For Patrick Gallagher, a Latin American recruiter for Loyola College of Maryland, Tuesday was a day of deep and bitter frustration.
Phone lines to the United States from Panama City, where he was taking part in a recruiting trip, were jammed. The local airport was closed, blocking any possibility of getting home.
“I had a friend that died in the Pentagon and I couldn’t get through on the phones,” he said. “My sister-in-law got out of the World Trade Center, but I only found that out later.
“Tuesday was one of the worst days of my life.”
For millions of Americans living and traveling abroad last week, the terror attacks in New York and Washington produced the same feelings of shock and horror that consumed their fellow citizens at home. But the sense of helplessness, many expatriate and traveling Americans said, was greater abroad.
Unlike Americans at home, they could not give blood or volunteer to lend a hand, though some made cash donations over the Internet. Flights to the United States were grounded, and desperate phone calls produced only recorded messages about overloaded lines.
That left Americans overseas reduced to watching the carnage unfold hour after hour on television and firing off e-mails, feeling a special kind of desperation and disbelief tempered only by outpourings of support from neighbors and friends.
Phyllis Fasano, a Seattle native who has lived in Brazil for 40 years, spent much of Tuesday desperately trying to phone her daughter’s best friend, who works in Manhattan and calls Fasano her “other mother.”
“I just kept calling and calling her Tuesday. I was so happy when I reached her, but then she said she had lost a lot of friends, people only in their 30s and 40s,” Fasano said.
“I wish I could be there,” she said. “If I could do something, just put a bandage on somebody or give blood. . . . I would like to be there to comfort someone who has lost someone.”
Web site helps
In Moscow, Americans exchanged phone calls all night as the tragedy unfolded on the other side of the world, and they turned to an expatriate Internet site for news from home as well as a discussion of the attack.
But Nicholas Pilugin, who runs Moscow’s expatriate Internet site, said television truly closed the gap with America.
“I do feel far away and isolated, but satellite TV has really brought this into my living room,” Pilugin said. “Perhaps even too much so. We sat glued to the set . . . watching and rewatching the same scenes.”
Steven Traylor, an executive with a building supplies importer in Moscow, said he had received many phone calls and e-mails from Russian friends and acquaintances. The response–“Russians are outraged too!”–boosted his spirits.
That sympathy and shared outrage from friends abroad deeply touched expatriates and U.S. travelers throughout the world. In Panama, American guests trapped by the air travel shutdown told tales of unusual kindness: the Argentine restaurant owner who invited them for a free dinner, the hotel staff who gave special Internet access, a Panamanian guidance counselor who offered her home phone number if they needed to talk.
“We’re all humans dealing with this right now–not Americans or Panamanians or whatever,” said Charles Ramos, a college recruiter for St. Louis University who was among those stuck overseas this week.
Evan Rodaniche, a young American recording studio manager in Panama City, was one of hundreds of Americans who jammed a noon church service Friday to pray for victims of the disaster. He said the attack elicited unexpected sympathy from foreigners–including Panamanians, who still smart from the long years of U.S. control of the Panama Canal.
“It’s not cool in Panama to like the gringos. People in the world in general are jealous of the States,” he said. “But now they’re standing with us.”
For Americans living in Africa, the tragedy back home seemed especially surreal, given that many are working in countries racked by the daily disasters of poverty, disease and political instability.
“Here I am sitting in the eye of the AIDS storm, surrounded by death, and my home suddenly explodes,” said Suzanne Leclerc-Madlala, a U.S. medical anthropologist studying the spread of disease in South Africa, which has one of the fastest-growing HIV infection rates.
Act of solidarity
“The attack has really made me conscious of my American-ness,” said Leclerc-Madlala, a native of Rhode Island who teaches at the University of Durban. “I put on some old cowboy boots yesterday because it rained, and I actually took them off again–I didn’t want to draw attention to my nationality.”
In the end, she said, she pulled the boots back on. “It was my small act of solidarity with those back home.”
Other Americans noted how their language or accents elicited condolences from waiters, bank tellers or even strangers on the street.
Plenty of Americans had tales to share–of the nephew who overslept and missed a Tuesday morning tour of the World Trade Center, or the brother still missing.
For Vivian Hermiz, an American student living in Beirut, television images of the destruction in New York and the Washington area were stunning–particularly because less than a week ago she had predicted to Arab friends that “short-sighted” U.S. policy would “come back to haunt America.”
“It took my breath away,” she said of the destruction. “I couldn’t believe it was happening in my own country.”
For some Americans abroad, the tragedy and images of the nation pulling together afterward stirred dormant feelings of pride and patriotism.
“Ironically, being down here makes me feel more like an American, more patriotic in some strange way,” said Paul Cohen, a New Jersey-born musician who has lived in Mexico City for 10 years.
In Beijing, as in many remote parts of the world, the distance from New York increased both the sense of helplessness and the feelings of disbelief because life in those remote areas was going on more or less normally.
Delicate decision
At the International School of Beijing, attended by expatriate children from dozens of countries, administrators Friday faced a delicate decision: whether to cancel the annual back-to-school barbecue.
The school’s American headmaster, Paul Dulac, said he decided not to cancel partly because expatriates rely on the school to create a sense of community. The barbecue started with a moment of silence.
“Expats say that it’s the worst nightmare: Somebody dies or someone is sick, and you can’t be there,” he said. “The sense of helplessness is increased because of the distance. It was important for us to provide normalcy and safeness.
“Because we’re here and everything that happened wasn’t here, it created a sense of loss that was perhaps more intense than even for those living in the States,” he said. “The intensity was multiplied because you can’t do anything.”
Bereaved and stranded
The deepest sense of helplessness, however, may have been felt by David Filipov, the Moscow correspondent for the Boston Globe newspaper. Filipov’s father, Alexander, of Concord, Mass., was aboard the American Airlines plane that was the first to crash into the World Trade Center.
Filipov received word of his father’s death by e-mail when his mother was unable to reach Moscow by telephone. He then had to wait days for air travel into the U.S. to resume.
On Friday, Filipov left Moscow for Paris, hoping to connect with a flight home that evening.
“It’s weird,” said Filipov, who has won awards for his coverage of the separatist wars in Chechnya. “We fly these old Aeroflot planes. We go to these violent, vicious places. This is the place where you think something is going to go wrong, not the United States.
“But [here] I am sitting in Moscow,” Filipov said, “safer than they are.”
