A week or two after I arrived in Waterloo. I think it was the very next week. I was living on Westmount RD NW. A tenant of another Nigerian student- Kingsley. Ok, I was in a classroom at Needles Hall, probably just finished lectures or maybe it was a computer laboratory when someone said something about an aeroplane hitting a building in New York. Of course guys, surreal is the word. It could be anything. I didn't pay any attention. It was a white young fellow, said it in passing to his friends not a general announcement of the the gloomy picture it was going to become in the hours following. To cut the story short by evening of my first week in Waterloo for a Masters in Civil Engineering at the University of waterloo, I witnessed on CNN the first major terrorist attack of the 21st century. I got to out apartment that night. Kingsley was still in school. And I remembered I was lonely and weeping internally. I started crying. No sounds just tears down my eyes like a kid who had been forced to tears by something really distressing. It was a combination of the shock of normal folk I could identify with being in an office for their days work being crushed and burnt to death. ... So that was one of the possible scenarios after I graduated and got a much desired high paying job. (retrospection is the logic here). I dried my eyes before Kingsley got back later. Yeah, also I might have cried because I had family in the USA (Maryland) that I chose not to live with at the time and had left the comfort of their home to live by myself in Canada.
It's been 15 years, the world has changed thoroughly. Nothing makes me cry anymore: theatre shooting, park shootings or mall shootings. I pray for world peace as we remember the victims of September 11, 2001- the police, firefighters, the people. (That's me visiting the memorial in 2013.)
