Editor’s Note: Laurie Chreitzberg ’05 was diagnosed with an inoperable cancer at the end of her third year. Rather than simply surrender, Laurie went to work to leave a lasting legacy.

Laurie Chreitzberg’s name arrived in my in-box without warning one day about five years ago. Attaching a resume, Laurie described herself as a first-year student at Stanford Law School looking for a summer internship in international law. I manage a legal office in Asmara, Eritrea, which collects and presents evidence before an international tribunal seated at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague. Called the Eritrea Ethiopia Claims Commission, this body is tasked with determining compensation for violations of international humanitarian law during the 1998–2000 Eritrea-Ethiopia border war. As Laurie had somehow learned, I do take summer interns, and she looked perfect. She was a bit older, had an impressive pre-law record in graduate school, and she spoke Arabic (one of Eritrea’s indigenous languages). I signed her up without even an interview.

How like her to surprise me when she arrived. Yes, she was intellectually mature and impressively credentialed. But the Arabic she knew was some obscure ancient dialect that I can’t remember the name of now—a product of her academic graduate experience—and what she really wanted was to spend the summer in an Internally Displaced Person camp interviewing Eritrean victims who mostly didn’t speak Arabic anyway. Okay, no problem. But then another surprise. One of our Eritrean lawyers reported that actually her Arabic was almost perfect—she was just too modest to try it out. And although she was brilliant and accomplished, her most impressive strength was an incredibly creative and whimsical mind, and—one more surprise—a superb lawyerly instinct. Out of a Yale PhD program? I didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Laurie was one of the interns that I’ll always remember. Brilliant, lawyerly, whimsical, persistent, sometimes a bit shy (and sometimes not)—there was always something new to learn about Laurie Chreitzberg.

I didn’t hear from her for a while—no surprise, I mostly lose track of people when they move on in their careers. The surprise came when I heard from her last summer, and it was not a good one. I couldn’t believe the news about her cancer. I was even more astonished when she described her reason for getting back in touch: her desire to make a large financial contribution to women’s health in Eritrea. Why Eritrea? And why call me? I never thought she’d recollect our law office or the people she had interviewed.

The two of us worked together in the last few months to develop a program that she could believe in. The Laurie Chreitzberg Fund will support maternal health care in conjunction with the National Union of Eritrean Women and the Eritrean Development Foundation. Laurie’s donation will be used to build “maternal waiting homes”—residential facilities near medical centers where women from rural areas can come along with their young children to stay during the last few months of pregnancy. The combination of good nutrition, rest, and access to health care is expected to reduce maternal and infant mortality while providing a supportive atmosphere for health education, medical checkups, and vaccinations for the youngsters.

The Eritrean women I know ask me why a brilliant young American woman like Laurie would think of their health at a time when the average Westerner would be totally preoccupied with her own. I tell them that the gift that Laurie gave me is equal to anything she gave them. By reaching out to me when she did, she told me that I could make a difference in the life of a younger colleague. This was not something I had ever expected from a summer intern (even a brilliant and creative one). Thank you Laurie.