9/11

Around 3 p.m. (15h) every afternoon I would check the news on the Internet. My office, across and down the street from the Geneva UN, looked on a tree with a bird's nest. The fledglings had flown away to make their own lives.

That day, 9/11, CNN reported that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I chocked it up to pilot error until a few minutes later, a second plane went through the second tower.

I worked for an international organization that wrote standards. We had over 30 nationalities on our 97-person staff. There were two other Americans, one a man in the next office. I ran next door. Then I took the elevator to the Secretary General's office where his secretary who was a dual American and Swiss, looked up.

Trying to get through to any news organization on the net became almost impossible. The man next door succeeded with the newspaper El Pais. Information was scanty at best, although it was obvious that it was a terrorist attack.

I ran home less than 20 minutes away from the office,  turned on CNN and called back to the office to let my cohorts know what was happening.

I lived in what I called the international ghetto. The apartment complex was so close to the alphabet international organizations that I had not met a native Swiss for the first few years I lived there. Most neighbors worked for those agencies.

Some neighbors had become close friends, but others were of the Bonjour or Bonsoir greeting level. We had a vague ideal of our nationalities other than to be aware they were from every continent. Over the next few days almost every one of them expressed their condolences to me.

On the bus a few days later when I was talking to a friend, a Muslim woman came up to me, and asked if I were American. I said yes. "I am so, so sorry," she said. There were tears in her eyes. She was not the only Muslim who expressed their condolences to me, one nationality, feeling the pain of another nationality.

My neighbor and good friend, a Syrian, had an American staying with her. She could not get home until the travel ban was lifted. It was strange for me NOT to be able to get home. Always, I thought if my daughter or step-mother needed me, all I had to do was cross the park to the airport and get the next plane to Boston.

That Logan, my airport, had become the airport of choice for a terrorist attack did not compute.

There were the revelations over the next few days that the brother of a coworker was in one of the towers. I learned that a friend who worked in New York was safe. An Israeli writer friend had sent her son to New York a week before because she thought he would be safer there. He lived within blocks of the towers. He, too, was okay.

My relationship to the attack was, at best, as an outsider with inside connections.

So many years later, we go on with our normal lives, but their are families in 62 countries for whom the loss was personal and is personal and will always be personal.  9/11 was not a political event for them. If only the hatred that caused the attacks, all attacks, all war would go away.

Here's the list by country of victims.

1. United States 2,605
2. United Kingdom 67
3. Dominican Republic 47
4. India 41
5. South Korea 28
6. Canada 24
7. Japan 24
8. Colombia 18
9. Jamaica 16
10. Philippines 16
11. Mexico 15
12. Trinidad and Tobago 14
13. Ecuador 13
14. Australia 11
15. Germany 11
16. Italy 10
17. Bangladesh 6
18. Ireland 6
19. Pakistan 6
20. Poland 6
21. Israel 5
22. Peru 5
23. Portugal 5
24. Argentina 4
25. France 4
26. Lebanon 4
27. Romania 4
28. Brazil 3
29. Ethiopia 3
30. Guyana 3
31. Malaysia 3
32. Bermuda 2
33. China 2
34. D.R. Congo 2
35. El Salvador 2
36. FR Yugoslavia 2
37. Ghana 2
38. Haiti 2
39. Hong Kong 2
40. Jordan 2
41. New Zealand 2
42. Paraguay 2
43. South Africa 2
44. Sweden 2
45. Switzerland 2
46. Belarus 1
47. Belgium 1
48. Chile 1
49. Honduras 1
50. Indonesia 1
51. Ivory Coast 1
52. Kenya 1
53. Lithuania 1
54. Moldova 1
55. Netherlands 1
56. Nigeria 1
57. Russia 1
58. Spain 1
59. Taiwan 1
60. Ukraine 1
61. Uzbekistan 1
62. Venezuela 1