There were no lights in Lower Manhattan: no elevators, no electricity to keep food from spoiling, no electricity to pump the water up the apartment buildings or to pump the sewage down the building. Residents described the floors of their apartment buildings as pitch black. They said you have to put one hand on the wall and feel your way down. If you live 20 floors up, that is a slow and dangerous walk. The food sat in the kitchen and the refrigerators and rotted. They were not able to take their garbage down all those floors in the darkness so the garbage sat in the apartment. They described the smell in the apartment buildings as rotting garbage mixed with the smell of sewage. Some of them, the younger and healthier, made the trek down the apartment stairs looking for electricity to charge their cell phones so that they could connect with the outside world and to have a phone in case they had a personal emergency. There was no food to purchase because the stores had the same problem with rotting food and the restaurants could not cook the food even if they had it. The first day we worked there we went without food all day because we couldnt find any to purchase. The next day we located a pizza restaurant with a wood-fire oven that was making cheese pizza. That cheese pizza tasted soooo good. One of the things we did was to use our bus to generate power to let people charge their cell phones. We gathered quite a crowd around our bus while their phones charged. They were courteous to each other and even with the large crowd there was no problem.

We went to work in the dark and drove home from work in the dark. But when we got to our hotels in Times Square, it was as if nothing had happened. The lights were on, the people were shopping, the shows were going and it was a bit disconcerting. It was as if there were parallel universes and we were going in and out of them. One had all the conveniences, the other had none. After being cold all day, I went back to the hotel and took a very hot shower, trying to get my body warm again.