Sunday, May 4, 2008

Wanda Ramey was staffing a security booth in a Pentagon parking lot when she saw an airplane hurtling toward the building.

"It looked like the concrete sucked the plane in," Ramey said. "I thought the world was coming to an end."

It was a fearful sight that Ramey could not get out of her head. In the weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, she experienced insomnia and, when she was able to sleep, was awakened by nightmares. Ramey was so spooked by the dark outside her windows that, to get any sleep, she would curl up in her bedroom closet.

"I would lie in bed at night looking out that window and seeing Osama bin Laden," she said. "He was out to get me."

Unable to face working at the Pentagon after the attack, Ramey quit her job. A single mother with two boys, she struggled financially.

Then she turned to the Survivors' Fund. With the charity's help, she started seeing a psychologist. Her case manager recommended that she abandon her law enforcement career and go back to school. The charity paid for her to study accounting at the College of Southern Maryland so she could start her own business.

"I would've been out on the street if the Survivors' Fund hadn't stepped in and helped me," Ramey said.

Now 40, Ramey is raising her sons in Waldorf and has founded a company, Bizzy Bounce, that rents party equipment, such as moon bounces and water slides, as well as cotton candy and popcorn machines.

For Ramey, the new company was a welcome distraction from the Sept. 11 memories that once haunted her.

"Sept. 11 took away all of my hope. It snatched it away," Ramey said. But the Survivors' Fund case managers "let me know that I had better things to look forward to," she said. "They told me I could rebuild, I could move forward and make the most of what's in front of me."

-- Philip Rucker