July 4 has come around again, and still we Americans find ourselves--metaphorically speaking--wandering with troubled minds and hearts in a dark wood, looking for light and landmarks. What to do with respect to Iraq, the Middle East, and our ever-deteriorating relations with the rest of the world? No one sees any easy solutions.

It's the long view that gives me hope. I'm reflecting on two related experiences today:

In early 1981, I was a trainee in the Peace Corps training center at Thies, Senegal. There, I was getting a 10-week crash course in Pulaar, one of West Africa's most widely-spoken languages, along with an intensive brush-up on my French (the official language of Senegal). I was to be detailed to a Pulaar-speaking village along the Senegal River in the north of the country, where I would work as an aquaculture extension agent.

One Saturday, we trainees were taken on a field trip to Goree Island, just offshore of Dakar, Senegal's capital. Goree is a beautiful island, with sunny beaches, seaside cafes, and historic architecture, and it's a popular day outing for Dakar residents. But worldwide, it's best known for the Maison des Esclaves, the Slave House, from which captured West Africans were loaded onto slave ships for the dangerous, terrifying trip to the New World. A walk through this forbidding fortress brings you to the single doorway through which so many people were forced to pass.

Wandering through the fortress on my own, I encountered a friendly guard, and began to chat with him in French. It was he who explained the significance of the doorway to me. He wondered what I was doing in Senegal and I explained that I would be a Peace Corps Volunteer in the River Region. As it happens, he was from that region, and Pulaar was his native language. So I switched from French to my halting Pulaar. On that day, I was just 3 or 4 weeks into my study, and could say little without great effort and concentration. But the guard was patient, and every word I could say seemed important in that our conversation represented as complete a break from the past as one could imagine, and felt like a small act of atonement on behalf of my country. Some of my maternal ancestors were wealthy Southerners who may well have owned some of the people who passed through the doorway. But there at the horrible doorway I stood, their development-worker descendant, speaking a language that would have been spoken by many enslaved people, in equal-to-equal conversation with a citizen of the free and democratic nation of Senegal. For the people being shoved through that doorway long ago, such a conversation might have seemed impossible.

Now it's 2007, and in my passport is a new visa for Vietnam, where I'm headed next week for personal travel--my first trip to Southeast Asia. I was a child during the Vietnam War (which the Vietnamese call the American War, I have learned). The TV images from that era, of frightening battles, bomb blasts and napalm attacks, exhausted soldiers and terrified villagers, are embedded deep in my consciousness, along with the names of so many places where battles were fought and lives lost.

So it's been a great pleasure lately to read through my Lonely Planet guidebook and discover that so many of the places with those forbidding names are now well-known tourist centers and historic sites. The Vietnamese countryside that once seemed so forbidding and hostile is lushly beautiful and inviting in the guidebook photos. A colleague who recently traveled to Vietnam on business reports that the Vietnamese people she met were delighted to meet and work with Americans--she would love to go back and explore more of the country. I'm impatiently waiting for these last few days to pass before I can board my flight to Ho Chi Minh City.

Someday, I'd love to walk along the banks of the Euphrates, and visit ancient Babylon and modern Baghdad as a peaceful and ordinary tourist. Today, such a trip seems impossible in my lifetime. But 30 years ago, my upcoming trip to Vietnam would have seemed the unlikeliest of dreams. We can't know how our future will unfold. But looking into the past, I see some signs of hope.