National Volunteer Week: Rescue, Recovery, & Respite

Richard Testa ended up a volunteer responder at Ground Zero through unusual circumstances. He'd started out working for General Electric, but in 1989, switched careers and became a massage therapist. 

On 9/11, Testa was maintaining a private practice, teaching at the Connecticut Center for Massage, and held a position on the board of the American Massage Therapy Association. Despite the juggling this required, Richard immediately jumped at the chance to take a Massage Emergency Response Team (MERT) training workshop and volunteer his services at Ground Zero. 

Testa recalls heading to New York City escorted by police, who cleared his party through various security checkpoints. As the van neared Ground Zero, he thought, “This is what a war zone looks like.”

The grimness lightened when he caught sight of “people on the sidewalk waving, shouting, and holding up thank-you signs.”

When he reached the designated respite center, he found “a busy but quiet place that had food, bathrooms, TV, a room with recliners, clean clothes, and boots." In terms of clientele, he recollected working on "police, firemen, a Red Cross worker, FBI personnel, and many others too numerous to list.” 

Some who made their way to the respite center were eager to strip off their gear for massage treatment. Others would not, bent on immediate return to the search and rescue efforts. In all, 305 members from the newly formed Connecticut chapter of MERT contributed to the efforts to support those working amid the grueling conditions at Ground Zero, collectively providing thousands of hours of restorative massages.

Richard Testa would spend 48 days at MERT’s Command Center near the disaster site, working with the organization’s core team to manage supplies, transportation, accommodations, and training of new volunteers. Testa remembers “how proud I was to be part of the team. We were a group of individual therapists, coming together for the common good. It still gives me chills and tears to this day.” 

Testa initially contacted the Museum about his story a week before the pandemic interrupted our normal flow of donation interactions. A year later, we acquired the identification badge he wore during that tour of volunteer service in lower Manhattan, as well as his written account of MERT’s response contributions.   

By 9/11 Memorial Staff