In Memoriam: Gladys Gilbert
Wednesday, September 5, 2012 at 06:46PM
"Has anyone here seen my old friend Gladys? Can you tell me where she has gone? You know she healed a lot of people... but, the good they die young I just turned around and she was gone."....a tune from the 60's.
Gladys Gilbert's friends reside throughout the world . . . among the inquisitive and curious Nepalese, the sad and yearning Bangladesh, the Afghans with their fiery eyes and spirit, the Ethiopians who mixed joy with their sorrow, and the bright and beautiful children of India.
Most will never learn she has left us. They will occasionally wonder, as distant friends tend to do, about what she is doing in her daily life as they recall pleasant memories of their time together. I, however, know she is gone. And all I am left with are the memories.
Gladys and I were Peace Corps volunteers together in southern India. Our group, I57, like so many of our era, was full of bright, idealistic people. But none more so than Gladys. I knew she would make a difference. She poured herself into the language, culture, and customs of the people of India. Later, she would do the same thing in every country she served in. She craved adventure. Assignments others dismissed as too dangerous, she accepted for the challenge. She believed courage was less important than compassion and that love could conquer fear. She also knew the more she gave, the more she got.
In service to her country, on a mission of hunger relief, she died aboard a plane carrying Congressman Mickey Leland across Ethiopia on August 7, 1989.
The story explaining why my friend was on a flight with a Texas congressman in Africa is vintage Gladys.
Just weeks before the crash, former President Jimmy Carter had visited Ethiopia and climbed Mt. Kilamanjaro. Gladys had been in the front row when he spoke to an assembled crowd at the American Embassy compound in Ethiopia where she worked for the US Agency for International Development (USAID) as a special projects officer. The President's words, she wrote to her friends, had impressed and moved her. About this time Gladys had signed up for another tour of duty in Ethiopia, one of the most difficult assignments in USAID. She was 43 years old.
A few weeks after President Carter left, Congressman Leland, chairman of the House Select Committee on Hunger, flew into the country. He was leading a group interested in inspecting conditions among Sudanese refugees living at the Fugnido refugee camp, one of four in Southwestern Ethiopia run the U.N. At the time, it housed 300,000 Sudanese who had fled famine and civil war in their home country.
Gladys joined the Congressman's group when it lifted off from Addis on its way to Fugnido, a remote village near the Sudan border, 480 miles southwest of Addis Ababa. A public health expert, she was interested in helping to stave off a major famine that held that portion of Africa in its grips.
The crash site was not found for a week. None of the 15 aboard had survived.
Gladys's husband Michael Cairney accompanied her body back to the United States.
Mark Edelman, acting AID administrator, wrote at the time that Gladys "symbolized the best in public service," not only as a skilled professional, but a humanitarian "who had long years of service in the poorest parts of Africa." He asked us to remember the many Americans working "quietly and persistently for improvements in the lives of others." He also spoke of the daily risks and dangers of doing relief work in Ethiopia, requiring, "frequent hazardous flights like the fatal one, and being exposed to dangerous diseases in refugee camps and living in primitive rural areas for weeks at a time." Gladys accepted these risks, he said, because she "wanted to be where the need was the greatest."
He summarized his comments by saying, "They don't come any better."
Gladys usually maintained her friendships by letters from some distant corner of the world. But she could surprise me with a sudden visit too. I recall visits from her while I was in graduate school, worrying about the deployment of my husband overseas, or enduring the tribulations of childbirth. She spoke little about herself but she probed about the twists and turns of my life. She never backed off until she was satisfied that she had a complete picture of all the things a close friend would have known had she been close at hand rather than half way around the world.
When Gladys visited, she was as much at ease preparing Indian dinners for groups of my friends as she was joining my husband to meet with fellow North Dakota state legislators to talk about the work she was doing on behalf of others.
At Gladys' memorial, I remember a friend of hers showing me a high school annual where Gladys had signed her name and drawn a picture. It was classic Gladys. The stick figure was throwing a globe back and forth between its hands and Gladys had written "the world" on the page and had drawn an arrow to the globe. It was obvious to me that even then Gladys saw herself totally involved with the world and all of its challenges.
Gladys and I first met on the flight to London on our way to Experiment for International Living assignments. She was off to India; I was headed to Tanzania. A year later we were surprised and pleased to find ourselves together again at Peace Corps training in Vermont.
After completing her Peace Corps service in 1970, Gladys met her 80-year- old grandmother Blanche Dorhmann in Germany. The two of them then traveled by a bus back to India. Gladys wanted to share with her grandmother what she knew and had experienced.
The Peace Corps experience was important to Gladys. She believed that it not only gave her the opportunity to share her knowledge, but also to learn about a people and a culture, which, in turn, enabled her to share that knowledge with others she met.
Although Gladys died in service to her country, her mission was more than country. She knew that the problems that plague this planet would only be solved when someone went to its depths with a gentle hand, a kind voice and a little encouragement and helped make a life more meaningful. Learn to love, to care and to share, Gladys would say. She would add that nothing has ended because of her passing.
I can hear her saying it now as if she were standing right next to me: "C'mon, reach a hand out, all of you, give of yourself, help someone and have an adventure along the way. If you all just take that extra step that I was planning, then surely I will live forever."
Gladys Gilbert served as an India 57 Peace Corps volunteer from 1968-70 in Usilampatti, Tamil Nadu as a health nutrition teacher trainer. Following Peace Corps, Gladys returned to the School of Public Health in Pittsburgh, PA for an advanced degree. Following graduation, she joined USAID's population/family planning program and later served in areas of hunger, refugee assistance and famine relief in locations including assignments in Afghanistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Somalia and Sudan and Ethiopia.
Gladys is a graduate of Bryn Mawr school in Baltimore and the Pittsburgh School of Public Health. She married Michael Cairney in 1985 in Washington D.C.
She is buried in the Meadow Ridge Cemetery in Baltimore.
Lois McKennett Schneider, PCV '68 - '70
Reader Comments (2)
I did not know Gladys but Mike was a friend of mine from Saudi. He sent me many photos of the two of them and they seemed very much in love. I lost touch with Mike after the tragic events and wondered if you were still in touch with him?
I met Gladys' husband, Michael Cairney, in Washington, DC shortly after Gladys' death. Michael and I were very close friends until Spring1993. It is true that Gladys was the love of Michael's life and that Michael could not reasonably recover from this incredible loss until late 1993. In 1992 I took him to the airport for his new World Bank assignment in Ankara, Turkey where he met his new wife. The very last time I saw him in person was when he and his new Turkish wife visited Washington, DC in 1994. Michael may have retired in Scotland. And, I am not sure if he is still alive because he suffered of Hepatitis B. As for Gladys, I have only seen her pictures and I believe that she was not only very beautiful but also very smart and kind person. God bless her soul.