Valerie Place bid her colleagues an informal goodbye when she left Mogadishu to care for the sick in famine-scarred Baidoa.
Hours later they gathered, shocked and grieving, to say a more final farewell to the young Irish nurse, killed in an ambush on the road."Pray for Somalia, that what she did was not in vain," Angus Fi-nu-cane, chief executive of the Irish relief group Concern, said at a memorial service after the shooting Monday.
Place's death was a shocking reminder of how wild and violent Somalia remains - despite the U.S.-led effort to make it safe for relief shipments.
It came the same day the most serious fighting in weeks broke out in southern Somalia, and a planned U.S. pullout from the southern port city of Kismayu was post-poned.
Several aid workers have been killed despite the presence of more than 30,000 foreign troops. And relief workers worry violence will only increase when the United States turns over control of the mission to the United Nations.
Place, a 23-year-old Dubliner who had worked in Somalia for six months for Concern, had given heavyweight boxing champion Riddick Bowe a tour of a food station in Mogadishu just hours before her death.
She was riding in a three-car convoy to Baidoa when a bandit jumped in the road about 30 miles northwest of Mogadishu and shot out the car's windshield.
One of several other attackers fired into the side of the car, hitting Place in the heart. She fell forward.
"I'm hit! I think I'm going to die!" she said, according to companions, and slipped into unconsciousness.
U.S. forces rushed her by helicopter to a Mogadishu hospital, where she died, said Finucane, who was in the convoy's lead car.
She had been the youngest of Concern's 36 expatriates in Somalia.
"I'm sure she's praying with us now," Finucane, 60, told the memorial service in a living room packed with about 50 relief workers and a handful of U.S. soldiers.
Capt. Leroy Gilbert, a Navy chaplain, told the group he was struck by Place's dedication when he saw her caring for a child at a hospital.
"Valerie was holding that child in her hands as if it was her own," he said.