MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) — Sarah “Sally” Goodrich, a Vermont woman who against advice helped start a school for girls in Afghanistan in memory of the son she lost on Sept. 11, has died. She was 65.
She died Saturday of cancer at her home in Bennington. E.P. Mahar and Son Funeral Home in Bennington confirmed her death to The Associated Press.
Her 33-year-old son Peter, a former All-American athlete at Bates College in Lewiston, was aboard the second plane that hit the World Trade Center in 2001. She and her husband, Donald, established the Peter M. Goodrich Memorial Foundation and later helped build a school for girls and assisted an orphanage in Afghanistan.
The Goodriches were struggling in 2004 with how to memorialize their son with the $49,000 donated to them from family and friends after his death.
“And then the idea that we could go to Afhganistan where the Afghan people were taken advantage of by al-Qaida, manipulated, and where the planning for our son’s death took place and provide an alternative way of looking at the world, was very appealing to us,” Donald Goodrich said of his wife, a former teacher.
“She was a person who loved humanity. And if there was any love in your soul you would reciprocate with my wife. And that’s really what has allowed us to do what we’ve been able to do,” he said.
Her determination worked on David Edwards, a professor of anthropology at Williams College and an Afghanistan expert who was at first discouraged Goodrich’s idea after seeing a lot of well-intentioned projects go awry.
But before he knew it, he had agreed to go to Logar province to inspect the school site.
“Sally had a kind of relentlessness to her, and I say that and it sounds like it could be a negative thing. But she had just a quality of determination that was really striking, but also a real sense of humor,” he said.
Edwards ended up connecting her with Afghanistan’s deputy minister of interior — his former research assistant.
After meeting the provincial director of schools and the director of education, they found a better, safer site for the school, Edwards said.
The project grew out of an e-mail from a neighbor, a friend of her late son, who was serving as a U.S. Marine in Afghanistan. He wrote about a school that needed supplies. The Goodriches went on to build one for $230,000.
In the process, she visited Afghanistan at least four times, met struggling Afghanis, and through those experiences regained a sense of hope.
“I found that suffering is a universal language that allows for a greater understanding,” she said in 2006 to the AP.
“She had a way of seizing the right thing to do that people wanted to join,” said Rick Derby of New York City, who is producing a documentary about the foundation’s work. “It wasn’t all about her. It was about the result.”
The Goodriches have helped to bring at least 14 exchange students from Afghanistan to schools including the Berkshire School, many of them staying in their small Vermont home during the summer and holidays.  They have gone on to get scholarships at such places as Williams, Mount Holyoke and Bates colleges.

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