But on the day she died, Holland as usual eschewed the armed guards that U.S. civilian employees are required to take as escorts whenever they leave a U.S. compound, according to the women at the Hillah center. She drove herself in an unarmored sedan.
"She did not want men with big guns coming into the center where there were women and children," Barrak said. "She said the women will be frightened. She drove alone in Hillah, Najaf and Babylon since January."
Ebadi said she tried to point out the risks. "All of us told her to be more careful, but she told us Hillah was safe and secure.
"I said, 'But the bad troops from Saddam are here. Al Qaeda is here; they are in our streets. Previously, we had only one enemy and that was Saddam. Now we don't know our enemy.' "
Holland's family was hardly surprised by her decision to travel without guards.
"I constantly talked to her about her safety and told her to be careful. That was Fern, though. She said, 'It's no more dangerous than other places I've been,' " recalled James Holland, 37, a brother who lives in Overland Park, Kan.
"There were factions over there that didn't believe in what she was doing for the women of Iraq and one of those factions killed her," he said.
"But in hindsight, I don't think she would have changed anything" about what she was doing, he added.
The youngest of five children born to an Oklahoma family, Holland was a shy girl who lost her father to a heart attack when she was barely 11.
But as she grew up, she shone academically and socially. She became salutatorian of her high school class and homecoming queen and attended the University of Oklahoma.
She first gained experience in aid work abroad through a nonprofit organization that sent her to care for terminally ill children and those with HIV in Siberian hospitals.
After law school, she worked in two Tulsa law firms and helped care for her mother, who was dying from emphysema.
Following her mother's death, she joined the Peace Corps. When she returned, she went to work in Washington, where she ultimately linked up with USAID and came to Iraq.
"A lot of times, I wonder if when our mother died, did that release her spirit?" said her eldest sister, Mary Ann Dunn, 43. "When she went to work overseas and started working in Third World countries, the need to help, it just engulfed her....
