Twenty-five years after September 11, 2001, neighbors gathered at the Molokaʻi Public Library on September 9 to remember the day together. The 90-minute talk, called "Tragedy or Triumph," was led by Ric Ornellas, a retired Molokaʻi High School teacher who was living in New York when the towers fell.
Where were you?
Ric opened with his own memories of the day and with stories from friends who lived through it, among them an international journalist and a friend whose home stood near the World Trade Center. Then he turned the question to the room. Everyone wrote down where they were when they heard the news.
A second exercise asked each person to imagine being trapped in a building with no way out. Who would you call? What would you say? For a few quiet minutes, the room sat with those questions.
The other side of the day
Ric's stories kept coming back to what strangers did for one another. People helped others get out of buildings. Drivers gave rides to people they had never met. Families opened their homes to people who had lost theirs. One family took in a woman and her children for two months. Two men helped a woman make her way down dozens of floors to safety.
"Humanity came out," Ric said. Walking through the city in the days after the attacks, he saw people treating each other with unusual kindness.
Why we remember this way
For Ric, remembering 9/11 means honoring the people who died and the compassion that followed, when ordinary life stopped and people reached for one another. The gathering gave Molokaʻi a quiet hour to do both.
HINA's work starts from the same place. When times are uncertain, how we treat one another becomes part of the story.
Mahalo to Mia Ritte and the Molokaʻi Public Library for hosting.
A version of this story first appeared in The Molokai Dispatch.
