nmah5327.xml

nmah5327.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-12-11

Overnight on September 10, I traveled to London on the first leg of a trip to Nigeria. On the 11th, I was walking around London enjoying the sights. I didn't learn what had happened in the U.S. until about 6:30 P.M. London time, so several hours after the event. When I finally reached my husband in Washington, D.C., where we live, he told me about the way the day was unfolding in the wake of the Pentagon attack. My son had blessedly been kept at school to await his afternoon bus (which normally passes right by the Pentagon), allowing my husband to remain at the office. As for me, I asked if I should return home, and he told me I couldn't: transatlantic flights were cancelled. So the next morning, September 12, I continued on to Abuja, Nigeria as scheduled, and spent the next week there on business. Once I got there, I wrote to my family saying it was the first time I felt safer in Africa than at homee. During the period of my stay in Nigeria, there was serious ethnic strife in the town of Jos, which left thousands of Nigerians dead. So the Nigerians I met, while expressing their condolences to me, also received mine. I remember one night at the hotel restaurant, when the waiter stood solemnly beside me and told me how very sad he was at my loss. I just started to cry right then and there. It was strange, for me and other American colleagues overseas, to experience the whole thing via CNN. When I got home, I knew I had missed an experience which had visibly marked everyone who had lived through it, including my family.

Yes, in the sense that it is more evident than before that the U.S. is not a "safe haven" from the troubles of the world. Since my career involves assistance to developing countries, I am more aware than most Americans of the problems most of the world faces. Having it "come home" was different, though. I can also see how shaken my son still is - on a recent visit to New York, we went to Ground Zero and he just fell apart. He thought a plane was going to land on us, and he kept saying he didn't want all those people to die. It was heart-rending.

Yes, we did. It means much more to me, and I have become very interested in learning more about the first years of our country. I have read Founding Brothers and the Adams biography recently. I also watched Ken Burns' Civil War series all the way through again. It seems to me we badly need to re-connect to our values as a nation. I am concerned about the direction our foreign policy has been taking during 2002, however; I do not feel certain that we are learning the lessons of this event.