A Jamaican mother remembers
WHEN Venesha Rodgers ventured into church in New Jersey, fresh off the plane from Jamaica, her first question to her mother was, “Mother, are these people Christians?”
The question was prompted by the fact that Venesha saw members of the congregation wearing pants in church, a practice then unheard of “back home”.
But Venesha adjusted to the cultural differences quickly, remaining in the church and eventually becoming youth director of the Brunswick Church of God in New Jersey.
As youth director, she would take the children of the church to functions, on trips, and every year would plan a week of activities in cabins at a New Jersey park.
“It was a thing they looked forward to,” her mother Lilieth Bergen, now remembers.
Memories like these are bittersweet, for Venesha Rodgers-Richards was one of the thousands of persons, who perished last year in the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center that shocked the world.
Born November 30, 1974, Venesha arrived in the United States with her mother, and an older brother, Omar, and a younger brother, Shaun in 1986.
Venesha began to excel immediately, making the honour roll all through school, and the Deans’ List in college where she studied computer technology.
She then began a Masters degree at Pace University, where she was an honour student.
But personal relationships were always as important to her as academic studies, and she was very close to her mother.
At 13 years old, for instance, unknown to her mother, Venesha went to her teacher and demanded permission to work, something she could not otherwise do in the US until she was 14, according to Bergen.
“She told the teacher she wanted the job to help her mother out. She got the job at Burger King, because she’s one persistent person,” says Bergen, who only knew about the job when she received a permission slip to sign.
“They said she wanted to do it and they couldn’t stop her. In the evenings she would come home with her little pay cheque, her little $40, and she would always take it to me. I never spent it, I always saved it, and anything she wanted I would give it to her.”
Venesha was also close to Bergen’s children by a later relationship, her younger brother Naquan and sister Queena, whom Venesha named.
But Venesha also managed to find time for a family of her own. Married in 1998, she had an eleven-month old daughter Kayla, whom her mother was helping to raise, in the manner familiar to many extended families.
Bergen, a nurse, took care of the baby in the day since she worked nights, while Venesha would pick up Kayla after classes in the evening.
Last September, Venesha was attending classes several evenings per week, and working days on the 100th floor of the North Tower in the World Trade Center at an insurance firm, Marsh and McLennan.
Ask Lilieth Bergen about the morning of September 11, and she immediately begins to recount an incident involving her granddaughter.
“At about 7:40, the baby stopped in the middle of the hallway and sat on her butt and said Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, three times. I called out to my mother, “Kayla singing Jesus loves me”, because her mother used to sing those little songs to me, but she didn’t say Jesus loves me, she said Jesus.”
Amused, Bergen nearly called her daughter, who was already at work, to tell her that the baby had just said her first words to her.
“I picked up the telephone to call her but I was running late, so I put the phone down,” she said.
She never made that call, however, and instead ran out to take her younger children to the bus stop, leaving baby Kayla with Bergen’s mother, Agle Brown.
Brown had only arrived in the US on September 6, to allow Bergen to visit Jamaica with the Caribbean Medical Mission, a group she helped found, that returns to work in Jamaica every year.
Returning from the bus stop, Bergen saw her mother with the baby in her arms, frantically trying to tell her something but incapable of getting the words out, until she finally screamed “TV!”
Bergen ran to the television, where she saw her daughter’s workplace in flames, and went into instant denial.
“I knew it was the building. I saw the reporter and the building behind him, but all I could say was, she wasn’t in that building, and my mother stood up there and said (yes). I’m saying, no mother, that’s not the building I was in, she was in the other building. Well, my whole world caved in (when) the reporter said, “Oh my God, the other building is hit.” I knew I didn’t have another chance, I knew my baby was there.”
Since then, Bergen, along with all the other families affected by the terrorist attacks, has been trying to find her own way to deal with the traumatic events.
She has started a foundation in her daughter’s name, The Venesha Rodgers-Richards Foundation, to help keep her daughter’s name alive, and give less privileged children access to the computers with which Venesha was so proficient.
Pace University and A T and T donated 14 computers to the foundation which Bergen recently presented to Jamaica’s Ministry of Education in her daughter’s memory.
“If I can help bring another Venesha up in this world, my labour would not be in vain. She was a giving person, a computer whiz, it’s something I’m going to continue as long as He gives me strength,” she says.
The continuous media coverage of last September’s events has been difficult for some families trying to put the day behind them and move on with their lives. The re-living of the events has stirred up the intense grief, guilt and anger many families felt last September.
Bergen says she expected to feel anger at her daughter’s death, but has searched her heart for that anger in vain.
“I don’t know where that anger is, I sat and looked at (Osama) Bin Laden in the cave (on television), and tried to find anger, but God has taken it away from that day,” she says.
Her ability to heal may have been helped by previous events in Bergen’s life, when she successfully managed to put behind her years of anger towards a relative who was cruel towards her during her childhood.
She managed to put that anger behind her with the help of God, who she believes helped her heal. She also notes that her unhappy childhood strengthened her determination to be a good mother to her own children, and proved to her that hate takes more energy than love. That philosophy is now being tested to the limit.
Hurtful for Bergen in recent months has been the neglect by fellow church members, for reasons she believes are related to the compensation to be paid to the families of the victims.
“They’re still rallying, but they’re not rallying around me, they’re rallying around the husband. I don’t go to church for three weeks now, and I’m waiting to hear who is going to call me, who is going to say something to me, and up until this moment, I haven’t heard from one of my church members yet. (September 11) is coming and I’m waiting,” Bergen says.
She says, however, that she has a close circle of friends who has helped her through the crisis, including those she works with in Caribbean Medical Mission.
But to compound that hurt, a rift has developed in her family, which she also believes to be related to the compensation money, and as a result of which she has not seen her baby granddaughter in two months.
“That’s all that’s bothering me,” she says.
“I would like to hold her and squeeze her. That’s all my daughter left here for me. I’m not angry, who am I to judge, but all I would like is to remember the day holding on to something of my daughter. September 11 doesn’t mean anything to me if I don’t have what my daughter left for me,” she says.
“That’s all she left here for me, that little baby. All the money, that too shall pass. That’s what’s making all the trouble, but that too shall pass.”