27 February 2002

Victim of Terrorist Attacks to be Honored in Nicaragua for Charity Work

Washington -- At 31, Sara Manley Harvey had a high-powered job in New York City as a telecommunications analyst.

But there was much more to her life than that. She made productive use of her spare time by volunteering to raise money for thousands of Nicaragua's most impoverished children.

That was, until she became one of the more than 3,000 people killed in the September 11 terrorist attacks against the United States. Now her family and friends will memorialize her charity work for Nicaragua by having a lunch hall/multi-use center in the rural community of Somoto, Nicaragua, dedicated in her name.

Mrs. Harvey was married for exactly one month when her life ended suddenly after a hijacked jet smashed into her office at New York's World Trade Center. She will be remembered for raising funds from the mid-1990s onward for the Fabretto Children's Foundation, a non-profit charity where she and her new husband Bill first met as volunteers. The foundation was named for the Italian missionary Rafael Maria Fabretto. Disturbed by the poverty he encountered after coming to Nicaragua in the 1950s, Fabretto founded a group of children's homes in the country's rugged northern region.

Two ceremonies in Nicaragua will pay tribute to Mrs. Harvey. One is targeted for April 27 in Somoto when the lunch hall is formally dedicated. But because the town is so hard to reach from Managua, Mrs. Harvey will have an April 26 ceremony in her honor at the Nicaraguan capital. Nicaragua's President Enrique Bolanos Geyer, U.S. embassy officials, and children of the community are among those invited to the events.

Other tributes to Mrs. Harvey include a "Night for Ninos" slated for March 1 in Miami and April 6 in New York. Money raised from those events will assist the Fabretto Children's Foundation, which supports more than 1,500 Nicaragua children with food, clothing, and after-school programs in sports, arts and music, tutoring, and vocational training. By 2005, the group hopes to have 5,000 children enrolled at its four centers in Nicaragua, which, besides Somoto, are in a village called San Jose de Cusmapa on the Honduran border, in the city of Esteli, and in San Isidro, near Managua.

The Fabretto Children's Foundation selected Somoto as the ideal place to honor Mrs. Harvey's memory because expanding a lunch hall there "is our most important priority," said Kevin Marinacci, the foundation's executive director in Managua. Lunch "anchors the rest of our school day," he said. "The present building is too small to meet our objectives."

Fabretto's vice president for development in Washington, Francis Rienzo, said the tributes to Mrs. Harvey are designed "to do something to commemorate everything she did for the kids." The Somoto lunch hall bearing Mrs. Harvey's name will be where kids come for their most substantial meal of the school day, Rienzo said.

A school day in Nicaragua can be much too short -- from 8 a.m. to noon -- because the country has too few teachers and schools to meet the needs of far too many children. Fabretto works with the local school district to determine which children are most disadvantaged and would have trouble continuing classes due to a lack of family resources. Children face a great vacuum following the noon meal since they cannot return to school afterwards. That is where Fabretto comes in, providing opportunities for children to stay in what is termed a "safe, structured, and nurturing environment."

After lunch, the children remain at the Fabretto center for arts and crafts, study hall, typing lessons, and computer training. Rienzo said that when their enrollees reach high-school age, they receive vocational training in auto mechanics, farming, and community foresting. The farm and foresting projects support Fabretto by generating revenue or providing food for the children's daily lunches.

Child poverty in Nicaragua means sometimes not having enough money to buy such basics as the $14 national school uniform. Fabretto foots the bill for the uniform that consists of a white shirt, a blue pair of pants or skirt, and shoes and socks, said Rienzo.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) provided Fabretto with $70,000 after Hurricane Mitch devastated Nicaragua in 1998. Fabretto used the funds to restore a pine tree nursery, which had washed away during flooding. Another project involved planting trees to stabilize a watershed area near Somoto, said Kevin Marinacci, the Fabretto executive director. The U.S. government also helps Fabretto through its "Cooperative Association of States for Scholarships," which is administered by Georgetown University in Washington. These two-year scholarships enable older Fabretto participants to attend vocational schools and junior colleges in the United States. Since 1990, these scholarships have allowed about a dozen Fabretto enrollees to study in the United States, said Marinacci.

Sara Harvey's husband, Bill Harvey, project manager for the New York City government's Economic Development Corporation, said the April 26 ceremony in Managua was designed to "really make it convenient for everyone" to come and honor his wife's memory, since Somoto is a four-to-five-hour car trip from the capital. Meanwhile, proceeds from the April 6 "Night for Ninos" in New York will be used for the Somoto lunch hall and for setting up scholarships in Sara Harvey's name.

A New York Times profile following the September 11 tragedy offered a brief insight into Sara Harvey's life. She and Bill married on August 11, 2000, in a ceremony she meticulously organized -- for example, by devoting as much time to planning the menu for three vegetarian guests as she did for the 120 other guests.

"That's the kind of person Sara was," Bill Harvey told the Times. "She wanted to make sure everyone was happy."

More information about the Fabretto Children's Foundation is available on the Internet at: www.fabretto.org