Laurie Goering, the Africa correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, published a story yesterday remembering her friend, Fakher Haider. He was a man who wanted to make a difference, who grasped the opportunities that the world presented to him with both hands and held on tight. He cared about people, and he lived to break down the barriers that stand between us. Instead of posting an article today, I offer a link to Ms. Goering's memories of her guardian and friend.

For me, his story is a tribute to the strength and beauty of human nature. In a world of conventions so strict that people have been killed for dismissing them, still he reached out in friendship to a woman and a foreigner. It was a transgression beyond our comprehension, but it was a choice he made because of who he was at heart. He followed his true nature, and no one could take that away from him. May we all be so courageous when our time comes to shine.

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Since the original posting, Ms. Goering's article has been moved to the Cicago Tribune's archives and can no longer be accessed at the above link. The following is Ms. Goering's original tribute to Fakher Haider, published here in its entirety with her permission:

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I first noticed Fakher Haider on the fringes of a crowd gathered at a dusty intersection in Umm Qasr, a southern Iraqi border town near the front lines of the days-old U.S. war with Iraq in 2003.

I was talking to residents to determine how they felt about the U.S. troops pouring into their country. But few spoke English, and I had no translator. Soon a thin, quiet man, seeing my struggles, stepped forward and began interpreting the crowd's comments. Afterward I thanked him, and we said goodbye.

The next day he was there again at the edge of another crowd. Again he stepped forward to help. This time, when we finished, I asked him if he would like to work with me. He said the Basra fertilizer factory where he worked had closed before the war. He would be glad to help. He didn't want any money. Seeing Iraq change, he said, was enough.

Over the next three weeks, Fakher became my interpreter, my unlikely bodyguard, my dear friend and my chief source of insight into Iraqi society. We slept in the dirt beside my four-wheel-drive as rocket-propelled grenades shook the ground. He found fuel and food when both were scarce; he translated verses of the Koran to help me understand his fervent faith. More than once, he saved my life.

On Monday he lost his.

Late Sunday night, Fakher Haider, 38, who had gone on to become a journalist working for The New York Times and to assist dozens of other foreign journalists, was seized from his apartment in Basra by masked men who claimed to be police. His body was discovered Monday near the edge of the city. He had been hooded, bound, beaten and shot in the head.

He knew the risks of working as a journalist in Basra, an increasingly violent Iraqi city where Shiite militias are vying for power. A month ago, he took photos of American journalist Steven Vincent's body being loaded into a SUV after the freelance writer was kidnapped and murdered there. A month before that, gunmen had forced Fakher's car off the road and fired at him.

But the soft-spoken Iraqi--calm, brave and always passionate about building a better Iraq--never let fear hold him back. During the 1991 Persian Gulf war, he participated in the uprising against Saddam Hussein and only narrowly escaped being killed when U.S. troops pulled out, leaving Hussein in power. After that, he was forced to live with his wife and three young children in the only housing available to state enemies--a decrepit apartment in Basra flanked by a sewage canal and surrounded by fetid heaps of trash.

Like most Iraqis, he wanted only what all of us want: freedom, dignity, safety and a better life for his children. When I asked him in the midst of the Iraq war if he wanted to make the perilous trip to Baghdad with me, he didn't hesitate. "I want to see this regime end!" he insisted.

With his help, I arrived in Baghdad the day the statue in Firdos Square fell, the day Hussein's regime ended. When we were fired on during the drive up, he helped determine that the shots were friendly fire, which allowed us to eventually negotiate safe passage from American troops.

Once in Baghdad, he pawed excitedly through piles of documents we found in Udai Hussein's bombed house and became my guide to the fast- changing city.

Weeks later, on my way out of Iraq, I dropped Fakher back at his apartment in Basra and pushed a roll of bills into his hands, over his protests. Saying goodbye wasn't easy. He had no phone, no e- mail, only an address at his now-looted fertilizer factory. I had no idea if I'd ever see him again.

But two months later, I did. On a return trip to Iraq, as I walked into a police station in Al Majar al Kabir, north of Basra, I spotted him in a crowd of journalists and called his name.

His eyes lit up, and he rushed toward me. Then we paused, torn between the urge to embrace and the rules of Iraqi propriety that forbid such things between a man and woman who aren't family.

Fakher hesitated only a moment. Then my brave friend opened his arms and took me in.