By Amrah Serdan

This scene has become a familiar one to me. When I was a kid growing up in Turkey, terrorism often reared its ugly head, roaming and burning the eastern lands of my country. The casualties were enormous and everyday the news flashes brought even more. Families were annihilated and villages were burned. Being no more than a young boy at that time, I perceived war as a monstrous chasm, swallowing and shadowing each and everything its hideous arms could reach. When it was finally over, I did not believe that it would rise from the graveyard of history’s pages and come back again to haunt us. After all, history has been a silent witness to all these tragedies.

Last November when I heard the news flash while living in Washington State, I realized I was horribly wrong: The heart of my home city, Istanbul, had been bombed. The bank headquarters I passed on my way to school every day had collapsed into ash and dust, familiar faces lay dead and wounded. The building had been targeted by the terrorists. The bank is only two blocks from the British Embassy, where only two months earlier, I had participated in my pre-departure orientation prior to coming to the United States. I looked at the photographs and saw the yellow fumes rising into the air, and I wondered what wrong was done to deserve this.

I am an exchange student from Istanbul, Turkey. I have left my family and home to be a part of an exchange program sponsored by the U.S. Government, promoting peace and understanding between cultures. I am proud to be a part of this peaceful revolution going on all around the U.S. We all came here, with the support of thousands of others before and after us, to be a part of this mutual empathy, believing that through understanding, we will cure prejudice. Through courage, we will eliminate fear, and through peace, we will eliminate hatred.

After the tragedy, I read the papers and I was appalled that the attack was called a “miss shot,” after all those deaths. What I did not understand clearly was, it was the heart of Istanbul that was hit, not a city of England. It was the citizens of Istanbul who were dead and wounded. I tried to look at this on a global scale, like I did on the bombings on Bali, like I did on the attack of September 11, like I did on all the terrorist attacks all around the world. And I admit I had a hard time. But I did not let the anger and hatred corrupt my mind. My hands did not clinch in fists of rage. I came to accept that what hurts, often instructs.

Now in the aftermath I realize; there is still much to be done all around the world. Our prejudices, fallacies and ignorance cause deaths and chaos all around the world. While we are the small notes in that symphony of World, if we get together in harmony, we can change that anomalous melody of bloodshed. We can learn, and understand before everything is over and all the tragedies go into history books. Don’t trust them being dead lying in the pages. Because they do rise from the dead.