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On the Story

Volunteers For The Volunteers At Ground Zero

Aired November 22, 2001 - 08:27   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: You know, Thanksgiving takes on special meaning this year in the shadow of ground zero. Volunteers are going to be serving up a big dinner to the workers at the Twin Tower site. They've been talking to Keith Oppenheim about what they're thankful for.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

KEITH OPPENHEIM, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): At moments, it is still as if the World Trade Center Towers fell just yesterday -- shock, pain, grief and the ceaseless work on the bottomless, atop the relentless fight.

The volunteers, with Thanksgiving now here, still they search and cut and clean. Here, where Fulton Street meets Broadway, geography offers its clearest, saddest view of this city's great wound. The volunteers are still watched by the silent hundreds. The volunteers are watched over by the historical St. Paul's Chapel at Trinity Church.

DIANE REINERS (ph), ST. PAUL'S CHAPEL VOLUNTEER: OK. So I'm going to walk you over to where the podiatrist station is. Have you been here before?

Diane Reiners is one of the volunteers tending to the volunteers.

REINERS: Feel free to sort of hang out with them and...

OPPENHEIM: And that podiatrist station? It's in the church pew in which George Washington prayed on the day he was inaugurated as president.

OPPENHEIM: Carolyn Siciliano volunteers too.

CAROLYN SICILIANO, ST. PAUL'S CHAPEL VOLUNTEER: After everything happened, I kind of wanted to do something. I didn't know what, and I figured my hands and my skill, as a therapist, would be the best thing that I could use to help out these workers.

OPPENHEIM: We tried to help out the workers, firemen, police, by leaving them alone.

St. Paul's was virtually a museum, a 235-year-old relic of a time when Fulton at Broadway was out in the suburbs. The city literally grew up around it. Then on September 11, a few hundred yards away, a part of that city literally collapsed around it.

SISTER GRACE, ST. PAUL'S CHAPEL VOLUNTEER: The fact that this place was undamaged after the blast, people draw a great feel of strength from that. This place was meant to be here, and we were meant to be here to be a sanctuary for them.

What happened to the sergeant stripe?

OPPENHEIM: Sister Grace is also, most unexpectedly, an honorary member of the New York Police Department. There are real sergeants here too, even a brigadier general of the South Carolina State Guard.

BRIG. GEN. ED HALL, SOUTH CAROLINA STATE GUARD: I had a hundred volunteers that wanted to do that, and I was only able to bring 28.

OPPENHEIM: They handle security and breakfast.

HALL: We wanted to come up here and relieve the workers that were on site here, so that they could spend time with their families during the Thanksgiving holidays.

OPPENHEIM: But the Guardsmen found there was already a family within these four walls.

KATHERINE AVERY, ST. PAUL'S CHAPEL VOLUNTEER: This is absolutely no problem.

OPPENHEIM: This is Katherine Avery, supervises the food. She, too, is here from South Carolina.

AVERY: And I am very excited about being here for Thanksgiving. This has become my second family. With all of these police officers and military and fire department, this is where I'm supposed to be.

OPPENHEIM: Civilians, making what is now called the pilgrimage, sense that as well. They write messages on blank canvases outside St. Paul's.

There is another message that all, here, want to send you.

SISTER GRACE: Everyone, when they remember this time in history, they don't just focus on the act of the terrorists, but they focus on the unity that we all experienced because of it.

OPPENHEIM: Now, the culmination of that unity, a gigantic Thanksgiving dinner for the volunteers, and for those who volunteer to them.

AVERY: I hope that what we're doing here is defining Thanksgiving. Since these people can't be with their families, we want to give them our family, you know, St. Paul's family.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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