It was poetic justice that Carrie Hessler-Radelet, deputy director of the Peace Corps, and Diane Gallagher, a two-time Peace Corps volunteer, were featured guests, along with former President Jimmy Carter, at the organization’s 50-year commemoration at The Carter Center in Atlanta.
Hessler-Radelet’s family is the first family to contain four generations of Peace Corps volunteers. Her aunt, who heard President John F. Kennedy make the call for volunteers to go to far-flung and often isolated outposts in the Peace Corps in 1961, inspired her when she was 8 years old. Her grandparents, also two-time volunteers, returned to the Peace Corps after they retired and were in their late 60s. Hessler-Radelet and her husband served in the 1980s, while her nephew just completed his tour in Mozambique 18 months ago.
Gallagher is the recipient of this year’s Lillian Carter Award, which goes to a returning senior Peace Corps volunteer over the age of 50. The award is named in honor of Jimmy Carter’s mother, Lillian Carter, a legendary humanitarian and philanthropist in the United States and abroad. In all, some 200,000 volunteers have given over 400,000 years of volunteer work since JFK made the Peace Corps an official government organization. Hessler-Radelet, for one, was forever impacted by her aunt’s devotion to others.
“I thought she was the most glamorous person I’d ever met, and I said I would do that someday. She wrote about her life living above her bakery and sent me post cards. It sounded so glamorous, and I wanted to be like her,” says Hessler-Radelet, who was picked for her current deputy director post personally by President Obama. She taught English, geography, history, social studies, physical education and music, while her husband taught math and science at an all-girls secondary school on a remote island in the middle of the Pacific. “So, between us, we taught every single subject at the school,” she adds, saying she was never so happy to work so hard.
Gallagher said her tour in the Peace Corps changed her so fundamentally that she doesn’t even recognize her former self. “When you are in the Peace Corps, major miracles and minor miracles happen all the time,” she says, adding that she would go back to serve. “In a heartbeat. Absolutely.
“The Peace Corps is a life-changing event, no matter if you are 12 or 53,” Gallagher added. “It made me tolerant, which I wasn’t. It made me patient, and it made me colorblind. It was a gift.”
A gift, volunteers say, they get in much higher quantities than they are ever able to give to the people they were designed to help. “It was hard. It was the toughest job you’ll ever love,” Gallagher says, who served on Cape Verde, some 380 miles off the coast off Africa. “It was wonderful.”
Hessler-Radelet echoes Gallagher’s sentiments. “I have to say that I never worked so hard in my life, except for [in my current role as] Peace Corps deputy director. My experience was wonderful.” –terry shropshire
