A Mother's Mission
Her son's death on 9/11 spurred Sally Goodrich to do the one thing she knows best: educate. The beneficiaries of her grief became young girls in war-ravaged Afghanistan.
It’s just after Easter, and the taps in the maple grove behind the Vermont home of Sally and Donald Goodrich are beginning to flow. The couple is collecting sap buckets, and the distant smell of wood smoke from the sugar shack is in the air. The spring thaw is finally here. They head back toward their house in the corner of a hayfield in Bennington. Don throws a log on a smoldering fire, and it hisses as the talk turns away from one of Vermont’s great rites of spring toward preparations for a perilous journey far from the gentle hills of home.
It’s a journey that began in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, when the Goodriches’ son Peter, 33, a software developer living in Sudbury with his wife, Rachel, boarded United Airlines Flight 175 bound for California. Peter hated flying and worried his whole life about hijackings. The flight he was on became the second plane that would crash into the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
Four days later, standing in lower Manhattan, a steady rain tamping down the ash and smoke amid those ruins, Don and Sally held each other and wept. It was from the despair and rubble of ground zero that they would embark on a nearly six-year odyssey to honor the memory of their son by responding to the crime of terrorism the way they believe Peter would have wanted them to. But getting to that place of understanding would first take them down into terrifying depths, where they felt everything was lost. That is, until they found themselves at a turning point that would draw them to the place from which the September 11 attacks were authored.
They set out to confront terrorism, but to do so in a way that would capture Peter’s spirit – his analytical mind, his sense of justice, and, above all, his passion for understanding other cultures and other faiths.
For Don, 64, it was a matter of law. At first, he used his skills as a tort lawyer to lead the families of victims of September 11 in a fight for compensation from the government and the airlines. Eventually, Don would also bring his passion for law to Washington and larger questions of terrorism. He has spoken out in Congress and in the highest circles of the security establishment in favor of an approach to fighting terrorism that does not trample upon America’s protection of civil rights embedded in the Constitution. But Don is the first to say that it was Sally, 61, the coordinator of federally funded programs for the North Adams school district, who brought meaning back to their lives and took them closer to a place where they’d find healing.
Sally’s path led inextricably toward Afghanistan. It was there that she would go to try and understand the suffering in a land ravaged by 30 years of war and to explore for herself why it yielded such violence. She wanted to embrace the people, particularly the students, to come to understand their needs. And not only to understand those needs, but to meet them. It was a journey spurred on by the memory of her son but also by her life’s work as an educator.
Eventually, Don and Sally would raise nearly $250,000 in a quest to build a school for 500 girls in Afghanistan and to help fund two other schools and an orphanage. Under the puritanical regime of the Taliban, which offered sanctuary to Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda terrorist network, girls were not allowed to go to school. After the US-led offensive in the weeks after September 11, the Taliban was toppled and Al Qaeda fractured.
One of the greatest needs in the nascent, struggling democracy of a new Afghanistan is to restore a system of education for girls and to ensure that they, too, are part of Afghanistan’s future. Afghanistan is a patchwork of ethnic identities, and Sally and Don built the school in the heart of the Pashtun tribes, which are the most conservative and traditional. They knew a girls’ school would be most needed there.
And so, a year ago, she and Don went to Afghanistan for the dedication of the girls’ school. In earlier trips to Afghanistan, she says, her emotions were more raw. She was still working through the powerful – and powerfully difficult – message of forgiveness that is central to her Christian faith. She is quick to stress that the Afghan people did not carry out the September 11 attacks. But, she adds, coming to understand the context of Afghanistan and the Pashtun culture that had provided bin Laden sanctuary and how Al Qaeda manipulated that custom, was part of a difficult, emotional “reconciliation” with Afghanistan and its people.
Her journey this spring was different, less emotional. She was traveling without Don, allowing me to accompany her from the hills of Vermont to the hills of Afghanistan, and she saw it as a pilgrimage of solidarity to see the school in mid-session for the first time. She wanted to stand with the students and the teachers as the Taliban mounted a spring offensive. The Taliban, which has been regrouping and reasserting itself in Afghanistan over the last two years, is now said to have regained significant control over four southern provinces.
The e-mails coming from friends in Afghanistan on the eve of the trip were chilling – there were Taliban death threats to students, the burning of girls’ schools, the kidnapping of an Italian journalist and the beheading of his Afghan translator, as well as a roadside bomb that killed five NATO troops amid heavy fighting in southern Afghanistan.
On this April day in their Bennington home, Don looked worried, Sally determined. She kept packing.
“These students take risks every day just to go to school, so I am going to take a risk to be there with them,” says Sally, stuffing a suitcase with bottles of their own maple syrup wrapped in plastic bags and packed in among books and medicines and sundries for the many people in Afghanistan who have helped her bring the school project to life.
She was also taking gifts for three Afghan families whose grown children had come to live with her through a fledgling program to send gifted Afghan students to receive educations in America. The teenagers, whom Sally now considers part of her family, are Matiullah, Javid, and Soraya. Fearing their families could be targeted, Sally has asked that their last names be withheld. Sally has so much emotionally invested in Afghanistan now through the school and the students who live with her that she feels it is in her blood, that she has an extended Afghan family.
“I have to go,” she says, zipping the suitcase shut on the morning before her departure.
On Friday, April 13, the final leg of Sally’s flight from New York takes her from Dubai into Afghanistan. It arrives late into the relentless dust and searing heat of Kabul. Her luggage is lost. She’s exhausted. But she’s thrilled to be back in Afghanistan. She is greeted on the tarmac by the families of the children who live with her now and by friends who work for the Welfare Association for Development of Afghanistan, or WADAN. It is one of the largest Afghan Non-Governmental Agencies, or NGOs, in the country, and its dedicated staff works on education and democracy building. The funding for the school flows through WADAN. The curriculum was developed through the Afghan Ministry of Education.
Sally can hardly contain her joy when she steps off the plane, a hearty New England smile framed by a black chador, the loose outer garment required to be worn by women in Afghanistan. But she can see a changed landscape across the faces of the friends who come to greet her. They look weary and worried. This is Sally’s fifth trip to Afghanistan in three years, and this time there is a palpable sense of peril that she has never felt so strongly before.
The fear is visible in Sharifa, the mother of Soraya, one of the students who has been living with the Goodriches. Six months earlier, Sharifa and her husband and their five children had received death threats from the Taliban at their home in southern Afghanistan. Sharifa was attacked on a road walking to the school where she taught English and told she would be killed for her work and for sending her daughter to America for an education. The family fled their home and resettled in Kabul.
On the hot tarmac on this day, Sally and Sharifa tearfully embrace, two mothers who share the life of and hopes for Soraya in America and for every Afghan female daring to claim her education.
The Toyota Land Cruiser pulls out of the airport, bumping along the roads of Kabul to WADAN’s offices, where Sally is brought up to date. The security situation in many provinces, including Logar, where the school is located, has deteriorated dramatically as the Taliban was stepping up its spring offensive against the US and international forces there.
Some 800 “night letters,” or warnings, to girls not to attend school had been distributed in Logar alone. Five UN workers were killed in a roadside bombing. There was a spate of suicide bombings in the south. The Taliban was also rocketing police stations along the roadsides. Sally’s most trusted advisers – Afghan and American – encourage her to rethink her planned trip to the school. Sally listens but cannot give up the idea of seeing the faces of the girls in class. It is the reason she came. Over the next two days, adjustments are made to the trip. Armed guards will accompany her. The scheduled day of the visit will be changed. It will be a short visit, but she will persevere.
“This isn’t just my journey, it’s Peter’s journey,” she says.
“He would not want fear to stop us. If we are afraid, then the terrorists win,” she adds, smiling in a way that is disarmingly serene in such a violent place.
“Peter would want us to go.”
Peter Morgan Goodrich was born on October 1, 1967, the day the Red Sox clinched the American League pennant. Family lore has it that Sally came out of anesthesia after the birth of her first child with one question: “Who won?” And, ever since, Peter, who was baptized a Catholic, was much more a devout congregant of the high church of Fenway. “He couldn’t go to Fenway without being the one in the bleachers to start the wave,” says Don.
In the family photo albums, Peter as a young boy is tall and skinny with a shy smile. He struggled - and overcame - severe dyslexia. Sally and Don say he was passive and always hated violence. In his freshman year of high school, he was ruthlessly bullied. It was on the chess board that Peter discovered his inner strength. His sophomore year, a classmate was arrogantly hustling everyone at chess. Peter put his mind to beating him and righteously toppled the bully of the game.
From that point on, his diffidence turned to confidence. He grew physically, into a 6-foot-2-inch, 220-pound athlete, a record-holder in the discus throw. He shed the awkward shyness of his youth and by his senior year had become a kind of lumbering bear, full of glee and warmth.
That sophomore-year victory in chess set him on a path toward justice, seeking out fairness in human relations. He devoured books on everything from philosophy to arcane aspects of law to Irish literature. He had an endlessly curious mind. “He always wanted to jump into the great mysteries of life,” Don says. Peter cultivated close friendships with people from all corners of the world: Serbs and Syrians, Orthodox Jews and Sikhs. He was drawn to and cherished such friendships, celebrating differences of culture and religion and always inviting his friends into the warm circle of his family.
After graduating from Bates College, he didn’t stop learning. He studied the Koran. And his English-language version of the Muslim holy book was marked with book darts on significant passages and sticky notes filled with questions and musings. His family saved his Koran as a cherished relic of a life that sought to understand the words of the prophet Mohammed but was cut short by those who perverted his message and killed the innocent.
The last time Sally and Don saw Peter was the weekend before September 11. They were moving from their longtime home in Williamstown, where they had raised Peter, his brother, Foster, 36, and his sister, Kim, 40, whom they had adopted when she was 14. Peter was on hand to help move the family’s belonging to his parents’ new home in a corner of Sally’s family farm in Bennington, Vermont. When the work was done, Peter said goodbye and gave both his parents his signature bearhug.
To never feel Peter’s physical presence again was devastating for the entire extended family, but for Sally and Don, in particular, it led to three years of darkness as they fell into the silent despair that can envelop any parent who loses a child. Sally drank heavily to numb her rage, sometimes firing off tirade-filled e-mails and speaking out against her own government for its failure to see the intentions of Al Qaeda.
She would recite the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi, asking for help to replace despair with hope and darkness with light. But the prayers left her empty, as if she were mouthing words her heart could not accept.
In the spring of 2002, the family was informed that a bone fragment believed to be Peter’s had been found in the ruins of the World Trade Center. DNA samples confirmed the remains were his, and Don and Sally began to accept Peter’s death. Though Sally managed to stop drinking, the anger and despair were always close by. And, then, on top of a mountain of sadness, came the bleak news that she had ovarian cancer. Amid the grief and the chemotherapy, she reached a point where she contemplated taking her own life. “Everything was destroyed,” she says. “My life, my faith, my ability to live. I had nothing left.”
The day that lifted her out of the darkness came in August 2004.
Sally and Don received an e-mail from US Marine Major Rush Filson, a childhood friend of Peter’s, who had volunteered for service in Afghanistan to fight for his country, a duty spurred on in large part, he says, by Peter’s death. The e-mail described Filson’s experiences there and his overwhelming sense of the needs of the children of Afghanistan. He wrote about a patrol where he met a village leader who told him the only thing he needed was school supplies. Filson asked Sally and Don to help him collect supplies to distribute in the village.
“That was the beginning,” says Sally. “I call it the moment of grace.”
“I knew Peter would have responded to that e-mail. I knew I had to in his name. For the first time, I felt Peter’s spirit back in my life.”
At first, she and Don and their son Foster raised money for school supplies and mailed them to Filson. Then Sally began to think about doing more, about actually building a school. The family created the Peter M. Goodrich Foundation in 2004 and raised $180,000 for the project. They enlisted the help of Williams College professor David Edwards and his former research assistant, Shahmahmood Miakhel, who was working as an adviser to the United Nations Assistance Mission for Afghanistan. Together, they decided on a location for a two-story school for 500 girls in Logar Province, about a one-hour drive south of Kabul. It was completed in the end of 2005 and opened its doors in March 2006. The foundation also raised an additional $70,000 to fund two schools and an orphanage in Wardak Province as well as dig a much-needed well for drinking water in Kunar Province.
Sally still has cancer. Just before she left in April, tests at Dana-Farber confirmed that. But it has only served to keep her focused even more urgently, she says, on her work in Afghanistan. “I wouldn’t say it was a journey of faith, but I would say it was a journey that restored my faith. And it also changed my faith. I think about my faith, and I think about God in more open ways than I did before. I don’t know how to explain it except to say that my faith is now about action to help people,” she says.
“Helping these children with education, which is the future of Afghanistan, gave us our lives back. I’m so lucky to have found that. I don’t know how to thank them.”
On Sunday, April 14, Sally climbs into the Land Cruiser accompanied by an armed guard and another vehicle with more security guards and WADAN officials. The two-vehicle convoy sets out from Kabul for the school in Logar to visit the students. Sally is fearless, though she is lighting one cigarette after another to calm the nerves.
The convoy makes its way past the military checkpoints where roadside bombs are always a threat. It bumps along into the farming valley of Logar, surrounded by the snow-capped peaks of the Paghman Range. It shifts gears past the cemeteries dug into the rocky hillside, dotted with green silk flags that mark the graves of “martyrs” from the country’s 30 years of war. It rises up into the rolling hills with a sheen of spring grass and the white blossoms in the apple orchards that remind her of her native Vermont.
“It is so beautiful here. This is where I get my strength,” Sally says, peering out the tinted windows, her face concealed by a black veil out of respect for local customs and a practical concern for security. “I think suffering is the bridge that connects me to this place,” she says. “It is Afghans who taught me about suffering. They know it well, and their suffering helped put ours in context.”
But Sally’s unbridled passion for Afghanistan has consumed her in a way that’s been difficult for her family to understand. It has taken time away from being with them and has created moments of tension.
Some see her journey as naive, or reckless, given the danger involved. Some ask whether she has stopped to ponder that this land she so loves is still seething with militancy and anger and, for some, an interpretation of Islam that views America not only with contempt but as an enemy.
When I ask Sally about this, she bristles and reveals a different side of her personality, one with a razor’s edge and a confidence captured in the certainty of her voice. “My response is to say that I feel I am here confronting the terrorists. The 9/11 commission called on America to do more to help Afghanistan build its civil society and provide better education. I say, who better to do that than a parent of a 9/11 victim, and someone who is an educator?” Terrorists, she continues, recruit children who are uneducated and turn them into suicide bombers. “The terrorists trade on their lack of education. What better way to fight terrorism than to provide education?”
The Land cruiser turns the corner into the lush fields that lead up to the two-story school perched on a bluff overlooking a majestic mountain range. As we pull into the school, the sound of schoolgirls playing in the courtyard carries on the light breeze of a perfectly sunny day. A cluster of girls, who range from kindergarteners through 12th-graders, engulfs Sally. They take her by both hands and pull her toward the school. The girls are in uniforms of black smocks, worn for modesty, and white head scarves, which frame smiling faces. The principal, a woman named Shama, stands on the front steps to greet her. Sally and Shama hug and then Sally is again pulled by the students, who are eager to show her all that is going on inside the school.
As the girls settle into their classes, the fourth grade is reciting lessons in an eager cadence back and forth with the teacher in Dari, one of the two official languages spoken in Afghanistan. The other is Pashto, which is the native tongue of most of the girls. In another classroom, English is being taught. And down the hall, in a handwriting lesson, the sound of girls furiously working chalk against a blackboard can be heard, the chalk dust flying in an arc of sunshine that pours through the window. Through a translator, Sally asks pointed questions about study plans and class sizes. She is in her element as an educator, and she is all business. She and the principal are arm-in-arm as they walk through the school’s echoing corridors. In a quieter moment, a few of the more studious and mature girls are brought forward for a discussion about the school and any worries they may have about their safety.
Speaking up confidently is Pashtana, 14, with a bright face and a quick smile. She is old enough to remember the five years before the fall of 2001, when the Taliban was firmly in control and forbade girls from attending school. “It was so boring. I was angry, but we were not allowed to be angry. Our parents were afraid for us that the Taliban would beat us or put us in jail,” she says in Pashto through a translator.
Asked about what she wants to do with her education, Pashtana says, “I want to be part of my country’s future, so that those who want to bring us back to the past, who want to destroy our country, will be defeated.”
Later, Sally talks to the principal and to a village elder, known as Hajji Malik, about the security situation. The principal says that security is a concern and an increasingly alarming one given the violence directed against girls’ schools. But she assures Sally that the school is well protected, both by a private guard and due to its proximity to a military checkpoint. The principal also assures her that the village leaders, particularly Hajji Malik, are not just protective but also actively support the school.
To break an uncomfortable silence, the principal opens a glass cabinet and shows Sally a Koran, the same edition as the one Peter had, that is kept next to a framed photograph of his smiling face. Sally holds the Koran and opens to Peter’s favorite verse, the first sura, or chapter, of the Muslim holy book, and reads: “. . . Keep us on the right path. The path of those upon whom Thou has bestowed favors. Not [the path] of those upon whom Thy wrath is brought down, nor of those who go astray.” Her voice quivers with emotion and then she stops and tears well in her eyes. The principal reaches across and holds her hand. “We pray for you and for Peter that he may rest in peace,” she says.
Then comes the hardest part. The WADAN officials who accompanied Sally are looking at their watches and encouraging her not to take any chances with security on the road. But as Sally is preparing to say goodbye, Pashtana and two other girls pull her into the classroom and begin painting her hands with henna. They close the door, but the laughter and the warmth can be heard on the other side.
At the front door of the school, hanging by a frayed rope, is an old, rusted part from a Russian tank, which serves as the school bell. It is time to ring it to mark the end of the school day. The school guard, an elderly gentleman with a beard and a face as weathered as the antique Kalashnikov rifle he shoulders, bangs a stone against the hollow metal. The clanging erupts into a thunder of footsteps on the stairs and then a squall of schoolgirl laughter pours out of the building.
The students surround her, shouting in English, “Goodbye, Miss Sally! Thank you!” One of the girls playfully sneaks up behind Sally and pulls a blue silk burka over her head. Sally dons the burka, the head-to-toe covering women must wear by law under the puritanical rule of the Taliban. Sally walks among the students in the garment and has fun with the moment, just before she has to say goodbye and head back to Kabul. The girls laugh as she spins in a circle; the sky- blue burka billowing out in the breeze and looking for a moment like it has given Sally wings. 