10 Years After and It Feels like Day 1.

The day of September 11th, 2001 I was in Dominican Republic taking my English class. It was about 11:00 am when my English teacher received a call from a family member that was living in New York by that time, he paused the class for a moment to take the call. It was an unusual time to receive a call from a family member during work hours. I noticed there was something wrong when I saw his face expression. After a few seconds he claimed: "The Twin Towers are falling down?”. Immediately, we all knew that he was talking about those two tall buildings that each of us had seen in those American movies at least once. I saw a tear coming down his face. I didn't know the magnitude of the tragedy until my professor walked out of the room unexpectedly. That behavior increased everybody's curiosity to know all the details about what was going on. As a result of this, the rest of the classes were cancelled and every body was dispatched. Since I was being a victim of my curiosity, instead of accepting my best friend's invitation to our favorite ice cream spot, I decided to go to my house to find out what had happened in New York City. I turned on the TV and I astonished by those images and videos taken at the precise moment. I simply couldn’t believe what I was watching.
Watching a tragedy like this on TV it’s totally different from being there. It must been really frustrating for the live spectators to watch people die and couldn’t do anything to avoid it.

If we talk from a journalistic prospective, to witness an event like this as a reporter certainly change the way of reporting the news. The task of a reporter while covering a news is to stay calm, and aware of what happens around them but it is hard to maintain the objectivity when you are directly being part of a historically event like this; Some of them witnessed people jumping out of windows from the last floor of one of the towers, they watched colleagues dying for getting too closer. While I was reading the article “9/11 remembered: for TV reporters on the scene, stress lingered long after the cameras stopped” by Richard Huff, I was stunned by the testimony of these reporters. It made me realized how hard and dangerous the task of a real reporter is. I learned that in order to be a good reporter is not enough to have a good education, or the best experience, but above all to have courage and run towards danger in order to bring the best out of an event of this magnitude, That's the real big challenge of a reporter. Inevitably, 9/11 changed their lives completely especially because in some way they were the heros that were defending the real facts about this tragedy in order to inform the public by risking their own lives.