New York:
Nearly every year since September 11, Hadidjatou Karamoko Traoré has made sure that her three children were dressed in their best clothes, and taken them from their tidy brick home in the Bronx to the pit where the World Trade Center stood, and where her husband, their father, worked and died.
After the attacks, all that was found of Abdoul-Karim Traoré, a cook at the Windows on the World restaurant, were his leather wallet, his identification cards and a few coins.
"I like to go down there and pray and see the place and remember," said Mrs. Traoré, a native of Ivory Coast who came to the United States in 1997. "When I go there, I feel closer to him. And him to me. I pray for him, too."
When she prays, she calls God Allah. Mrs. Traoré, 40, says praying in the pit feels entirely natural, even if some of those standing with her -- widows and widowers, parents and children -- blame her religion for the destruction of that day.
"That's not fair," she said. "It's not because of Allah that these buildings fell."
Mrs. Traoré is the widow of one of roughly 60 Muslim victims -- cooks, businessmen, emergency responders and airline passengers -- believed to have died on 9/11.
It is a group that has been little examined, and no precisely reliable count of their ranks exists. But their stories, when told, have frequently been offered as counterweights in the latest public argument over terrorism and Islam.
Mrs. Traoré works the overnight shift as a nurse's assistant at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx. She loves to cook: peanut sauce and doughy fritters are her specialties.
She has a wide smile and a raspy laugh. Her life, a juggling act of homework, bills and prayer, is one September 11 story -- the kind of personal account Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and others have sought to highlight amid the debate over a planned Islamic community center near the pit where Ms. Traoré prays every September.
Over the past nine years, Mrs. Traoré has lived a kind of dual life. She is a 9/11 widow struggling to raise her children, cope with her loss and tame her anger.
The trials of her days would ring familiar to single mothers and fathers from Staten Island to Washington. But she is also a Muslim woman, both devoted to her faith and conscious of the discomfort it can evoke in her adopted homeland.
She wears Western clothes when she shops at Costco. But she wears a robe and head scarf when she visits her mosque in the Bronx. When she is in her religious attire, she can sense a shift as people on the street appear to regard her with suspicion.
"When people run away from me, I feel sad," she said. "But I understand why they're doing that. What happened was terrible."
Her two sons, Souleymane, 11, and Siaka, 9, attend a Roman Catholic school near their home. During prayer, they sit in the back of the classroom with the few other non-Catholic students. They feel comfortable there, but they, too, have hidden their religion from schoolyard bullies.
Mrs. Traoré received government money from the September 11 compensation fund, and she said she was both unsurprised by and grateful for the American generosity.
Mrs. Traoré is also frustrated and troubled, she said, that so many Americans find it impossible to separate the pious of her faith from its fanatics. But it has not buckled her beliefs.
"I'm proud to be Muslim," she said. "I'm going to be Muslim until God takes my spirit."
Mrs. Traoré met her husband in 1990 in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. He was a handsome mechanic, she worked at a health clinic, and they quickly fell in love.
They married in 1992, and she was pregnant the next year. Before their daughter was born, however, Mr. Traoré moved to New York in search of a better life. Mrs. Traoré followed four years later.
They lived, at first, in the Parkchester section of the Bronx. She braided women's hair and spent most of her time with other West Africans. She felt comfortable in the city and never felt the need to hide her religion.
Mr. Traoré first worked delivering groceries; later he got a job as a cook at the restaurant inside the American Museum of Natural History, and then came the opportunity at Windows on the World. He worked the 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. shift, which allowed him to make extra money delivering USA Today in the early morning.
Mr. Traoré never met his daughter, Djenebou, a quiet 17-year-old who now looks after her brothers as something of a surrogate parent. Unable to move to the United States with her mother, she grew up with relatives in Ivory Coast, and came to New York in 2002 after receiving "humanitarian parole."