Memories of Marla
From the time I first met her, Marla was brightening the world around her. I had just arrived in Kabul, Afghanistan, on a snowy evening in February 2002 and had been furtively brought to the U.N. Club, a wood-paneled dive serving only whiskey--supposedly off limits to journalists. I was edging my way around the throngs of flirting French aid workers, feeling kind of out of place, when I came face to face with a huge, toothy grin. Marla took my hand, said, "Hi! Come to my party tomorrow!" and thrust a flier at me for "Club Kabul," a bash she planned on throwing every Friday night, complete with journalists deputized as bartenders. My memories of Marla Ruzicka were some of the best ones in the past three years of covering war. She had a way of injecting a serious note of fun into places where everyone most needed it, even while working tirelessly for her cause--helping civilian casualties of war. In Kabul, we jogged together with an Afghan champion kickboxer friend as our bodyguard, shooing away the boys who tried to keep up. In Baghdad, we'd go out during the day in head-to-toe black abayas, then peel them off back at the hotel, don bikinis, and jump in the pool. In Washington, she Rollerbladed around town in borrowed men's skates three sizes too large, sometimes thrown off balance by her backpack stuffed with documents from victims' families.
Marla was brash, vulnerable, sometimes seemingly possessed--but always all heart. In an E-mail she wrote to me in March 2003, when I was in northern Iraq and she was en route to Jordan, waiting for the Iraq war to begin, she spoke of working hard on a new project. She said she was lonely and stressed but that she didn't want to miss out on a chance to help people. Then she mentioned how sad she was about the death in a plane crash of a friend who worked in the Afghan Foreign Ministry. "Here we are, young," she wrote, "and we gotta just live life bold and make the most of it."
Editor's note: Human-rights activist Marla Ruzicka, 28, and her Iraqi driver were killed in a suicide car bombing on their way to Baghdad International Airport on April 16.
This story appears in the May 2, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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