A street sign in Manila shows a US businesswoman and Sept. 11, 2001, victim smiling down on a community whose transformation would have warmed her heart: children frolicking on tidy brick alleys near brightly colored houses.
Unlike many victims of the 2001 attacks who are remembered mostly by their family and friends, Marie Rose Abad’s legacy lives on half-way around the world in a once-notorious Manila slum now turned into an orderly village that carries her name.
Her Philippine-born American husband had the community of about 50 one-story houses built in her memory in 2004 as a tribute to their 26 years of marriage and her unfulfilled desire to help the poor in the Philippines.
The neighborhood used to be a shantytown rife with garbage, human waste and crime, but residents now see Marie Rose Abad Village as a bright spot spun out of the disaster thousand of miles away at Ground Zero in New York City.
“This used to be a dreaded area,” said Waminal, who heads the village homeowners’ association. “Now there is no more fighting, no more stabbings, no more drinking on the street.”
The black-and-white image of Marie Rose is on the side of a framed, rectangular sign welcoming visitors to the community. Residents reverentially wipe the picture each day with cloth.
Before she became one of the nearly 2,800 killed in the unprecedented terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center, Abad was a senior executive at the New York-based investment bank Keefe, Bruyette & Woods. She was at the twin towers when the second plane slammed below her 89th-floor office.
A New York-born daughter from an Italian immigrant family, Marie Rose Abad had a soft spot for children and the underprivileged. The couple’s encounter with the crushing poverty that afflicts nearly a third of the 94 million people in the Philippines came as a surprise, during a 1989 visit.
It was the first time back home for Rudy Abad, who was from an affluent family, since he left Manila in 1963 to study in the US, where he eventually acquired citizenship and married Marie Rose. He had told his wife that the Philippines was a paradise.
What they saw appalled them.
“I could not believe what I was seeing, because right there from the airport I could see the squatters, the shanties and everything,” he said during an interview at his home south of Manila.
The childless couple were out jogging without cash one day when they were mobbed by street children aged four and five peddling lottery tickets.
“That was the first time she felt the pain,” he said, recalling that Marie Rose asked him to take her to a bank, where she got about US$12 worth of Philippine coins.
They returned and she announced to the kids’ applause that she would buy all of their tickets.
Later, she told him: “I don’t know when, where and how but some day, I’m going to come back and I’m going to do more than this.”
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, she called to tell him she was all right despite the plane crashing into the first of the towers. He switched on the TV and later watched in disbelief as the second plane smashed into her tower.
Then, the final call: “It’s too hot, this might be the last time that I will talk to you,” she said.
“I remembered her last words to me at the time was, ‘Ru, pray, pray,’” he said.
A few minutes later, he saw her tower collapse to the ground.
Abad said he drifted aimlessly during the three years after her death, unable to work. He tried to find a new meaning in life.
Then he met Philippine friends involved with the Gawad Kalinga charity, which seeks to transform slums across the country into decent, productive communities.
Abad remembered his wife’s promise and decided to donate more than US$60,000 for the construction of a village for destitute families in Manila’s Tondo slum.
When construction began, Abad brought wealthy Filipino friends to the site to help lay bricks and paint the houses.
“It’s the good side of 9/11,” Gawad Kalinga volunteer Jun Valbuena said.
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