puerto Rico until they heard news about Johnson, also boarded a plane to Atlanta.

While they were taxiing, Steven Johnson’s phone rang.

He was too emotional to talk so he immediately gave the phone to his wife.

“She said, ‘Mom, you would have been so proud of me,’” said Perry-Johnson, adding that her daughter then recalled a biblical parable that she taught her. “‘I was like a warrior. I had the faith of a mustard seed.’ She was sounding so strong. She sounded like a warrior.”

Getting help

On the day she arrived in Atlanta, her parents took Johnson to eat, before taking her to the hospital. She got a call from buildOn to make sure she had arrived home safely. But they also told her that two people from their group, including Ahmed, with whom she had that silly conversation about a prostitute, had been killed trying to save others.

Perry-Johnson had to rush her daughter out of the restaurant.

But it was only recently that Johnson realized that she was not OK. Loud noises and crowds still “freak” her out.

“La’Nita was always exuberant in her personality. Zany, like her father,” Perry-Johnson said. “But she became very subdued. She didn’t want to go outside and go places. She didn’t want to go to restaurants. That was a challenge.”

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

All of that is very familiar to David Kendrick Jr., a mental health advocate and vice president of NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) DeKalb.

In 2007, while he served in the U.S. Army in Iraq, a sniper’s bullet shattered his femur. He needed two blood transfusions and his left leg is still partially paralyzed.

“With my injury, anything that resembles the sound of a sniper’s rifle took me right back there. It is something I still fear to this day,” said Kendrick, 34. “She can try to avoid anything that can take her back to that moment. You never get over it, but the best thing you can do is avoid triggers.”

At the time of the attack, Johnson was living in Chicago. When she arrived back in America, she stayed at her parents’ Atlanta home only for about a month, before going back to Chicago.

“It was my first time having trauma-based mental health issues. I wanted space to completely break down and you can only do that by yourself,” Johnson said. “I never had the space to cry here, and that must have been terrifying for my parents. When I did cry, my dad cried with me.”

She went into therapy but said she wasn’t invested in it. Her first therapist cried.

“And that made me super guarded,” Johnson said.

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Dr. Marcuetta Sims, an Atlanta-based psychologist who specializes in treating trauma, said PTSD is often not diagnosed in Black women and women of color, although they experience some form of it almost on a daily basis.

In the latest book by Northwestern Medicine clinical psychologist Dr. Inger Burnett-Zeigler, “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen: The Emotional Lives of Black Women,” an estimated 8 out of 10 Black women have experienced some form of trauma.

“Treatment is very important,” said Sims, who works primarily with Black women. “There is a lot of conversation around healing from trauma. And a big part of the kinds of treatment that are necessary are things that get our mind and body regulated. Like having a good community and support system.”

Johnson is still in therapy, but has also found an outlet in blogging about her mental health issues and PTSD. It is also a platform to answer questions like “Why are you so tired? What is wrong with you?”

She wanted to let people know what she was dealing with and that PTSD can happen “to a 23-year-old Black girl that lives on North Michigan Avenue and brunches.”

“I wanted people to understand that I am not my best and I didn’t feel like people saw that when they saw me,” Johnson said. “I still liked being around people, but I was really different. No one could see the middle that I was feeling. I was smiling, but it was exhausting.”

Finding purpose and peace

After returning to Chicago, Johnson was back at work a month later. But by May, she went on short-term disability, taking off five months. She went back to work in November 2016, but quit the following May.

“My job did not care about my well-being and I realized that the only person that cares about you is you,” Johnson said. “As soon as I got back, I started looking for jobs in education.”

Remembering her promise to God to go into education, a month later, Johnson got a USAID Donald M. Payne International Development Graduate Fellowship to pursue a career in the Foreign Service of the U.S. Agency for International Development. By August, she had enrolled in American University to get her master’s degree. She graduated in May 2019 and started training for foreign services in September.

Last October, just four years after the attack in Burkina Faso, she moved to Guatemala to work for USAID/Guatemala in the Health and Education Office, where she leads her team’s cross-office knowledge management, as well as the Youth Working Group focusing on youth advocacy, and serves as coordinator of the Mission Guatemala’s First and Second Tour Officer (FASTO) Program.

She is the only Black woman on her team.

Credit: La’Nita Johnson

Credit: La’Nita Johnson

A 2020 report by the Government Accountability Office, a government watchdog agency, found that although the overall proportion of racial or ethnic minorities at the State Department rose from 28% to 32% between 2002 and 2018, the proportion of Black employees fell from 17% to 15%.

“One thing that the attack has made very clear is that I have a passion for serving youth,” Johnson said.

Back at her parents’ Powder Springs home, they threw a big cookout for her before she headed back to Guatemala. Perry-Johnson carefully curated the guest list to make sure no one asked Johnson about Burkina Faso.

Credit: La’Nita Johnson

Credit: La’Nita Johnson

But it never goes away.

“How does someone like Ahmed die? The experience has given me the strength to keep traveling and still be open for service,” Johnson said. “But on the back end, I struggled with the why. My biggest journey now is why am I still here? I might never get the answer. But I am still on the exploration journey.”

Epilogue

Weeks after they spoke for this article, writer Ernie Suggs asked La’Nita Johnson, as a survivor of a terrorist attack, what went through her mind when she heard about Thursday’s deadly attacks in Afghanistan at the Kabul airport, where members of the U.S. military have been evacuating people as the Taliban retakes control of the country.

Here’s her response in her own words:

“For the first couple of years following my terrorist attack, I used to be glued to my phone looking up any details I could find regarding news of any recently announced acts of terrorism. I would spend hours digging myself into rabbit holes — learning about each victim and details of their life or seeking to understand the political landscape of the country in which the attack occurred to provide insight about the ‘sorted rationale’ of the attackers. This string of actions almost always ended in a persistent obsession into the details of my own attack. During that time and in those moments of pain, I would feel oddly comforted knowing that I wasn’t alone in being a survivor of international terrorism.

“‘It is unhealthy.’ My therapist(s) would share, pleading for me to turn off my alerts, because constantly waiting for those alerts was ultimately triggering to my PTSD and overall mental health.

“Five years later, I can say I’ve finally listened to them. I’ve turned off all news outlets of my phone. My father, who is still very much the opposite, always gently updates me when news of terrorism occurs — like he did this morning. After he sent me a text reflecting on the reality of my experience and almost losing me to violence, he tearfully shared that there was an attack at the Afghanistan airport this morning. I had no idea, I hadn’t heard.

“While I no longer go into my past practice of ceaseless investigation, my heart still hurts to know that others are joining me in the ranks of surviving such atrocities. I will always be reminded of my own experience in hearing such news; however, my ironic sense of solace in knowing there are others like me no longer comforts me. It now brings about a sadness for both the brutality to which the survivors and victims were exposed, but also a despair at the state of our world, as I wonder if things will ever change.”