Afghan-massacre victims had given years of service

August 9, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

KABUL

One gave up a lucrative practice to give free dental care to children who had never seen a toothbrush. Others had devoted whole decades of their lives to helping the Afghan people through war and deprivation.

The years of service ended in a hail of bullets in a remote valley of a land that members of the medical team had learned to love.

The bodies of the 10 slain volunteers — six Americans, two Afghans, a German and a Briton — were flown Sunday back to Kabul by helicopter, even as friends and family bitterly rejected Taliban claims the group had tried to convert Afghans to Christianity.

Also flown to the capital was the lone survivor of the attack, an Afghan driver who said he was spared because he was a Muslim and recited Islamic holy verses as he begged for his life. The International Assistance Mission, which organized the trip, said the driver had been a trusted employee with four years of service.

Police said they don’t know if he is a witness or an accomplice in the killings, claimed by the Taliban.

“We are heartbroken by the loss of these heroic, generous people,” U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in Washington.

The group had spent two weeks treating villagers in a remote valley in northern Afghanistan for eye diseases and other ailments before being ambushed by extremists on their way back to Kabul.

Neither the Afghan government nor foreign embassies formally released the victims’ names Sunday. Family and friends, however, came forward.

Team leader Tom Little, an optometrist from Delmar, N.Y., had been working in Afghanistan for more than 30 years. He and his wife, Libby, reared three daughters in Kabul, sticking it out through the Soviet invasion of the 1980s and the vicious civil war of the 1990s.

Dan Terry, 64, was another long Afghan veteran. He came to Afghanistan in 1971 and returned to live there in 1980 with his wife, rearing three daughters while working with impoverished ethnic groups.

Dr. Thomas Grams, 51, quit his dental practice in Durango, Colo., four years ago to work full-time giving poor children free dental care in Afghanistan and Nepal, said Katy Shaw of Global Dental Relief.

Dr. Karen Woo, 36, the lone Briton among the dead, gave up her job with a private clinic in London to work in Afghanistan. She was planning to leave in a few weeks to get married, friends said.

Another victim, Glen Lapp, 40, a trained nurse from Lancaster, Pa., had come to Afghanistan in 2008 for a limited assignment but decided to stay, serving as an executive assistant at IAM and manager of its provincial eye-care program, according to the Mennonite Central Committee, a relief group based in Akron, Pa.

Another victim, Cheryl Beckett, the 32-year-old daughter of a Knoxville, Tennessee, pastor, had spent six years in Afghanistan and specialized in nutritional gardening and mother-child health, her family said.

Beckett, who was her high school valedictorian at a Cincinnati-area high school and held a biology degree, also had spent time doing work in Honduras, Mexico, Kenya and Zimbabwe.