25 years later…I remember

Buried under a couple of boxes lies the rather nondescript trunk that holds my old travel journals. I opened it the other day, sorted through the frayed and fading dairies until I found the one I was looking for, “Africa: Book 6.”  The opening page is titled Sept. 11, 2001. “It is probably fitting,” I wrote, “that on my last morning in Joburg I finally saw the early morning Jesus singer. He was right on time…” The Jesus Singer. That was the name I had given to a man I would never meet but whose voice I came to know well. This man walked through the neighborhood I was staying in every morning singing, beautifully, songs of hope, redemption and God’s glory. I came to take his songs for granted; I had no idea that just hours later I, like so many others, would be wanting to hear words of hope. It’s funny how time changes things. How, looking back, things seem so different, even symbolic, in ways they never felt in the moment.

As I chronicled in my book, “Always a Detour,” I was en route to Cairo when the World Trade Center’s North Tower was struck on 9/11. Grounded in Nairobi, over and over I watched that plane and the one that struck the South Tower on a TV placed above an airport snack bar. A lot of the details from that day are hazy at best, but there are people, complete strangers, that I can see clearly in my mind and who will always be part of my 9/11 story.

The South African man I’d chatted with on the plane who somehow found me in the chaos of the airport, handed me his cell phone and simply said, “Call anyone you need to.”

The older woman who put her arm around me as we watched the planes hit the tower for perhaps the 100th time on the TV. She leaned towards me and said, “We never know when we’ll need to be strong, but that is when we find how strong we are.”

The Kenya Airways workers who never stopped walking from group to group, giving updates or simply letting us know they would give us information as soon as they had it. It sounds like a small thing; in times of uncertainly it means a great deal.

Later that night, around 11 pm, I stepped off an airport shuttle, voucher in hand, and walked into the downtown Nairobi Hilton. It still amazes me that of all the thousands of people stranded in airports around the globe, I ended up in a hotel room nicer than anywhere I stayed as a paying tourist. Unable to sleep, I had a great deal of time on my hands and a mind spinning with worry and wonder.

I kept going to the computer room in the lobby to check my email. Before social media we had “the group email.” These were often very long messages sent to as many addresses, sometimes all the addresses, as we had in our contacts folder. I was longing to hear from anyone in the US and especially from friends and former co-workers in New York City. They did not disappoint. It seems that in times of tragedy and uncertainty people want to share their stories. New messages appeared every few hours, some of them from people I did not even know well. I found messages from people I had shared a work assignment or even just a brief conversation with at the stock photography agency I had worked for in New York. I was so grateful they included me.

One woman, a close work friend, wrote that, after hearing about the attacks she felt lost, like she should do something but not knowing what in the world she could actually do. She decided to walk to her yoga studio where she found a large gathering of others who felt the same way. She said she wasn’t sure whose idea it was, but someone suggested they all go to donate blood, which they did, finding community and a sense of purpose.

Another message from a work friend included a long, wonderfully written story about a man he knew “from the neighborhood,” a retired firefighter who had been downtown when the towers were hit and had impulsively joined the search and rescue mission. My friend had found him that night completely covered in soot and ash, but with a determined look in his exhausted eyes that said he would be back there the next day.

There was a man who worked downstairs in the photography department that I spoke to occasionally. One night, delivering some prints, I found him looking over some historic photos of the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911. He told me that his grandmother had been on the street outside the factory that day and watched the tragedy unfold. He said she had described to him the horror of watching bodies hit the ground around her as young women chose to jump from the building hoping death would come swiftly rather than be burned alive. You could see the emotion in his face and hear it in his voice as he thought of his grandmother witnessing something so harrowing, and of the young women who in the throes of terror realized the only thing they could control was how they would die.

It was through one of the group emails I read in the Nairobi Hilton that I learned that same man had uncharacteristically been in lower Manhattan, on the streets near the World Trade Center, when the first tower was hit. I read that he had stood there in disbelief watching bodies fall from the building, people choosing to jump to their death rather than be burned alive.

I read the messages and watched it all, over and over, on TV.

I was rebooked on a flight to Cairo on Sept 13th. That night I found myself seated in a common room at the backpacker-friendly Sun Hotel. All the guests gathered there each evening, conversing with each other and watching TV. The news coverage and conversations were non-stop about the attacks in the US. Those more removed from it asked questions about the clean-up; some cited supposed predictions by Nostradamus, others wondered and debated what might happen now. But most people wanted to share their own stories. They wanted to talk about where they were and what was happening around them when they heard about it. People wondered about friends in New York and expressed their own fears and worries. It did not matter that most of us had only just met; we wanted the companionship. We wanted to hear and be heard.

And still the emails came. I could read that the initial shock was starting to fade, and a dark understanding was beginning to spread. Many wrote of the smoke that kept billowing over Manhattan. It seemed to reflect the reality that those who were unaccounted for were not going to be found. Thousands of people, people who had simply gone to work one day, would never come home again.

We all have our 9/11 memories and stories as we mark 25 years since that day. Most of us still find comfort in telling them.

I returned to America in 2004. This was still in the days of travel agents and paper tickets so I went to an agency in Johannesburg to book my flight home. The young man who helped me was quite friendly and was curious about my life in America. He told me he had lived briefly in the States. I remember him well.

“I graduated from Wits University,” he told me proudly, “and landed my absolute dream job in New York. I couldn’t believe it; it truly was my dream come true.” His face and his voice changed as he continued his story. “But I had only worked there a few weeks and word came that the company would be downsizing. You know how it goes, ‘last hired, first fired.’ And so I was let go. I couldn’t believe it. I was in shock, devastated. I came back here feeling like a failure and got a job as a travel agent. I really thought my life was over. And then, just one week later, a plane flew into our office building and killed all my former co-workers. Life…you never know do you? I thought losing that job was the worst thing that could ever happen to me. Instead it saved my life.”

I think we all changed, at least a bit, after 9/11. I know America did. People describe it in different ways. That we lost our innocence. That we suddenly found armed guards and surveillance cameras where we once never even thought of such things. And how, in a short amount of time, we somehow grew used to it. We stopped trusting each other as much as we once had.

What I try to hold onto is knowing that while history is recorded in the “big stories” that make the headlines, it is kept alive through the stories of everyday people. I think that if we keep listening to each other, keep sharing our stories, sharing the small and large acts of bravery we witness, that we can hold onto our humanity. And if we do that, we can keep finding our own words of hope.