Love from volunteer lifts leader

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Peace Corps spreads legacy of global service

The setting was formal, the second inauguration of Sierra Leone’s president in 2012, and Carrie Hessler- Radelet was just trying to make conversation.

The Peace Corps leader found herself seated next to him at dinner, and asked how a boy from a small village had grown up to be president.

Her innocent question kicked off a sequence of events that soon sent her scrambling, she recalled during a visit to Honolulu this month. The story that unfolded shows the enduring impact Peace Corps volunteers can have, whether they know it or not.

Ernest Bai Koroma told her that a Peace Corps volunteer had taught high school in his hometown, a young American woman he remembered only as “Sharon.” He was too young to be in her class, but she formed a service club and got kids to pitch in around their community with small acts of kindness.

“Throughout my life I’ve thought about her so often,” Koroma told Hessler-Radelet. He thought about her when he graduated from high school, he said, and again at the university where he started a community service club. As a businessman he tried to show corporate social responsibility.

“Then when I became president, I thought about her and the fact that she was so concerned about those who were least among us,” he said.

In a reckless moment, Hessler-Radelet told him to contact her if he ever came to Washington and she would hook him up with Sharon. She figured she would never see him again.

Ten days later he called her up. President Obama had invited him to the White House. Her heart sank. Peace Corps records from the early 1960s were spotty at best, and she had just a week to find Sharon.

Her staff got cracking. They managed to identify two Sharons who had served in the West African country, including one who had worked in his village. But when Hessler-Radelet called to invite her to Washington, she demurred.

“I don’t recognize that name,” responded Sharon Alvarado, retired after a career in Chicago’s public schools. “And I am confident that none of my kids ever grew up to be president.”

Only after Hessler-Radelet begged her to come just to represent “all Sharons who served in Sierra Leone” did she relent. She was clutching a big photo album to her chest when the president, who stands 6 feet 2 inches tall, strode into Peace Corps headquarters.

She didn’t recognize him. But then he said two words: “Toure Street.” She had lived on that street. And inside the photo album, they found pictures of him as an 11-year-old. No one called him Ernest back then. They called him “Baba.”

He told her about the many times he had thought of her over the years.

“It was the most beautiful reunion that I’ve ever encountered — they were weeping,” Hessler-Radelet recalled in a speech May 20 at the East-West Center.

“Not the multiplication tables, it was the values that she lived by. He was watching when she helped someone on the street, or one of the kids with their writing.”

Afterward, Koroma gave a speech lauding the Peace Corps. The director remembers his words.

“You give us your sons and your daughters, your mothers and your fathers, to come live among us, to eat our food, to celebrate our holidays,” he said. “My country has received millions of dollars from the United States. It has not been as important as the love that your volunteers give to my people in a way that money cannot do.”