Zachimalawi's Pick

Two years ago, I went to the Chichiri Trade Fair grounds- owned by the Malawi Confederation of Chambers of Commerce and Industry; the place former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, visited on Friday last week.

I did not go to the Trade Fair grounds to sample goods on display. No, it was not yet Trade Fair season.

I went there to buy books- fiction and non-fiction- from Development Aid from People to People shop. I remember buying 10 books -I actually buy four books a day; I just love buying books and reading them. To say the truth, I now have a collection of 110,000 books, neatly stacked in sacks.

One of the books is a black-covered book with the title '110 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers' by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn.

I read the book through-and-through two years ago. Now I am reading again. I am sleeping late now, because I am feeling so sad inside. So sad reading the book.

On Page 233, paragraph 2, under the sub-title 'You Don't Understand', (for that is where I am, in my re-reading) I have found the following passage. It has left a mark in my life because it is symbolic.

That, too, is our (Zachimalawi's) pick today. It goes:

  
.................................................................................................................
A light appeared- someone must have had a flashlight- and with the
emergence of that single beam came sounds: groans and coughs and
people saying, 'I'm over here'. One voice found another, then more,
aural links that became a hand on a shoulder that led to a hand on
yet another shoulder: a sputtering human chain that shuffled toward
where the escalator had been---Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, from the
non-fiction book '102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to
Survive Inside The Twin Towers.