For almost a decade, while my life was a head-spinning montage of departure gates, tournament brackets, travel, competition, pressure - there was one place that slowed everything down. Each year I travelled to Zambia to visit my uncle - a Catholic priest who had chosen to spend his entire adult life in Africa. He lived simply on the outskirts of the capital, Lusaka, in a small house amongst the people he served. There were no perimeter walls separating him from the community

I was twenty-one years old in the summer of 2001. A young Irish athlete in New York on a summer student visa, spending my days working, training and dreaming about what might be possible in sport and in life. I had just finished my undergraduate degree and, like most people at twenty-one, I imagined I had all the time in the world. On the morning of September 11th, my Uncle Michael and I were taking the A train towards Fulton Street. He ran a bar and restaurant called John St