She grew up on a traditional croft in the Outer Hebrides, where her loving parents kept cattle and a pony for their daughter. She died nearly 4,000 miles away after being kidnapped in one of the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan.
Linda Norgrove, 36, had devoted her life to improving the lives of people in poor countries. She knew the dangers of working in Afghanistan but people who met her said she was relaxed and comfortable as she went about her work with the local Afghan population.
In February she became regional director of the American-based Development Alternatives Inc (DAI). Based in Jalalabad, she was in charge of a five-year, £94m (US$150m) aid project in unstable areas of eastern Afghanistan.
The only long-term expatriate on the team, she worked with more than 200 Afghan professionals building roads, bridges and markets, installing small-scale hydroelectric systems, improving agriculture and encouraging local businesses to produce textiles, honey, talc and marble.
Training local people was one of the key aims and she was said to have played a vital role in ensuring women and disabled people were included.
She taught herself to speak Dari, an Afghan version of Persian, to help her to talk to the locals.
Her commitment to Afghanistan remained firm even after the death of Shaun Sexton, 29, one of her security guards, in Kunduz in July, and the murder of Dr Karen Woo, another aid worker, who was shot dead with nine colleagues in August.
Trudy Rubin, a journalist with the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper, who spent time with Miss Norgrove while reporting on DIA’s work in Afghanistan in May, said Miss Norgrove “knew all the staff on the ground, and could talk to all the farmers.
“She seemed to be totally comfortable with everyone, with the elders, with women, with everyone, and she really listened to Afghans.
“She dressed with total modesty, with long black robes and a headscarf.”
Miss Norgrove had grown to love Afghanistan, so much so that, while working in Laos last year, she spent three weeks of her annual leave in Afghanistan, trekking in the Pamir mountains in the far north-east of the country.
She was a great adventurer. In the summer of 1994 she and a friend cycled 4,100 miles from Oregon to Washington DC. A year later she did another marathon bike ride, travelling for three and a half months through China, then from Tibet across the Himalayas to Nepal. She also enjoyed sea canoeing, scuba diving and photography.
After a glittering academic career, focusing mainly on environmental and development studies, her career as an aid worker began in earnest in 2002 when she joined the World Wildlife Fund in Peru. She spent three years working on conservation – including work with tapirs – poverty reduction and protecting indigenous communities.
In 2005 she started working for the UN in Afghanistan and Laos. Colleagues said she was a gifted aid worker and an emerging leader in her field, combining sharp professionalism and commitment with a quiet dignity and personal warmth. Her talent was recognised and she was soon given managerial roles in road and irrigation schemes, retraining former soldiers and finding alternative livelihoods for opium poppy growers.
She was born in 1974 in Sutherland, north-east Scotland, to Lorna, a charity worker and active crofter, now 62, and John, a Birmingham-born water engineer, now 60. The family moved to Lewis from Altnaharra in the central Scottish Highlands when Miss Norgrove was a young child.
She spent her childhood on Lewis, in Ness and then Mangersta in the Uig district where the family has lived for 30 years.
Miss Norgrove developed a passion for Third World countries as a teenager when her parents took her and her sister Sofie travelling in developing countries for five weeks every second winter.
Her parents’ work for the Water Aid charity, raising funds and organising beach clean-ups, increased her desire to help those less fortunate than herself.
She went to school in Uig and Stornoway and spent a gap year working for a stable in Belgium and travelling around Spain and France.
Miss Norgrove went on to study in Britain, Mexico and America. She picked up a first class degree in environmental science from Aberdeen University in 1996 and earned a distinction for her master’s degree at London University.
She did postgraduate research at the University of Chiapas, in Mexico before starting a PhD in development policy at the University of Manchester in 1998, which involved almost two years researching in Uganda.
