Marla Ruzicka

Marla Ruzicka was born in a tiny conservative town in northern California. She was one of six children, and a born activist, with a passion for human rights and an innate ability to hustle anyone. When she was in the eighth grade, Marla rallied her entire school to stage a walkout in protest of the Persian Gulf War. At seventeen, Marla began volunteering at the San Francisco headquarters of Global Exchange, an international human-rights organization co-founded by Medea Benjamin, who became her surrogate mother. Marla enrolled at Long Island University, in the Friends World Program, and for four years studied in Costa Rica, Cuba, Israel/Palestine, and Eastern Africa. After graduating from LIU in 1999, Marla returned to Zimbabwe, where she'd met a musician named Phillip Machingura. They returned to California together, and were married in 2000. But Marla was restless in San Francisco, particularly after September 11, 2001. Six weeks after the war in Afghanistan was launched, she visited Afghan refugee camps in Peshawar, Pakistan. Marla was horrified by the sight of orphaned children and the civilian devastation caused by U.S. air strikes. Instead of returning to California as planned, she stayed in Pakistan to collect stories of civilian victims; a few days later, as the Taliban fell, she hitched a ride over the border to Afghanistan. There, Marla befriended journalists, and examined the collateral damage of the U.S. bombing campaign. She knocked on doors and visited the wounded in hospitals. With her uncombed platinum hair and childlike demeanor, she was highly unconventional. The press corps dubbed her "Bubbles." In the summer of 2002, Ruzicka went to Washington, D.C., where she lobbied Patrick Leahy to institutionalize the U.S.'s policy of compensating civilians. She and Leahy developed legislation to provide $1.5 million in medical care, home rebuilding, micro-loans and other forms of assistance to Afghan civilians. The legislation was the first of its kind in American history. In 2003, shortly before the U.S. declared war, she moved to Baghdad, and founded the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC) to count civilian casualties, which the U.S. government was not doing. Marla visited villages and hospitals, interviewing witnesses and holding demonstrations, demanding that the U.S. compensate civilians for the destruction. Over time, the press started following her. Her efforts were reported in papers around the world, including Newsweek and the New York Times. Along with Iraqi colleagues, Marla and CIVIC organized door-to-door surveys, with more than 160 volunteers, to obtain firsthand accounts of civilian casualties and injuries as a result of military action. As a result of her data, Sen. Leahy sponsored another bill in 2003, awarding a record $10 million in assistance to Iraqi civilians. On April 16, 2005, Marla and her driver were killed when a suicide bomb exploded on Baghdad's Airport Road. According to Rolling Stone Magazine, "Ruzicka is perhaps the most famous American aid worker to die in any conflict of the past two decades... She stands as a youthful representative of American idealism, and darkly symbolic of what has gone so tragically wrong in Iraq." Six hundred people, including Barbara Boxer and Sean Penn, attended her funeral in her hometown of Lakeport. There were also memorial services in New York, Washington, Baghdad, Kabul, and San Francisco.