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REMARKS BY:	DONNA E.SHALALA, SECRETARY OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES
PLACE:		Peace Corps News Event, Washington, D.C.
DATE:		February 11, 1999

As so many of you know, I have my own Peace Corps story to tell. My years in the Peace Corps took me to Iran. It was more demanding than any class I'd ever taken. More challenging than any job I ever held. But when I came home I realized I knew more about this world and this country -- and my place in both -- than I ever had before.

I began to think of myself as a citizen of the world -- and I appreciated how fortunate we Americans truly are. And I'm not alone.

In the years since it's creation, 150,000 other Peace Corps volunteers learned the very same lessons I did. Lessons about overcoming differences in culture and tradition. Lessons about putting your ideals to work. Lessons about what it really takes to make this world a better place for all of us to live.

Some of those returned volunteers are here today. And I know they'll each tell you that hardly a day passes when they don't draw upon those very same lessons.

And they'll tell you something else, too: that as Americans who answered the call to service in the past, we share a unique responsibility to help provide that opportunity to young Americans in the future. Young Americans like the 6,700 Peace Corps volunteers working today in 80 countries around the world.

Young Americans like the women and men I had the opportunity to meet just last year. They're working against the spread of AIDS in Thailand: a problem none of us could have even foreseen back in 1961, but a problem these young volunteers are helping to solve today.

When President Kennedy launched the Peace Corps he understood something that many of us are only beginning to fully realize today. It's that as our world becomes smaller, America's role within it can only grow larger.

And if we want the role we play to be one that benefits other nations - as well as ourselves - we need to invest more than dollars. We need to invest our enthusiasm. We need to invest our idealism. We need to invest our skills. That was true 38 years ago. And it's even more true today.

That's why I'm proud to join with these other returned volunteers and supporters in urging continued, bipartisan support for President Clinton's efforts to expand the Peace Corps. Working together, Republicans and Democrats alike, we can see to it that America has 10,000 Peace Corps volunteers by early in this next century. That's the kind of Peace Corps America wants. That's the kind of Peace Corps the world desperately needs. Together, that's the kind of Peace Corps we can begin to build.