Samford junior Alyssa Stockard was in Paris when ISIS attacked Nov. 13. One of several Samford University in Birmingham students studying abroad in London this semester, she was on a weekend trip to the city of lights when things turned dark.
What started out as a routine tourist visit to the Eiffel Tower quickly turned to a keen focus on how to escape the area.
“When going to the top of the Eiffel Tower, most people expect to see kissing couples, tourists taking pictures, a city of lights and love below,” Stockard said. “What I witnessed was very different. I saw panic and concern, I saw blue and red lights of ambulances and policemen, not the twinkling iconic lights of Paris.”
Stockard was in the elevator headed to the top of the tower at 10:20 p.m. when she received a fear-ridden text from her mother noting there was a shootout taking place in Paris at that very moment.
“My first reaction was shock but not terror,” she said. “At 11:45 p.m. we left the tower to get back to safety at the hotel Mercure. The city was beginning to shut down and hotels were being booked and we were in zone 11 where the attacks were focused.
“As we left the Eiffel Tower grounds the bomb squad and swat team passed right in front of us, heading to the hostages,” she noted. “This is when the crowds began flocking to the metro. We made it on the last metro out of zone 11 at [midnight].”
Once safely tucked away in the hotel, Stockard’s shock turned to fear.
“I was stuck in a foreign country I was lost, confused and separated by a language barrier,” she said. “I was physically stuck there; they closed the borders and I couldn’t go anywhere. I didn’t know how or when I was getting out of Paris.”
After a few hours of interrupted sleep, she woke to a hungry stomach and an empty Paris.
“We went out to get food and Paris was a ghost town for a city. You would have thought it was Samford during Jan term,” she said. “We stayed out for a little because we had cabin fever but when I saw the police and army marching up and down the Champs Elysee I was ready to be back at the hotel.”
Even though Paris seemed abandoned, the people of Paris came together during the crisis, Stockard noticed. The Paris attacks consisted of seven separate, coordinated attacks by ISIS that killed at least 127 people.
“At this point I feel a deep sense of pride for Paris. As far as I am concerned, today I became a little French,” she said. “From the heavens God does not see lines separating countries like we do on a map. He does not see the French, Syrian and UK borders. He just sees His broken people.
"I am bonded with my brothers and sisters in Christ … in Paris.”
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