In September 2001, New Zealand nurse Frances Hughes arrived in New York City to take up a prestigious Harkness Fellowship in Health Care Policy, landing just one day before the terrorist attacks that reshaped global history. On the 25th anniversary of September 11, Dr. Hughes’s story captures the raw immediacy of witnessing the fall of the World Trade Center, the sudden paralysis of international travel, and the profound, lasting psychological aftershocks experienced by foreign nationals caught in the crisis.
Crossing Borders Into the Unimaginable
Dr. Hughes was in her mid-30s and doing her doctorate when she secured the Harkness Fellowship, an opportunity to study public policy alongside prominent figures. Traveling alone—with plans for her husband and two children, then aged 11 and 13, to join her later—she arrived in New Jersey and stayed with a professor before making her way into Manhattan. Her host offered a piece of routine urban advice she would never forget: visit the World Trade Center, but wait until after 9:00 a.m. once the morning commuters had cleared.
Instead, the morning brought an unthinkable catastrophe. According to reporting by 1News, Dr. Hughes and her colleagues were inside a conference room at Harkness House near Central Park when news spread that a plane had struck the towers. Stepping outside, they watched in horror as the first tower collapsed, followed moments later by the second. Amid the chaos, she managed a brief phone call to her husband in New Zealand to confirm she was safe before the call dropped.
An Eerie Silence and Rising Tensions
With communication severed and the city descending into lockdown, Dr. Hughes fell back on her clinical training. She directed displaced pedestrians toward Red Cross stations and attempted to bring order to the unfolding confusion. The atmosphere shifted rapidly, yielding an eerie, ash-choked quiet across the city. The underground transport tunnels servicing New York’s islands were shut down, massive yellow dump trucks rolled in endless succession through the streets, and heavily armed patrol boats secured the Hudson River.
For her family back in New Zealand, relief finally arrived when Dr. Hughes appeared on a broadcast via the Reuters studio for the Paul Holmes show, proving to her anxious relatives that she survived. Yet the city itself was changing beneath her feet. In Times Square, the usual roar of traffic vanished, replaced by silent vigils with candles and lights. But that quiet solemnity soon gave way to suspicion and hostility. Dr. Hughes witnessed foreign tourists being berated for taking photographs, alongside subsequent verbal assaults and aggression directed at individuals who looked like they came from a Muslim or an Arab country.
The cultural shift permeated daily life. American flags suddenly blanketed public spaces, adorning handbags and lapel badges. Though offered a commemorative brooch, Dr. Hughes recalled feeling uncomfortable wearing it. Church services echoed with patriotic refrains like “God Bless America” and “The Star-Spangled Banner,” drawing sharp lines between citizens and outsiders.
Bureaucratic Freefall and Personal Aftershocks
The immediate administrative fallout left foreign nationals stranded in legal and financial limbo. The suspension of all J1 visas trapped Dr. Hughes in a web of restrictions. She found herself unable to open a bank account or access funds, requiring emergency cash wired by her husband. Finding permanent housing proved impossible for six or seven weeks, forcing her to rely on the hospitality of friends.
The psychological toll, however, proved the most enduring legacy of her fellowship. Driven by adrenaline, she had spent the initial weeks assisting others, pushing her own processing of the trauma aside. Later, the deferred impact manifested as trouble sleeping and panic attacks. The psychological weight also strained her family from afar; her young son explicitly told her, I don’t want to come, Mum.
When her family eventually made the journey months later, they entered a transformed nation where travel, borders, and foreign status carried permanent scars.
Reflecting on the quarter-century since that fateful September morning, Dr. Hughes’s journey underscores how a single day alters the trajectory of international lives, turning a routine academic sabbatical into a lifelong confrontation with history.
