Nineteen UMass Boston students visited “Ground Zero” at the World Trade Center in New York City on Friday, November 8. The day trip was organized by the Asian Center. It was meant to be a pilgrimage, a bonding experience that would help build a sense of community among the participants. Members of several different student groups, including the Black Student Center and the Veterans Center, went on the trip, leaving UMass at 5:30am and arriving in New York four hours later.

Some of the students had been to the site previously. Steve Osemwenkhae had been there in May. “It was a mess, stuff was everywhere.” Just six months later, and more than a year after the attack, Ground Zero looked different to Osemwenkhae. “I was amazed by how clean the site was,” he remarked.

Both for those who had been there before and those who were seeing it for the first time, the feelings were palpable. “It is one thing to see it on TV, but it is another to be there,” voiced Zamuhua Moreno. “We wanted to have a memory that we were there,” said Moreno. “Some of the visitors said they ‘could smell death'”

Sherly Torres explained her emotional reaction, “I felt weird walking there. What if someone died right here?” she wondered, and went on to state that, “it felt eerie.”

However, around Manhattan it was business as usual. “People carried on with their lives, it just felt like New York,” said Torres. But feelings at the site were different; “There was lots of hugging; everyone was quiet.”

Going to that place stirred up lots of memories for the UMB visitors, and for many in the group it added a new dimension. “Before it had been real, but through the lens of the media, it lost its sense of space. Now that point was driven home.” Moreno said. For her, being there “brought back a lot of memories.”

It was that sense of space that impressed many of the visitors. Louis Colon was amazed, “It was a massive hole, you could fit this building [Wheatley Hall] in there.” It is that same sense of space that saddened others. Torres commented on the new skyline and the clean up crews. “It looks empty, like something is missing, I could see that gap and the missing buildings in [the crew members’] faces.”

“The feeling that I came away with,” said Moreno, “was that life goes on. There is a time to grieve, but life goes on.” After they spent some time at Ground Zero, they split up; some students visited the Brooklyn Bridge and others went shopping downtown.

Louis Colon described the power of the site by saying, “When you were there at the site there was that [sense of] togetherness. But when we left, it was gone.”