Less Than Cake

Where was I today, six years ago? Not in America. Across the pond. In Puerto Plata. 1430 miles from Ground Zero.

I was in one of my poorest areas. It was built on the side of the mountain. The higher you climbed the poorer the people were. An ironic twist to the living conditions found here in America.

It was early in the morning and my comp and I were walking up one of the many hills in our area looking for somebody to teach. We found a guy chilling on his porch and he invited us in. When he sat down he immediately turned on the TV - I'd never had anyone do that. Of course, normally the TV was already on and we'd tell them to turn it off. My comp tried to get him to turn off the TV but he wasn't really paying attention to us, just your typical teenager.

The TV was on CNN and something serious was going on. It took a few minutes before we realized what was going on - we could see a building smoking in the background and figured it must be on fire. I guess we were right, in a way.

Then we started to read the ticker and put together what the news reporter was saying. Two planes piloted directly into the twin towers - as unbelievable as that may have sounded in English it seemed even more unreal in Spanish. We sat there with our eyes fixed on the television. We were shocked.

Just as we were about to leave the commotion picked up on the set. And there it went. Live, we watched the first tower fall. This left us speechless. What could be said? What seemed like just minutes later, the second tower came crashing down. This was unlike anything else we'd ever witnessed on the news.

The rest of day was filled with bits and pieces of story, and a lot of misinformation. Lots of the people were telling us 40, 50, no 60 thousand people had died. I wasn't so sure about that. But I didn't really know. We walked around the rest of day not really knowing what had happened. Or why.

That was my 9/11.