FARMINGTON - Devoted to helping children in Afghanistan since her son died in the World Trade Center attacks, Vermont educator Sally Goodrich will be keynote commencement speaker at the University of Maine at Farmington.

Goodrich's son Peter, a graduate of Bates College, was in the second plane to hit the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. He was 33.

Her work to help children through the Peter M. Goodrich Memorial Foundation by building a school for 500 girls in Afghanistan will be reflected in her message, "Believe in things unseen."

"When attempting to change something in parts of the world that represent challenges, you need hope and the belief that you can alter the landscape," Goodrich said Monday.

"After 9/11, my immediate response was, 'Why my son ... a very loving, kind, open-minded and nonjudgmental human being,' " she said.

In his work for a software company, some of his colleagues were Russian Jews, Serbian and Indian immigrants. He was curious and immersed himself in their culture reading both the Bible and the Quran, she said.

Wanting to remember the way her son lived his life, not the way he died, Goodrich responded when her neighbor's son wrote to his parents. As a Marine major, Rush Filson, also a Bates graduate, was on his first tour of duty in Afghanistan when he wrote his family to tell them about meeting a school principal there who changed his life. At the end of the e-mail, he asked for school supplies to be sent.

"It was like a door opening," she said, knowing that her son would have had the same openness to the culture. She realized that at that time, she needed to understand the underlying conditions that lead to 9/11, she said.

"I went to Afghanistan and encountered such widespread suffering on a scale I had not experienced ... Everyone in Afghanistan had lost a family member, moved in order to survive or faced prison ... It put my own suffering into perspective," she said.

"It was just a matter of months from collecting school supplies to taking the money donated after Peter's death and from his estate and using it as a memorial to construct a school," she said.

The school faces a lack of teachers, the fact that adolescent girls are not allowed to attend school, and the need for school supplies, she said.

But the school principal is a woman with a master's degree. And now there are eight Afghanistan young people who are supported in their education here in the states by the Goodrich family. Some are in college, others in private schools, but they call Goodrich's house in Vermont home during school vacations.

Goodrich called her invitation to speak at the UMF commencement "the single greatest honor I've received."

She applauds UMF for its willingness to take on difficult subjects to help people understand while allowing for individual beliefs, she said.

Goodrich was invited last spring to a month-long series on Afghanistan held at the university. The day she arrived, a workshop on the causes and effects of the Iraq war was being held, she said.

More information about the Goodrich Foundation, Afghanistan and Peter Goodrich can be found at www.goodrichfoundation.org