On Sept. 11th, 2001, I was in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. I was part of the management team of a USAID-funded program called Community Revitalization Through Democratic Action, and we were in the middle of a big meeting to decide which 60 community projects we would fund.

I had been in Serbia for about two weeks, and on a whirlwind trip around Western Serbia, the area our project was assigned, before the meeting. (There were five projects in all over Serbia, and I had been told they were part of a peacebuilding approach in post conflict countries.)

It must have been just after lunch time in Belgrade when the mobile phones of the Americans on the management team began to ring. In shock, Angela, our head of mission, and I went looking for a television in the hotel to see what was happening in the US.