Giving Girls Wings

Devastated by the loss of her son on 9/11, Sally Goodrich found new life helping the children of Afghanistan.

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In His Honor

Consumed by sorrow after their son Peter died in the second plane to hit the World Trade Center, Sally and Donald Goodrich of Bennington, Vermont, fell into lives of silent despair. Sally began to drink; then, diagnosed with ovarian cancer, she contemplated taking her own life. "Everything was destroyed," she says. "My life, my faith, my ability to live. I had nothing left."

In August 2004 an e-mail from U.S. Marine Maj. Rush Filson, one of Peter's childhood friends, awakened the Goodriches to hope. He told them about the dire need for school supplies in Afghanistan, where he was serving. "That was the beginning," says Sally. "I call it the moment of grace. For the first time, I felt Peter's spirit back in my life."

The Goodriches began to dedicate their lives to responding to terrorism the way they believe Peter, a software developer who was 33 when he died, would have wanted -- with a sense of justice and sensitivity to other cultures and faiths. "I know Peter would have responded to that e-mail," says Sally. "I knew I had to in his name."

At first, Sally and Don simply raised money for supplies and sent them to Filson. Then Sally, 61, a coordinator of academic-achievement programs for the disadvantaged in the North Adams, Massachusetts, school district, began to think about building a school in Afghanistan for girls. The family created the Peter M. Goodrich Memorial Foundation and, in 2006, dedicated a two-story building big enough for 500 girls in Logar Province, about an hour south of Kabul.

Last April, Sally made a trip to Afghanistan -- her fifth in three years -- to see how the school was faring.

The Taliban, Afghanistan's former rulers, had begun a new offensive, embarking on a spate of suicide bombings and other attacks in the south. One schoolgirl had been shot to death and another wounded. The rebels delivered hundreds of "night letters" -- tacking them on houses, slipping them under doors, even delivering them in person. They threatened death to the families who allowed their daughters to attend school.

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Q. What's brown and sticky?

A. A stick

 

-- Kevin Kruse, Salem, Oregon