What it Was Like to be Far Away

It was a Tuesday morning and I had to go to the orphanage early. I was meeting with the Moms, the women who live in the small houses that are home to ten children each. One of those houses and one of those Moms had actually been my own children’s years before.

I remember that first moment, the one in which I went from being unknowing to hearing the first faint note of tragedy. We were talking about socks. As we planned, with the Moms, the orphanages annual budget, we were pondering the number of socks we would need to buy for eighty children and how much that would cost. That’s when the cheerful woman who worked in the orphanage as a secretary came in looking not cheerful at all and whispered something very strange in my ear.

“Jaime, on the radio they are saying that a plane crashed into the Twin Towers in New York.”

It sounded goofy to me. The media in Bolivia is notorious for reporting all kinds of stories that turn out not to be true. I thought back to that morning in 1991 when I was stopped in my tracks by the front-page headline in the Cochabamba daily, proclaiming that President George Bush had had a heart attack and that Dan Quayle had been sworn in as President. Believe me, that put the U.S. ex-pats here ill at ease for a good twelve hours, until we were finally able to sort out that in fact, Bush had just gone into the hospital for a heart examination.

But on that Tuesday morning my friend sounded upset enough that I decided to walk to her office and see what I could find on the Internet. That’s when I saw the CNN page with a photo of one of the tours ablaze and a report that the other had just collapsed into a massive pile of rubble and bodies.

I called another member of the U.S. ex-pat community here, a woman who had a television with cable (I have neither). It was a very short conversation.

“Can we come over?”

“Yes.”

And then, along with millions of other Americans who were so very much closer, we sat memorized in front of a television all day, watching CNN and trying to absorb the enormous way in which our world had changed in one hour and twenty-five minutes.

Back then my two older children were still middle schoolers at one of the American Schools here. At the request of the U.S. Embassy the school closed and sent the children home. It is hard to remember now eight years on, but for those first few hours no one had any idea what was going on and what might come under attack next.

It reminded me so much of the day when I was in the first grade and my teacher came back from the lunch recess, tears having swollen her eyes, telling us that the President had been killed and that we were to go home.

It is a very odd feeling to be so far away from your country when your country has been attacked. It was, in a milder way, like the feeling I had walking on the streets of San Francisco the day my father died many years before. The world around you continues as if nothing is different. But your world is different. We became part of a small pocket of people for whom the world had become, suddenly, another kind of place, surrounded by people who certainly knew of the events in New York, Washington, and Sharksville, but who were not affected by it in the same way.

Bolivians seemed to react to the attack on the two Towers in two different ways.

That evening and for a few days after we received telephone calls from friends telling us how sorry they were for what had happened, offering us condolences the way they might have if they had heard through the grapevine that a relative had died. We appreciated these calls.

Other people here, however, could not get past affixing their political ideologies to the attacks that left 2,993 people dead and 2,993 families in unspeakable grief. In Cochabamba’s main plaza one group posted a copy of the front page of the local paper, which featured a graphic photo of a human being ending his or her life with a leap from a flaming skyscraper. Written along side the photo in red ink were proclamations of how the Empire had finally harvested its just rewards. No mention was made of how the men and women killed, including immigrant Latinos working as janitors and dishwashers, were responsible for U.S. foreign policy.

September 11, 2001 reminded us in ways enormous and not so enormous how some people are willing to suspend entirely their ability to see human beings as human beings, in the name of political fundamentalism. This is true on the left and the right and in other corners less easy to name.

I did not stay far away for long, as it turned out.

A few weeks after the attacks I was in both Washington and New York for work. My first understanding of how things had changed was the sight of dozens of uniformed young soldiers in the Miami airport, armed with automatic rifles.

In New York I took the long walk to the lower end of Manhattan, as did so many, to pay my respects to the massive demolition project that Ground Zero had become, in a decimated neighborhood where chain link fences were papered over with letters of sympathy from all over the world and desperate flyers of families still searching for the ones they had loved and lost.

Looking back on that day eight years ago, I recall the afternoon that my older brother and I stood on my father’s fresh grave and, wiser than me then and now, he told me, “Remember how it feels today. The feeling will fade. It will not feel this intense again.”

Our memories do, over time, strip away the intensity that the present brings to events, both joyous and horrible. And so we designate dates on a calendar as assignments to summon as we can some of the intensity of what we once felt, because remembering has a purpose. And it is a purpose that is not political, ideological or commercial. It is human.

September 11, 2009