An expanded school lunch hall in Nicaragua has been dedicated in the name of Sara Manley Harvey, a 31-year-old New York telecommunications analyst who was killed on September 11 when a hijacked jet slammed into her office at New York's World Trade Center.

Dedicated at a ceremony in Managua on April 26, 2002, the Sara Manley Harvey lunch hall offers a fitting tribute to the volunteer who since the mid-1990s raised money through the Fabretto Children's Foundation for Nicaragua's poor. Fabretto, founded in 1953, works in underserved communities in Nicaragua, identifying children at risk of dropping out of school due to poverty, lack of food, inability to afford school uniforms and supplies, or the need to work to help support the family.

The community of Somoto in Nicaragua welcomes Sara Harvey's family and friends for the dedication of a school lunch room. (Father Fabretto Foundation.)

Global Impact

Sara helped with the first Fabretto "Night for Ninos" fundraiser in New York in 1994 and had served as the charity's corporate contributions coordinator ever since. It was through a Fabretto benefit in 1998 that she met her husband, Bill, whom she married exactly one month before being killed in the terrorist attack.

With the help of a grant exceeding $76,000 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the new lunch hall in the rural community of Somoto will offer expanded space to provide school lunches to a greater number of Nicaraguan children each year. The lunch hall, said U.S. ambassador to Nicaragua Oliver Garza in remarks at the ceremony, will serve as a monument to Sara's charitable work.

"At 31, Sara was the very definition of success," said Garza. "Sara was a citizen of the United States, but the impact of her life was global. Her story illustrates more poignantly than any words why the attacks of September 11 were attacks not only against the United States, but against the ideas of freedom and democracy that are shared by people the world over."

"Nicaragua has lost a guardian angel," said Nicaraguan President Enrique Bolanos at the ceremony. "But the work that Sara began, with the help of so many other people, has not ceased with her death."

Fabretto officials say their present building was not big enough to serve all the children who need to have lunch, which is often their only substantial meal of the day. Besides lunch, Fabretto provides more than 1,500 children in Somoto and three other regional centers in the country with a variety of services — including clothing, health care, after-school programs in sports, arts and music education, and vocational training. By 2005, Fabretto hopes to have 5,000 Nicaraguan children enrolled in its programs. Fabretto was named for the Italian missionary Rafael Maria Fabretto, who founded a group of children's homes in Nicaragua's rugged northern region.

A Country's Future

According to Fabretto, hundreds of Sara's friends, her family, her former employer, Fred Alger Management, and other companies raised much of the funds required for construction of the lunch hall. The facility will enable the charity to better offer nutrition and education programs to over 400 impoverished children in Somoto, "and is an important step in Fabretto's efforts to more than triple the number of children in its programs by 2005," the organization said in a statement.

"One needs only to look around at the hundreds of faces here today," Garza said, "to understand how many people one person touches in the course of life, even if that life, as in Sara's case, is cut short." Each life lost, said Garza, "affects thousands more," which shows "the magnitude of the horror inflicted by terrorists" on September 11.

President Bolanos said Fabretto has given the neediest children in his country medical attention, food, scholarships, school supplies, and ultimately "what is needed to create men and women that are the future of our country."

Somoto welcomes Sara Harvey's family and friends. (Andy Castro, U.S. Embassy Managua.)

The Fabretto Foundation said its school programs in Nicaragua are vitally needed, since 85 percent of the country's children under age 14 live in poverty. Fabretto said 22 percent of children age six to nine suffer malnutrition, while 44 percent do not know how to read or write.

Unfortunately, Sara Harvey never had a chance to come to Nicaragua. "But in Somoto, a living, functioning monument to Sara will rise to remind others of her deeds," Garza said. "The lunch hall that will stand in her name will continue to fill stomachs with food and minds with inspiration, until long after terrorism has been starved from this earth. And Sara's spirit, her wonderful spirit of caring and giving, will live on in the children of Somoto."