9 a.m. in New York City on September 11, 2001 was the moment everything changed for the worst in my life. It was 9 p.m. in Jakarta, Indonesia that day and my husband Andy Colameco was watching an American football game on TV. We had been happy residents of Vermont for the first 12 years of our marriage from 1983 through 1995. Andy taught at Craftsbury Academy and at Stowe High School and I was a lawyer in Burlington. We left Vermont in 1995 to become International School teachers, first in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and later at the Jakarta International School. Andy was the vice principal at the Jakarta International School and his favorite way of de-stressing in the evenings was watching American football on TV. The game Andy was watching on 9/11 was interrupted to show the first minutes of the airplane hitting the Twin Trade Towers in New York. He called me out of bed to see it and both of us felt a sense of dread because ever since we had met Osama Bin Laden's family in Jeddah two years before, we had known that Americans were hated by him and his followers. We also had lived in Saudi Arabia when 12 Americans died in an army facility that was bombed. We all assumed then that Osama Bin Laden was behind it so when we saw the Trade Towers coming down we assumed the same thing. For me now 20 years later, I can see us both watching the Trade Towers falling on television and it was like my entire life was falling in on itself to utter destruction. The assault on the Trade Towers felt like a personal assault on us. Over the next year our life in Jakarta was one of constant stress because of all the bomb threats against Americans. Combat Marines with machine guns were stationed around our school and men would enter my classroom unannounced to put bomb proofing materials over the windows while I was teaching the sixth graders in my charge. Within a year-and-a-half of 9/11 a teacher friend had been killed in the Bali bombing and Andy himself came down with leukemia and died nine months later on June 5, 2003. He was only 51 years old when he died. It is difficult for me not to connect those events of 9/11 with his illness and death. Ever since he died I have suffered from PTSD from that year and a half of feeling like a hunted American. So I tend to feel that I am like a veteran from a war. 9/11 woke me up from the dream I was in that Americans were loved and appreciated for all our good points. I think our very obvious wealth in the face of the rest of the world's poverty created too much envy and resentment and the world's envy and resentment has permeated the lives of innocent civilians like myself.

Annie Moore