Nine-Eleven
By Colly Radford

September 11, 2002, I attended a memorial service for victims and families of 9-11 terrorist acts. That celebration drew standing-room crowds to the cathedral in Lima, Peru. Two weeks later, I prayed at a pile of stones and dying flowers left over from a similar memorial on the quay of Rarotonga Town, capitol of the South Pacific Cook Islands.

Last week, I attended a Rotary lunch at the Seattle Museum of Flight. Nineteen Rotarians from Burnaby, BC, bussed down for a show of US-Canadian friendship, exemplified by the citizen support given airline crews and passengers who were forced for several days upon mostly small Canadian communities when the FAA closed US air space after the 9-11 attacks. As I arrived home to tell my wife Manio about that, Canadian neighbors arrived with a basket of fresh produce from Eastern Washington in their personal and separate act of memorial to 9-11 friendship. They had taken the day to drive to Wenatchee and back and were delivering a station wagon of baskets door to door to people they care about.

How do we remember 9-11? Do we realize how many of the 2,960 fatalities were citizens of over 50 different countries? Do we memorialize the acts of kindness and support given by friends of victims, families of victims, firefights, and police, other countries? By making 9-11 too US, too much our own, we risk losing an opportunity dear to the hearts of Rotarians to strengthen initiative for international goodwill and foundation for world peace.

My personal prayer is that we will all share visions with friends and acquaintances of diversity around the world and next door about those opportunities and incorporate those visions into our own daily actions and international service projects. I am proud to be in a club where there are friends who go to Africa to share medical inoculation and to third world countries to offer dental care and to local schools and service organizations to mentor folks who think life is hopeless, a club that knows that life is not hopeless, that there is hope and opportunity and friendship. Nine-Eleven is a great wake-up call for Rotary’s brand of friendship.