That was quite a show. A month ago (i.e., the week of Valentine's Day and the WTC/Pentagon 5-month anniversary), i got to spend a week volunteering in a Manhattan warehouse, helping supply the firemen/police/construction workers who are cleaning up ground zero. so much of that show brought back memories, os that i kept interrupting it to tell my mom another story about what we encountered.

The primary thing that amazed me was that that entire firehouse got away safely. I'm not sure how many managed to do that, but we sure didn't hear about any while in the city. And a lot of those guys who went in on Sept 12 for rescue/clean-up literally didn't come back out for 2-3 weeks. The clean-up effort is way ahead of schedule, because the firemen/police are going 24 hours a day to finish it. They lost so many friends, as well as all those they were working to save. Many of them simply have to finish, just so they can complete that task and embark on piecing their lives/families back together.

When we saw ground zero, we did so from the roof of the 1010 firehouse, the one which services the WTC (i.e., it's next door). I never heard an exact number of how many they lost, but it's amazing they have anyone left. It was the single hardest-hit group of all the rescue workers there. While we were waiting to be allowed on the roof, we found out that one of the killed firefighters' families was there.

Needless to say, just being there 5 months later was overwhelming. The New Yorkers were grateful for outside volunteers, and they were getting on with life, but respectfully. The people of the city were incredibly inspiring to us. It was overwhelming, but there was great encouragement in what we got to be a part of.

I particularly liked that our warehouse had been donated, besides loads of useful supplies, urinals and teddy bears and Magic 8-balls to assist in the clean-up effort. We filled the urinals with candy--i'm serious. And the left-over teddy bears were boxed up in a back corner. The last magic 8-ball was picked up by a firefighter the week we were there, but i'm told that the GPS navigators were so frustrated early on by their hi-tech equipment goofing up that they started using the magic 8-balls to decide where to dig next.

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