Remembering 9/11: Because 'we cared'

GAINESVILLE - For a group of Georgia Baptists, including two from Toccoa, trips to New York in the days and months after 9/11 were a way to show they cared.

Their mission: clean apartments adjacent to Ground Zero which were covered in dust - from floors to ceilings. "(It was) in the air conditioners," said Rose Marie Eachman. "It was everywhere. It filtered through all the cracks and crevices and covered everything."

Everything had to be either cleaned on site, taken to cleaners, or tossed in the trash. Bedclothes, mattresses, clothes in closets, clothes in drawers - nothing was immune to the thick, white dust that billowed through Manhattan when the Twin Towers collapsed five years ago.

One group went to New York in October, about a month after the attacks; another made the trip in December. Eachman made both trips.

Why did they do it?

"Because there were people in need and the best way to show the love of Christ was to go there and help them," she said in an AccessNorthGa.com interview in late 2001 after returning to Toccoa following her second trip to New York.

Outside the apartment windows where they were cleaning, what they saw at Ground Zero made lasting impressions. Eachman said if you look straight out the windows, everything looked normal - the New York skyline. But as you looked straight down, "you're looking down on Ground Zero and it looks like something that should have been in World War II," Eachman said. "It was totally out of place. When you looked at it, you couldn't believe it."

Phil Burgess, also from Toccoa, said during that interview nearly five years ago that the trips to New York were part of a Southern Baptist Convention program that sends volunteers to disasters all over the world.

All this week, AccessNorthGa.com is recalling the reaction of some northeast Georgians to the 9/11 attacks and also reporting on what some of them did in response.