A Decade of Hope (12 page)

Ada Rosario Dolch was the principal of a high school just two blocks from the World Trade Center. On 9/11 she safely evacuated her six hundred students. In memory of her sister Wendy Wakeford, who died that day, Ada helped build a school in Afghanistan that opened in 2005. She currently works with school leaders, and lectures on emergency preparedness and on how to respond and recover from disasters.

 

 

 

W
e were five girls and one brother, all within seven years of each other, so my mother and father were very busy for a lot of the time. I was the oldest. Then there was my sister Miriam, my brother, Ed, and then three more girls—Rachel, Wendy, and Clara, in that order. I remember five Easter Sunday dresses my mother bought us when we were kids. They were very fluffy and had these big green and pink ribbons and bushy sleeves, like organza. Before church we dressed up my little brother in one of those dresses, either Wendy's or Rachel's. And I can see my sisters now trying to tackle him, and then finally getting this dress on him. He was the only boy in the house, and so we took advantage of that.

I think that's my first recollection of Wendy, and she was having fun. I also remember how we used to tease her. Wendy had this ridiculously thick hair that was extremely straight, so we used to say that there must have been some Chinese in her.

As the oldest I played surrogate mom very often. My mother would leave me with the children so she could run an errand, so she could run to the doctor or dentist. Wendy was six years away from me, but when you're younger that's an eternity apart. The two youngest, Clara and Wendy, were eleven months apart, but spiritually and emotionally they were twins. And losing Wendy brought a severe and intense pain that Clara suffers to this day. She suffers this pain, and simply can't address the issue of 9/11. She still cannot believe that we have been through this and that she has lost someone as close as Wendy. It's been painful for us to watch Clara not able to begin the journey toward recovery. We all hope and pray her time to heal will come sooner rather than later.

 

We lived on the Lower East Side for a long time, and then moved to Brooklyn. I got married very young—at just nineteen—when the youngest one of us was twelve and Wendy was thirteen. So I had to leave these selfblossoming teenagers behind. I didn't spend a lot of time with them at home then, but they would love to come to my house. We were brought up in a family that was very religious, and my parents were very, very strict Pentecostal Protestants. The girls had very few outings without both parents, and so being able to go to my house was a big thing, something they could do on their own. I lived out in Bay Ridge, a whole other part of the world, out there on Shore Road, where there was a park and the waterside. I remember Wendy, and all of my siblings, always struggling with wanting to be faithful to the upbringing our parents had given us but at the same time trying to spread their own wings and accept God as they wanted to in their hearts—without the limitations that were often put on us under the classification of “this is religion and this is God.” And I think they saw me spread my wings through my marriage and realized that there were other things in life. They were beginning to open their eyes to other things, and that was a very interesting experience for me. I was able to show them that God was not just about rules and regulations and thees and thous and don'ts and dos but really One who wanted to know and touch your heart. I'm very happy to have had that experience, to have been able to provide a different angle to the issue of loving God, or worshipping God.

Both my parents came from Puerto Rico when they were young. My mother was fourteen, and my father was sixteen. Two years later they were married on the Lower East Side. My parents both came here looking for the seascape of gold, like just about everyone who comes to America. And, of course, if you're from Puerto Rico you're part of America, and life is going to be easier if you're poor. You're really going to make it big in these great streets of New York. My parents, though, found their life and their streets of gold in factories. So my mother supported our education, because she knew there had to be more than just a sewing machine. She often said, “I don't ever want you to have to find yourself in front of a sewing machine to make a living.”

We grew up in a truly complete bilingual environment, because at school everything was in the English language, but we went to a Spanishspeaking church and read the Bible in Spanish. My parents did not speak English very well, but they truly encouraged our English. They were big on: “Let's speak the English.” “We don't want you to get confused,” I remember my mother saying.

We all went to vocational high school, and so all of us acquired good business skills. But my siblings wondered how I, being the oldest, would get away from a very difficult situation at home, and the strictness of my father holding the reins. I guess they felt that my salvation would come through marriage and college. I went on to Baruch College. And, thank God, thirty-six years later, I'm still a very happily married woman. Wendy went to work, and about three years later she realized that she wanted to get ahead in life, to have better employment opportunities. And so she decided to go to college and got accepted at [the State University of New York at] New Paltz. She was proud of that, our big, tough Wendy—very independent; she knew what she wanted. My husband and I actually drove her up to college, and as we were saying good-bye she wrapped her arms around my husband and said, “Don't let me go.” She was twenty-one then, and we realized,
Oh, my God, this is a kid.
She did very well at New Paltz. She also met a lovely young man, got married, finished college, and went to work. Her marriage didn't work out, but it was part of her life, and it wasn't a terrible thing.

She started working at the World Trade Center for a bond house, Cantor Fitzgerald. In 1993, when the center was first bombed, we couldn't find Wendy. We were all in front of the television looking for her but didn't see her coming out. And then it turned out that that morning Wendy had woken up and said,
I'm not going to go to work today, I'm going to go shopping
. And she spent the whole day in a mall and had no clue as to what had happened. Everyone from her office had been evacuated, and luckily everyone was just fine. But so often, after the bombing in 1993, we would hear Wendy say, “I need to get out of here. I don't like this place. I don't like this energy.” She was hoping to one day go back to school for her master's degree.

After her divorce, Wendy lived with me for some time, until she found a place of her own in New Jersey, which was very close to our sister Clara. And then she met a young man, a police officer, and about a year later, in May of 2001, moved in with him. We went to her house for a Memorial Day weekend barbecue. We had met him already a couple of times, but now we could see that they were creating a home for themselves.

One of the things that we always did at the end of September or beginning of October was to go apple picking. Wendy lived in Freehold, and we planned to go to an orchard near her home. But my mom and I wanted to see her before then, and so we decided to meet on her fortieth birthday—August 6, 2001—at the World Trade Center. At this point I was working close by as principal at the Leadership and Public Service High School.

Because she worked for brokers on the 103rd and 104th floors of the tower, she sometimes couldn't get out for lunch, as she was stuck to her table on the trading floor. I told her, “Mom and I, we'll just be right in the mezzanine of your building.” We met her there with our presents and cupcakes. We talked and laughed and, because we all have such busy lives in New York, after a few minutes she went back to work, Mom left, and I went back to my school, and life went on. Then came 9/11.

That day was a special election day, for the primaries. It was also the first time that our school building was being used as a voting site, because the area was becoming more of a family community and not just the canyons of nothing but Wall Street office buildings. In fact, some of those office buildings were now being turned into residential apartments, and so there was a need to have a new voting district. The Leadership and Public Service High School was a collaborative effort with Syracuse University, and because some of the members of the advisory board knew Michael Bloomberg, who was on the ballot running for mayor, we were hoping that he would show up at our building to vote. Everything was spiffed up that day, and we were so excited about people voting at a school with the name Leadership and Public Service, as we were really living out our mission. It was another great push for us to continue our public service work.

I got to school by 6:00 A.M. that morning, which was probably one of the most beautiful, most spectacular clear mornings ever. We have an extremely large lobby, and I saw the voting booths spread all over the place. I didn't want my rambunctious teenagers bumping into people who were coming in to vote, so I instructed my custodian to set up two long cafeteria tables to create a dividing line—the voting on one side, and the kids coming in on the other. People began coming in at a quarter to eight, and when I saw that things were running smoothly, I ran upstairs to check on what was going on in the office.

My secretary was actually preparing placards with the names of every teacher for the fire drill we were planning for the next day. When we went outside for the drill, each teacher was to hold up his or her placard so that the children could always find them easily. We had an effective plan for our school, which was enormous—a fourteen-story school building is not very usual. Also, because it was integrated into an office building, the fire codes were very different than they would be for just a schoolhouse.

I sat at my desk to do some paperwork. At 8:30, when classes started, I said to my secretary, “I'm going to run downstairs, just to see who the last stragglers are.” I also wanted to check on what was happening with the election. In addition, the battery on my watch had stopped working, so I was going to run into the World Trade Center to get a new battery at Watch World. Since we're such a big school, we had walkie-talkies, so I took my walkie-talkie, which I would never leave without, and my keys, and left. And I never went back upstairs on that day.

At the polls I saw a gentleman who was reading his newspaper, indifferent to what was going on. There was a woman with a little dog, some elderly people, and the policeman who was assigned to the building for the election. As I was speaking with my school safety agents the lights in the lobby went out.
Oh, no
, I thought,
we're having a blackout—probably an electrical mess because of the voting booths
. I believe that when the airplane entered our area it caused a power surge, because there was no [other] reason for those lights to go out. I believe it was because God was watching out for us, and it put me into alert mode. When you're a school principal you're responsible for everybody in the building.

Seconds later the lights went back on. And almost immediately, the first boom resonated. The sound was so intense that you actually shook. I looked over at the police officer in the building, but he was out of there in a flash, and to this day I don't know what happened to that young man. People started screaming and scrambling. I stayed in the lobby and looked up at One Liberty Plaza, and because it's all glass I could see the reflection of the North Tower in it. Garbage started to fly, and I'm wondering,
What the hell is that? What am I watching?
People started spewing into my building for safety, screaming, “An airplane hit! An airplane hit!” They asked for a phone, but I told them we only had an intercom. I wasn't really telling the truth, but I didn't want everyone on the phone. I got on my walkie-talkie and told the assistant principal, who was upstairs, to go and take a look out the window and tell me what had just happened. More and more people were rushing into our lobby, and with all the turmoil going on, and screaming, a few of my kids started coming in. I remember specifically one young man, David, who looked as if he'd seen a ghost. He said, “The World Trade Center was hit.” And I said, “Hit with what?” He replied, “An airplane hit the building.” I thought to myself,
An airplane
, and pictured a Piper. I pictured a helicopter. A young lady then came in and said, “Ms. Dolch, a big airplane hit.”

“Big airplane? What are you talking about, big airplane?” And then I asked her to describe it. She was crying, and had a look of terror on her face, so I sat her down on a big granite bench, and she told me that the North Tower had been hit by a big airplane. And I remember I instantly thought to myself,
Oh, my God, my sister Wendy is there
. And then I said to God,
Please, you have to take care of Wendy, because I have to take care of the kids.

If I ever write a book, it will be called
The Miracles of 9/11.
Because Wendy was then plucked from my brain; I never thought about my dear sister again, until later on that day. I think I recognized that if I thought about her, I would have been confused. I would have been in an emotional state, and that emotional state would have taken over. I would never have been able to continue to do what I knew I had to do that day, for those kids and that staff and that building were my responsibility Those were truly miraculous moments for me.

There was a lot of scurrying, screaming, people crying, many in hysteria. People wanted to run upstairs for personal items left behind, and I would say no, like a wicked witch of the West. A security officer from the American Stock Exchange came to help. Others were coming in, people I didn't know, and I was afraid. In schools we don't let strangers in our buildings, and it was nerve-racking. Parents were starting to show up, wanting to see their kids, and I told them, “Sorry, you're not going anywhere.” I shut down the elevators and told them the elevators didn't work. I had two girls in wheelchairs, I had one girl who had just returned from heart surgery in August, and I had one girl who was 95 percent blind—all she could see was some fog of color. Each had a paraprofessional assigned to her, and I told my assistant principal, “Get them down.” A while back we had discussed cherry pickers, and we knew the fire department's trucks couldn't reach the fourteenth floor. While the elevators were still working, we brought the four girls down on them, and told them, except for the blind girl, to leave the building and the area.