From tragedy, mother builds a future

(Correction: Because of a reporting error, an article in the World pages on Sunday about a Vermont woman's efforts to finance a new girls school in Afghanistan to honor her son who died in the Sept. 11 attacks incorrectly described the airplane that hit the south tower of the World Trade Center. It was United Air Lines Flight 175.)

SORKHABAD, Afghanistan -- Peter Goodrich never got to take all the journeys he wished. His last trip was on American Airlines Flight 175, which smashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

Last week, Peter's mother, Sally, made a voyage on her son's behalf. The 59-year old from Bennington, Vt., came to Afghanistan to see the girls' school that is being built about 30 miles southeast of Kabul with money from her son's memorial fund.

''This is really Peter's journey," said Goodrich, who is the district administrator for public schools in North Adams, Mass. ''I am living to move my child's life forward."

Her travels took her to Sorkhabad, a village of adobe houses in Logar Province, where girls and a few boys study on the mud floor of a house or in a tent pitched in the courtyard. A mile away, workmen lay the stone foundations of the new building, financed by the memorial fund, which will house a school for more than 500 girls ages 6 to 13.

As tens of thousands of dollars accrued in the fund set up after her son's death, Goodrich and her husband, Donald, struggled to find the right project to spend it on in memory of Peter, a software designer who lived in Sudbury, Mass., and was 33 when he died.

''Peter was a very complex person, and it was hard to pick a project that was emblematic of the way he lived his life," she said.

Then came an e-mail last year from a childhood neighbor of the family, Major Rush Filson of the US Marine Corps, who was posted in Afghanistan. He wrote to his parents pleading for equipment for a school in Logar Province that had no building, desks, or supplies.

''This was a perfect fit for who Peter was," Sally Goodrich said last week as she sat in the sunny courtyard of a guest house in Kabul. She described the eldest of her three children as spiritual, but ''not religious," and said he had read the Koran and was interested in travel and different cultures. ''He was a gentle, gracious person," she said.

Peter Goodrich was on his way to a software conference in California when he was killed. He left a wife, Rachel, but no children.

After hearing about Filson's request, the Goodriches set about organizing supplies for the Logar school and thought about building premises. Donald Goodrich is a lawyer and one of the founding members of Families of September 11, a nonprofit organization that aims to promote the interests of victims' families and support policies that prevent terrorism.

On the advice of David Edwards, a professor of anthropology at Williams College and a specialist on Afghanistan, they decided instead to fund construction at the Sorkhabad school, because it operates under the authority of the Afghan government. Edwards and his former research assistant, Shah Mahmood Miakhel, who is now Afghanistan's deputy interior minister, felt it was important to support government structures, Goodrich said.

The Sorkhabad project will cost $185,000, plus about $20,000 for furniture. The memorial fund has raised about $165,000, including $55,000 from the Goodriches, their share of the government compensation given to the families of Sept. 11 victims.

At Sorkhabad, teachers and pupils spoke with excitement at the prospect of trading their cramped, primitive quarters for a proper schoolhouse.

''It will make a huge difference," said Shaima Hashimi, 26, the principal, whose family compound currently houses the school. In the absence of a table, she serves visitors tea and heart-shaped cookies on a chair.

''We have a real space problem," she said. ''We don't have any latrines; the children use an abandoned house next door. We had a water pump, but that was stolen, so the kids drink from the stream."

Up a flight of uneven steps from Hashimi's bare office, about 20 fourth-graders sat on mats on the mud floor, reading aloud in Dari, one of Afghanistan's official languages. Behind a shabby rug dividing the room, a sixth-grade class sat at donated desks drawing pictures of songbirds.

Outside, about 100 children from four grades sat under a stifling white UNICEF tent and a blue tarpaulin.

''We'll be able to study properly," said 9-year old Ipozhmai, who squirmed on the hard bench she shared with three other pupils. ''The new school will be big. It will be made of concrete, and it will be nice and clean."

Hashimi said she always hoped for a proper girls' school in the village, but never dreamed it would come from an American woman and her family.

''As Muslims, we always have hope; we believe that God will help us," Hashimi said. ''God sent her [Goodrich] to help us."

Goodrich hopes the school project will contribute to the arduous process of rebuilding Afghanistan, shaping a better future for the country whose collapse provided a haven for her son's Al Qaeda killers.

Enchanted by the people and the landscape, she is eager to return in September to mark the completion of the school and the fourth anniversary of her son's death. ''Peter would have loved it," she said.