Grief, and a faraway longing

Last week, Cristin Gadue, a public health worker for a Cambridge company, was killed in a plane crash in the snowy mountains of Afghanistan. Now her father, Michael Gadue, wants to fly to Kabul, not to see how his daughter died, but to learn how she lived.

Reading her e-mails at his home in Burlington, Vt., Gadue said he was struck by how happy Cristin was in her work, aiding people scarred by violence and disease.

"Her spirit is what's important here, and her spirit was happy in Afghanistan," said Gadue, 57, whose 26-year-old daughter was one of three women from Cambridge-based Management Sciences for Health who died trying to rebuild the country's ramshackle public health system. "The purpose for me to possibly go to Afghanistan would be to see if I can catch some of that spirit."

Across the country, watching snow fall outside his parents' house in Kansas this week, Jose Urdaneta remembered his sister, Carmen, 32, in similar spirit.

Urdaneta, 34, knows Afghanistan mostly through the photos and e-mails Carmen sent back home and he said he longs for a closer connection to the country that made her happy.

"If I could see where the plane was, maybe that would be something I would want to do," Urdaneta said. "But if anything, my biggest fantasy is to go just to see what seemed to fill my sister with such joy and with such passion."

The plane went down Feb. 3 in the treacherous Chaperi Mountains, 20 miles outside Kabul.

All 104 passengers aboard the Kam Air flight died, including another MSH colleague, Amy Lynn Niebling, 29, of Somerville, whose family could not be reached.

All three women had been scheduled to return to the United States this weekend. Instead, Carmen Urdaneta will be remembered at a memorial service tomorrow in Topeka, Kan. Niebling's family will hold a memorial service Feb. 19 at a church in Omaha, and Gadue will be honored Feb. 21 at a memorial in a chapel at the University of Vermont.

The owner of the plane said this week that rough weather, not a mechanical failure, was to blame in the crash.

"The plane crashed in Kabul due to bad weather and not safety issues; it was unfortunate but not our fault," said a manager at Phoenix Aviation, a firm based at Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates that leased the aircraft to Kam Air, an Afghan firm.

Searchers, battling snow, cold and what might be debris from other plane wrecks, say it could be weeks or even months before remains are found on the peak, 11,000 feet up, Gadue said embassy officials have told him.

Yesterday, officials said the operation to recover the bodies still had not begun because of heavy snow.

Snow fell steadily from gray skies over the Afghan capital yesterday, grounding NATO helicopters poised to carry Afghan National Army troops, investigators, and engineers to the crash area. The NATO engineers plan to build a helipad nearby.

Urdaneta said he is haunted by images of the crash site and yearns for some physical remnant of his sister to make her death real -- "proof," he said, that his vivacious sister is gone. His parents are planning the memorial service at their church in Topeka.

"You just want to hold on to something," Urdaneta said. "It snowed here yesterday and I just remember seeing pictures of Kabul and the peak and all the snow, and I think of my sister being up there. It's hard I know . . . she's gone."

Gadue said he will think about a funeral later, after the memorial service he is planning for Cristin.

MSH has set up a memorial fund for the three women, which will be used to further the work the work they dedicated themselves to. Carmen's brother, Leo, said their family also is setting up the Carmen Christina Urdaneta Memorial Fund, which will probably be a scholarship for studying international health or funding for a project that would benefit the people she tried to help.

All left behind friends here and abroad. Carmen Urdaneta, a Brookline resident, loved dancing salsa and merengue with friends at clubs in Cambridge. A 1997 graduate of Boston University's School of Public Health, she was the "tia" -- Spanish for aunt -- to the two young children of her friend Tina Knight, who worked at the school.

Niebling married in October and had moved with her husband, Andrew Meeks, to Somerville. Gadue, a Tufts University graduate in 2000, won a three-month traveling fellowship last year and had been in Kabul for nearly 16 months, gaining public health experience.

Dr. Jonathan Quick, president and chief executive officer for MSH, said the group is getting help in the recovery work at the crash site from its security director, who has decades of experience in the region. The nonprofit has 350 Afghan workers and 30 group international staff in the country, Quick said.

Gadue said Gadue, Niebling, and Urdaneta had more in common than a public health mission in Afghanistan, he said. "Those girls were, I know, three friends who shared companionship and hard work," he said.

Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.