By Joan Axelrod-Contrada

Sara Schewe was having the time of her life.

“Words cannot describe how much I am seeing and learning,” she wrote in a fax home to her parents, Charles and Anne Schewe, a UMass Amherst marketing professor and a rug importer, respectively, after seeing lions feasting on a water buffalo in the African wilderness. In typical student fashion, Sara, a Georgetown University junior participating in Semester at Sea, asked her parents for a small favor: “Could you please tape the G’town-UMass game for me?” she asked. “I am so excited that they actually get to play each other, and I am very jealous that you get to watch it!”

But Sara never got to see the game.

On March 27, 1996, the day after she told her mom, “I’ve really got the travel bug,” Sara died in a bus crash in India.

Semester at Sea had promised students a side trip in India by plane. Unable to get reservations, organizers had made a last-minute change to a nighttime bus, despite poor driving conditions; drivers regularly navigate unlit stretches of road, and rickshaws, people, and cows share the single-lane roads. Sara had just seen the sun rise over the Ganges River and was headed for the Taj Mahal. Unable to sleep, she joined her friend, Tom Broyles, in the back of the bus. “We had just been to Varanasi that day, one of the holiest places in India,” Broyles recalls. “We couldn’t stop remembering all the things that we saw, heard, smelled, and felt. You could see the experience had an impact on Sara.”

Then the road curved, and the bus went off the road, hit a tree, and overturned. The impact of the crash killed Sara and six other passengers.

Now, 10 years later, the tragedy has inspired a new invention—a portable seat belt, created through a collaboration between the Schewes’ charitable foundation and the UMass Amherst Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department. “Sara would have worn a seat belt if she’d had one,” says Anne Schewe. “I believe it would have saved her.”

The story of the portable seat belt is more than just a tale of a possible life-saving

Clint Walton ’08 and Joshua Doolittle ’08 work on the portable seatbelt in the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering machine shop. Under professor Sundar Krishnamurty’s guidance and inspired by Sara’s Wish Foundation, the young men invented a life-saving device for travelers. The affordable portable seatbelt features an integrated carrying case, retractable belts, and a three-point safety-restraint system. It’s expected to be available on the market soon.

innovation: It’s also the saga of an extraordinary couple’s efforts to honor the spirit of their daughter. Sara was following in her father’s footsteps, planning a career in marketing. Friends called her by her last name, “Shoe-ee,” which is how Schewe is pronounced. They liked that Sara could be a little goofy at times. Pictures of Sara at the Schewes’ Amherst home show a young woman who looks as though she just stepped out of a sporting-goods catalog, a fresh-faced beauty with the sea breeze blowing through her blond hair. She signed her letters to her parents “Sara-Bear.”

News of Sara’s death hit her parents and brother hard, so hard that Anne Schewe felt it physically as an ache in her heart. However, both she and her husband knew that Sara wouldn’t have wanted them to be paralyzed by grief. Two days before her death, Sara had put her hands around a wishing post in India. If she had survived the crash, her parents believe she would have wished for other students to enjoy international travel as much as she did, but to do so safely. They named their new foundation Sara’s Wish.

Shortly after Sara’s Wish was launched, Anne began to joke about how she was going to invent the portable seat belt. Then Vanessa Rivera, the assistant dean of student affairs in the College of Engineering, told her she was onto something. “We were just two women talking,” Ann Schewe remembers.

The Schewes brought the idea to Mechanical and Industrial Engineering department head Sundar Krishnamurty as a possible project for his sophomore design students. Krishnamurty knew it would be most effective if the Schewes told Sara’s story directly to the class. From the Schewes’ presentation, the students saw themselves in Sara.

“There wasn’t a dry eye in the house,” recalls Clint Walton, a 22-year-old student from Marlborough. Seven teams went on to develop portable seat belts to bring to a panel of judges that included the Schewes. Walton’s team created the winning design, which features a zipper-binder case that doubles as a seat cushion. Straps wrap around the back and bottom of the bus seat and buckle in front like a child’s car seat. A team of Charles Schewe’s marketing students will be working with the young engineers to bring the product to market, possibly this year.

For the Schewes, this invention caps off a decade of advocating for international travel safety in a world that often ignores the problems of poor road conditions, focusing instead on vaccines and bottled water, even though, according to the World Health Organization, travelers are more likely to be killed or injured in road accidents or through violence than to be struck down by diseases like malaria.

Seeing the seat belt take shape has been a deeply gratifying experience for the Schewes. “We are fortunate, if that word can be used at all with such a loss, to be able to see some grander scheme, some good come from our loss,” says Charles Schewe. “If we can save one life, it is worth all the energy and effort. This will be Sara’s legacy, and I’m sure it would be her wish.”