"It was wonderful to see the progress that the town and community had made," he said. "And one thing the students said as we were gathered there at the school was, you taught us two very important words, a four letter word H-E-L-P, that we were to help each other, and the other was ‘community’, that we were a community and we would together do well. And they had indeed."

Peace mission

The California congressman recalls another visit to the Horn of Africa in the late 1990s as part of a peacekeeping mission when the region was engulfed in war between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Garamendi says the mission succeeded largely because both Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and Eritrean President Isaias Afewerki trusted the Peace Corps.

"My team was invited to meet with prime minister of Ethiopia and the president of Eritrea. Why? Because they’d been taught by Peace Corps and they knew our agenda was peace," Garamendi said. "We had no other agenda. So we met with both heads of state talking about the war, talking about what their goals were. And in those communications we saw a path for peace. Those concepts we had discovered in our communication with the heads of state… became the essential elements of the peace negotiations and the settlement."

Garamendi and his team of Peace Corps veterans were later invited to witness the signing of the Algiers peace agreement that ended the two-year war.