Impact

Bad things happen. Bad things happen to good people. Bad things tend to happen mysteriously when I'm away on school trips.

When I was in eighth grade, my class took their annual pilgrimage to Washington D.C. At the time, I was attending the Salem Academy Charter School, which was a combination middle school and high school. The trip was designed to be a reward for making it out of middle school alive but also, a bridge between those years and the more meaningful and demanding ones ahead.

Eighth grade was a rough year and I think afterwards, I went back and deleted all photographic evidence of this trip. This is all I could find.

As we got closer to the city, we started hearing radio broadcasts about road blockades within the city. What I really remember is the fact that it took an extra hour to make it to our hotel because of them. Later we would find out that there had been a shooting at the Holocaust Museum and a security guard had been shot and killed. We had been scheduled to go to the museum the next morning. I realize that eighth grade doesn't seem like that long ago but I don't remember this event sticking as a tragedy. I don't remember if there had been extensive news coverage about it. I remember being sad and that's it.

I did however, find this on someone else's Facebook. According to that caption, it was taken inside the Capitol Building and I suppose I just have to believe them.

When I was a senior in high school, I joined a community service trip through my local YMCA and accompanied them on a trip to New Orleans to help restore wetland growth and rebuild homes that were still in dire need of repairs after Hurricane Katrina. 

This photo was taken about twenty minutes after we first heard news about the bombing of the Boston Marathon. It was pouring rain that day and we were all standing in a garden full of mud, huddled around someone's phone, trying to listen to CNN reports. We were scared for our loved ones who may or may not have been in Boston at the time. We only lived 20 minutes outside of Boston. We felt that crushing blow. 

And still, we continued on with our work, tirelessly trying to ensure that a family had a home to come back to finally.  Each day we were skim coating drywall and each night we were sitting in the community room of the volunteer camp where we were staying, eyes glued to the news as more details came to light about the Boston bombing.

It was terrifying and emotional. I think we all cried at least a little when the manhunt was finally over but the most distinct memory for me was actually feeling like a community. We were Boston at that moment. As scared as we all were, we were there to support each other. 

That brings me to the tragedy of Charlie Hebdo. I think this is the only post I will make on the subject because I have a lot of conflicting feeling on the subject but, I will say that I am a journalist and I was in Europe at the time of the shootings. If anything, I was thankful to be surrounded by fellow journalists because for the most part, I knew that they were thinking some of the same things. We were all thinking carefully about our rights of free speech and how important, and possibly taken for granted, they are. We felt the crushing loss of these men and women as both people and journalists and I was more than thankful that at least we could try to combat and overcome that loss together.