9/11 Reflections

My wife and I were living in Ecuador on Sept. 11, 2001. We overheard our landlady talking on the phone that morning, just bits and pieces about bombs and the United States. Because of my perspective and where I was living at the time, I assumed the US embassy in Ecuador had been bombed. So we turned on the television and watched. . .



Helplessly we watched. . .



Two US citizens living in South America, totally out of touch with their families, and their country. We knew something was changing that day, but had no idea the scope of change.

We turned on the TV in our little apartment and watched footage from CNN (the local Ecuadorian stations were pirating CNN footage and then just speaking Spanish over the top of it, so if you listened carefully you could hear the English behind the Spanish.)

We sat there in shock and just watched. It is strange to feel like you are part of the US, but not be in the US when such a traumatic event is happening. I am sure other ex-pats living abroad at the time had similar feelings.

We called our families to make sure they were ok. Everyone on the other end of the line was in shock, disbelief. So were we, but we were stuck in Ecuador.

My mom asked us if we thought we should come home "to be safe." It was kind of funny, because we want to be close and turn inwards in a situation like that. But there weren't any terrorists flying airplanes into buildings in Ecuador. We were "safer" in Cuenca, Ecuador than we would have been in the United States on that day.

After a half day of watching gut-wrenching news footage with the TV muted, we left our apartment and wandered into the center of town to grab dinner. There weren't a ton of foreigners living in Cuenca, so we always stood out and people always knew us as "that really tall American couple." As we walked into town, complete stangers (at least strangers to us) walked up to us and asked us if we were ok, if our families were ok. We were treated almost like royalty for the days following Sept. 11.

We decided to eat at a restaurant called "New York Pizza." There was even a drawing of the New York skyline on their sign and their pizza boxes that included the twin towers. The owners were Ecuadorian but had lived in New York for years and then moved back to Ecuador to open the restaurant.

As we sat there, watching more news footage (this time in English because New York Pizza had satelite television) more people came up to us and asked us how we were doing. Those that didn't come right up to us stared at us, or looked at us with sympathy and even solidarity in their eyes.

We walked back to our apartment in a daze. I don't think we had any idea what kind of a long-term impact this would have on our country, our "homeland."

We spent weeks processing it. It would occasionaly slip from our conciousness because of where we were, but then it would be brought back by seeing a paper or watching the news.

I think the first time we really "mourned" was watching one of the telethons following the attacks. It was 10 days afterwards, the "America - A Tribute to Heros" broadcast. It was showing live on every channel in Ecuador. When Neil Young began to sing "Imagine" we just cried and held each other. I still get misty-eyed thinking about that moment.

I still think Jessica and I have a little bit of a disconnect from the events of that day. I am so grateful that we shared the experience together. It would have been even tougher to suffer through it alone.

I think this is the first time I have written down my reflections of that day, where we were, and what it did to us.

My inspiration for writing this blog post was from watching a video yesterday. The first "Daily Show with John Stewart" broadcast following Sept. 11. I listened to John Stewart's reflections and began thinking about my own experience with that day.

Below is a link to the video. The first 8 minutes are amazingly profound. I hope this means as much to you as it meant to me after watching it.

http://www.bangitout.com/videos/viewvideo.php?a=1463

Water use put into perspective

I saw this and thought it was pretty amazing. It is a graphic that shows how much water we use in a day, not just through showers and flushing toilets, but the amount of freshwater resources it takes to create some of the food we eat too.

Click on the link and then click on the graphic within the link to get it to a size you can read it:
http://www.good.is/post/transparency-how-much-water-do-you-use/

Another great water org with a very similar message

Yesterday I posted about not getting paralyzed by the scope of the problems we are facing in the world. Today I got an e-mail and a video from another water org that had a very similar message. I really like what they have to say, just at the end, kick over to Healing Waters website instead of the one that they suggest. :)

Enjoy!

"I've been reading a lot lately about the psychology of enormous problems. About how people will always rush to save one child but disconnect when faced with helping thousands of children. "One death is a tragedy, a million - a statistic," we're told.

Non-profits like ours that are addressing enormous problems (a billion people without clean water) are told to make sure we don't scare people off by communicating how big the whole problem is.

Author Seth Godin recently wrote that the problem with enormity in marketing is that it doesn't work. He said "Enormity should pull at our heartstrings, but it usually shuts us down. Show us too many sick kids, unfair imprisonments or burned bodies, and you won't get a bigger donation, you'll just get averted eyes."

While all this may be true, it just seems rather boring. Visionless. I believe people want to sign up for something bigger than just one. I did.

There's a proverb in the Bible that says, "Where there is no vision, the people perish." People are certainly dying all around us, but could that be because we're terrified to tackle the enormous? Because we don't have the faith to see the entire problem solved?

I can't quite see to a billion people yet, but I'm getting closer.

So in the spirit of solving enormous problems, we want to step it up this September, and serve more people. Then keep going until every single person on the planet has clean and safe drinking water.

We shot a video that explains how we want to do that through the 2009 September campaign. Please watch it, share it and act."

Overwhelmed, paralyzed, what can I do?

The title of this post captures the sentiment that I have felt at times about issues of social justice, global poverty, starvation, the water crisis and other tough stuff that tugs at my heart strings.

There are so many issues out there, that we can be paralyzed into inaction because we are so overwhelmed by the amount of saddness and suffering around us.

But know that you can make a difference, even little you. In your tiny corner of the world, you can make a difference. I use the starfish parable a lot to describe this:

One morning an elderly man was walking on a beach. A high tide the night before had washed thousands of starfish up on the beach. Now that the tide was back out and the sun was coming up, the starfish were dying in the sun. He came upon a boy surrounded by thousands and thousands of starfish. As eagerly as he could, the youngster was picking them up one at a time and throwing them back into the ocean.

Puzzled, the older man looked at the young boy and asked, "Little boy, what are you doing?"

The youth responded without looking up, "I'm trying to save these starfish, sir."

The old man chuckled aloud, and queried, "Son, there are thousands of starfish and only one of you. What difference can you make?"

Holding a starfish in his hand, the boy turned to the man and, gently tossing the starfish into the water, said, "It will make a difference to that one!"

Find your starfish in your own little corner of the world. For me, it is safe drinking water in Latin America. For my wife, it is teaching in urban schools. For a friend of mine, it is working in soup kitchens and homeless shelters on her time off. Each one of us knows we can't fix all the world's problems, but we each work in our own corner of the world "making a difference to that one."

The video below has a cool spin on this too (and is also pretty critical of "reality TV" which is one of my pet peeves):