The Foreign Service Journal, September 2011

28 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 1 the first plane’s impact that morning. As I spoke with the assignment editor for a radio show who was tasking me to get to the towers, I saw the second plane explode in flames. The timeline of what follows re- mains hazy. I was interviewing wit- nesses on the street when I looked up to see a man in a suit running toward me. We briefly made eye contact as he pointed east and shouted, “Go!” A stampede of frantic faces came into focus behind him, chased by a wall of smoke and deafen- ing crashes. I turned and ran. Two friends and I, scared of being trampled, fled for an East River pier. We shared the next few hours with about 50 others, all of us feeling trapped on the pier by waves of smoke that rolled in and out like the tide. When the smoke got too thick, we took off our shoes, ready to jump. We watched hordes running over the Brooklyn Bridge, calmed a man panicking about anthrax, and comforted a Tower 1 janitor who had listened on his walkie-talkie as his colleagues died. Ashes covered us like snowflakes. We gathered to listen as a man read news headlines from his pager, shared phone numbers of family for peo- ple to pass on if they reached someone, and decided whom to send off in small boats that stopped to pick up people in small groups. Eventually, a Coast Guard boat took us all to Brooklyn. I was impressed by how many people offered us cups of water as we wandered. That night, a dance teacher let us sleep on the floor of her studio. After a week of moving around, we then checked into a hotel for a month while the apartments we’d left behind were inspected for contamination and stability. They were time capsules upon our return, for everything around them had changed. The surrounding blocks felt like a modern Pompeii, bathed in stadium lights and the drone of helicopters. That experience knocked me into political conscious- ness. It became very important to better understand the dynamics between people of different cultures, so I could process what I had witnessed. As the years progressed, I also saw some U.S. actions under the “war on terror” to be damaging and counterproductive. I hoped somehow to contribute to better understanding between people and to finding ways to improve relations that didn’t contribute to cycles of violence and distrust. After several years as a journalist, I joined the Foreign Service as a public diplomacy officer to make a contribution to such ef- forts. It was comforting to feel I would work among like-minded peo- ple who would understand the per- sonal impact of politically motivated violence. Although it’s terrible to hear about the traumas of others, I appreciate having found a colleague who had escaped from one of the towers, and others who have experienced terrible upheaval, including war and the loss of loved ones. I like to think that all who have been touched by such experiences are using the force of their personal histories to help mold a more peaceful world. Lisa Venbrux FSO Embassy Tegucigalpa Moving Beyond 9/11 I sometimes find it hard to believe that I will be spend- ing the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in Saudi Ara- bia as a Foreign Service officer, using my Arabic-language skills to adjudicate visas. I was a senior in high school on Sept. 11, 2001, and the events of that day have been the primary motivation for many of my life decisions since then. Given that it occurred at the same time I was think- ing about where to go for college, I decided that New York City was where I wanted to study. I visited Ground Zero two months after the attacks and could feel the sadness in the air. At that moment, I knew that I wanted to be part of rebuilding the city. Application submissions were down that year across all universities in the city, but I refused to let the fear of another attack pre- vent me from moving there and making a difference. In 2002, I matriculated at New York University with an eye toward studying international business and cultural affairs. I knew that I had a knack for foreign languages and, after a wonderful study-abroad experience in Italy, I decided that it was time to learn a language that would be more useful. Arabic was my first choice, for I wanted to confront the large cultural chasm that seemed to exist between average Americans and people from countries that spoke it. I took four semesters of the language which, combined with my international business classes, further cemented my in- C OVER S TORY We become excellent at managing issues, not at leading people or building effective teams.