That image, of the little boy on the ground as we bulleted down the road without stopping, has stayed with me every day since. I, like the other reporters in my vehicle, kept asking why we hadn’t stopped after hitting a little boy. How could we not stop? In the ensuing hours, all the reasons we didn’t stop emerged to paint a more gray picture than the initial black and white one, but I still, somehow, wasn’t able to let go of the anger I felt.

I am an African and an American. I was born in Liberia and moved to the United States when I was 14. I got a one-in-a-million lottery ticket, somehow ending up, as a native African, working for one of the most powerful institutions in the world, The New York Times, following around the most powerful people in the world: American dignitaries. I have flown into Ankara on Air Force One with President Obama and have accompanied Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Bosnia. I’ve done combat landings aboard Richard Holbrooke’s plane into Kandahar and helicoptered with Defense Secretary Ashton Carter into Baghdad.

In all of these instances, I was stationed securely on the other side of the great divide that separates the powerful from the powerless. That all-encompassing machine that projects American might around the world. By virtue of my job as a Times reporter covering the American government, I somehow became one of the people whose lives are deemed so important that we need millions of dollars spent to protect us from people so poor they have no shoes on their feet and wear hand-me-down Chelsea football shirts.

But I am also a daughter of Africa, and I know what it’s like to stand on the other side of that divide. To stand on the side of a road in your own country, watching the shiny vehicles filled with important people, encased in air-conditioning, as they speed by. My sister and I once stood on the roadside for hours near our home in Monrovia hoping to catch a glimpse of Amy Carter, when President Carter visited Liberia in 1978. The Americans in the motorcade looked like some kind of visiting deities. These were the people who put men on the moon and who had so much money that they could spend it on clothing for their dogs. They paid no attention to us as we waved frantically at the motorcade, but my sister and I still ran excitedly back to the house afterward exclaiming about how we had seen Amy.

We had seen, with our own eyes, the people in the motorcade. The people who are so important that they don’t have to stop when they hit and kill a young boy.