Awakening: My 9/11 experience

I was a second year high school student. It was night time in Manila and I was already asleep, but my brother suddenly woke me up. “Check out the news,” he told me, like it was a matter of life and death if I missed it.

I went to the living room where the television was and I saw the horror. Smoke billowed from a huge hole on one of the World Trade Center buildings. I didn’t even have any idea what that building was back then.

It was a terrible sight.

I couldn’t sleep anymore as our family stayed glued to coverage. Then-news anchor Mari Kaimo was on board for News Central on Studio 23, with the live footage from New York aired on TV. Moments later, another plane went rammed into another tower. Much later, the buildings were no more.

I’ve never seen anything like it. We all haven’t, really.

The next day I found out I was one of the few who lacked sleep after watching how the events unfolded live. Most of my classmates had learned about the attacks while eating breakfast or while scouring newspaper headlines for an event to report for our History class.

Our English teacher Gigi Yulo discussed the event in class on September 12th. Being the (hyper)active student that I (always) was, I gamely participated in the lecture. Ms. Yulo later ordered us to write about the tragic incident and perhaps include our message to the victims.

With the known facts about the attacks still fresh in my mind — the time the planes hit WTC, the kind of planes that hit the towers, etc. — I shared with my classmates what I knew. I even wrote the bullet points on the blackboard to help them in the essay known as “Formal Theme.”

If the impeachment trial of former President Joseph Estrada made me care about the political events in the Philippines, the September 11 attacks made me care more about what was happening in the world. Not that I never did — after all I was a kid who read Reader’s Digest and Newsweek to pass the time — but back then I felt 9/11 was something that would hit everyone in the gut even in the years after. It was 9/11 that made me allot more time to read the newspapers’ international stories — stories that, I felt, could no longer be ignored.

At hindsight, the 9/11 attacks were among the main reasons why I wanted to be a journalist. I wanted to tell the world what was happening in the most factual way I could. I wanted the people to know what they had and what they needed to know. I wanted them to realize there are things that may be happening from as far as New York but can make a big impact to us in Manila.

Ten years later I find myself glued to the TV again, this time monitoring events that mark 9/11 from a newsroom in Manila. Ten years later, I find myself helping out in the newscasts and in the social media coverage that look back and look ahead after the terror attacks.

Ten years later I find myself doing what 9/11 made me want to be and made me want to do, hoping I’ll never see anything like what we all saw on September 11, 2001 ever again.