Amid optimism that missing people were still alive yesterday after the World Trade Center collapse, rescue worker Jay Zion said he feared finding a survivor inside the ruins of the twin towers.
"I don't mind the dead people. Dead are dead," said the city Emergency Medical Services technician waiting to be deployed into the wreckage. "It's the live people, just to experience that suffering."
"I dread finding someone in the rubble after three, four, days, finding someone half alive," he said, quickly adding that, of course, "if miraculously somebody is alive in there, I'll be treating them."
Like hundreds of emergency workers and firefighters, Zion was at what is now called "Ground Zero" when the towers of the huge commercial complex were attacked on Tuesday.
More than 300 of those workers remain missing, trapped while trying to help thousands of people flee the buildings that then collapsed in clouds of smoke and flames.
Zion and his downtown Manhattan battalion had answered the emergency call on Tuesday morning that the Trade Center tower just a few blocks away had been struck by a plane.
Minutes later, he was working in an ambulance parked in the shadow of the twin towers.
He was there when the second plane hit and still there when the south tower toppled overhead. Trapped in the ambulance under a shower of concrete, metal and glass, he said, "it just went black and there was no air."
"I just wanted to die quick. I didn't want to be pinned here for days or have some piece of metal on top of me," he said. But he didn't die at all.
He escaped and ran for several blocks, only to be surrounded in dust and darkness again when the second tower fell. Friday marked the first day in four that Zion was venturing back into the disaster site.
The government is aiming to recruit 1,096 foreign English teachers and teaching assistants this year, the Ministry of Education said yesterday. The foreign teachers would work closely with elementary and junior-high instructors to create and teach courses, ministry official Tsai Yi-ching (蔡宜靜) said. Together, they would create an immersive language environment, helping to motivate students while enhancing the skills of local teachers, she said. The ministry has since 2021 been recruiting foreign teachers through the Taiwan Foreign English Teacher Program, which offers placement, salary, housing and other benefits to eligible foreign teachers. Two centers serving northern and southern Taiwan assist in recruiting and training
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