On the afternoon of April 22, 2011, as LCC media arts student Sakti Sarfati was walking home from class, she stopped at a railroad crossing. “I was filming to illustrate a song,” says Sarfati, who was so focused on a westbound freight train that she didn’t hear the horn of the approaching Amtrak passenger train. “She flew like a rag doll into the gravel,” a witness reported. Sarfati spent five days in the hospital, had 12 staples in her head and nine months of vertigo, but recovered and won a scholarship to continue her studies.

After graduating in June of 2013, she is looking for work in video production. “I have no memory of the incident,” says Sarfati, who has nevertheless featured it in art works. “I am interested in art as inspiration and healing.” Her piece “I am Still Here” can be seen in the Salon du Peuple at the New Zone Gallery through the First Friday ArtWalk on Oct. 4. Her YouTube video “I am Here” includes the scene she was recording when she was struck. Early in the summer, anticipating the departure of her son Ami to college, she started a blog about “a coming of age of a middle-age, single mother.” Find it at mamasakti.wordpress.com.