It's hard to believe that the devastating September 11 attacks happened eleven years ago, it still seems like just yesterday. We were talking today at uni about where we were at the time when it happened. Here in New Zealand, it was the early hours of the morning before school; Dad was leaving town for a work conference, so we were awake earlier than usual. I think my parents had heard something on the radio and I remember them calling me out of my room to watch the news. Everything was chaotic and no one could really tell what was happening on the screen; it seemed so surreal and so awful, and as a child I could barely register the reality of it. We went to school like normal, but unlike every other day, we all spent the day in the school Church; everyone was praying and just in complete shock. The teachers were crying and all of us students were in a daze, because even though we were in a country so far away, the fact that this horrifying attack happened to every day people had such a massive impact on the way we began to view ourselves in this world. We lost our childhood naivete as we realised that the politics of larger nations had such an affect on us, but more awfully, we realised that people could be this violent and hateful to one another. What a terrible, terrible day.
