Not long before she was killed, Fern Holland told a friend she was thinking about coming back to Oklahoma, maybe settling down and starting a family.

She walked away from a high-paying job with a Tulsa law firm to join the Peace Corps in 1999, drifting from war zone to war zone across Africa and the Middle East.

After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, she went to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority, dodging mortars and car bombs to promote women’s rights in the country’s fledgling democracy.

"It’s not easy to picture her as a soccer mom,” says Stephen Rodolf, a Tulsa attorney who worked with Holland and remained a close friend after she left town.

"She would have to find a way to juggle being a mom and being an activist — because that’s just who she was. She couldn’t not do it.”

Five years ago today — March 9, 2004 — insurgents disguised themselves as Iraqi police to stop Holland’s car at a checkpoint.

Apparently hoping to derail Holland’s campaign to win the right to vote for Iraqi women, they shot and killed her, along with an Iraqi translator and a fellow activist who were traveling with her.

Holland, 33, became the first U.S. civilian to die in the war, attracting international news coverage when the Pentagon announced the deaths on March 11.

That same day — within hours of hearing the news — Holland’s family asked Rodolf to set up the Fern Holland Charitable Foundation, raising money to continue her work in Iraq and elsewhere.

"We didn’t want her work to end that way,” Rodolf said. "We weren’t going to let that happen.”

A year after her sister’s death, Vi Holland went to west Africa, visiting the refugee camps and shanty towns where her sister had worked in an effort to figure out the best places to send the donations.

"When you stand there in the heat and the humidity, when you stand there in the stench and the squalor, it affects you,” Vi Holland said.

"It changes you. For the first time, I really understood Fern. I understood why she did what she did, because once you’ve seen it, you have to do something.”

The foundation was no longer just a way to remember Fern Holland’s work. It was Vi Holland’s cause, too.

Bath products to raise money

Since 2004, the foundation has raised between $50,000 and $60,000, channeling most of it through Women for Women International, a group founded by one of the Iraqi women who worked with Fern Holland.

But in recent years, after Fern Holland’s name fell out of the headlines and the American public grew weary of the war in Iraq, donations have slowed to a trickle.

In fact, Rodolf described the foundation as being at a "virtual standstill.”

But Vi Holland has a plan.

This spring, she’s launching a new line of bath and body products called "Violet Fern,” with half the proceeds going to the charitable trust.

A single mother living in Collinsville, Vi Holland doesn’t have time to travel the world the way her sister did. But she’s learning to do what Fern Holland might have done, if she had gotten the chance.

She’s learning how to juggle being a mom and being an activist.

"It might sound over-the-top to some people,” Vi Holland said of her little sister. "But this is a way to keep Fern with me, to keep her spirit alive.”