Bill Text: HI HR122 | 2013 | Regular Session | Introduced

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Bill Title: Peace Corps East Timor.

Spectrum: Moderate Partisan Bill (Democrat 8-1)

Status: (Introduced - Dead) 2013-03-18 - Referred to VMI, FIN, referral sheet 39 [HR122 Detail]

Download: Hawaii-2013-HR122-Introduced.html

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HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES	H.R. NO.	122
TWENTY-SEVENTH LEGISLATURE, 2013
STATE OF HAWAII

HOUSE RESOLUTION

 

 

urging the peace corps to reOpen the peace corps east timor location.

 

 

 

     WHEREAS, the Peace Corps was created in 1961 by United States Senator John F. Kennedy and trains and arranges for nearly two hundred thousand volunteers to serve in one hundred thirty-nine countries; and

 

     WHEREAS, Peace Corps East Timor was the first new Peace Corps program of the 21st century, and the diplomatic note of 2002 formally establishing the program was signed by Nobel Peace Laureate and East Timor Minister of Foreign Affairs Jose Ramos-Horta; and

 

     WHEREAS, Peace Corps volunteers worked to meet crucial community development needs in East Timor, such as organizational development, health promotion, small-scale agriculture, water and sanitation, nutrition, environment, human immunodeficiency virus infection and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, and women's and youth development; and

 

     WHEREAS, Peace Corps volunteers were the first international group to be trained in Tetum, the local language of East Timor; and

 

     WHEREAS, since Peace Corps East Timor volunteers were evacuated in 2006 due to civil unrest and government instability, the country has stabilized and the country is safer now than it was when the Peace Corps East Timor program was first established in 2002; and

 

     WHEREAS, the need for Peace Corps volunteers in East Timor is greater now than ever, as the country remains one of the poorest in Asia and throughout the world, and forty per cent of its population survives on less than $1 per day; and

 

     WHEREAS, nearly half of the country's population is children under the age of fifteen, many of whose parents are struggling to support them; and

 

     WHEREAS, the Peace Corps sent an assessment mission to East Timor in April 2010, to determine whether to reopen the country's Peace Corps program; and

 

     WHEREAS, as a result of the recent assessment mission, the Peace Corps recommended the reopening of a Peace Corps office in East Timor, but this recommendation has not yet been acted upon; and

 

     WHEREAS, in the summer of 2010 the Peace Corps reopened a mission in Indonesia, after forty-five years of absence from the country; and

 

     WHEREAS, President Obama has called for the expansion of the Peace Corps throughout the tenure of his administration; now, therefore,

 

     BE IT RESOLVED by the House of Representatives of the Twenty-seventh Legislature of the State of Hawaii, Regular Session of 2013, urging the Peace Corps to reopen the Peace Corps East Timor office as soon as practicable for the mutual benefit of the Peace Corps volunteers and the people of East Timor; and

 

     BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that certified copies of this Resolution be transmitted to the President of the United States, the President and Prime Minister of East Timor, Ambassador of the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste to the United States of the Embassy of the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste in Washington, D.C., Ambassador of the United States to the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste of the United States Embassy in Timor-Leste, Office of the Administrator and the Office of the Director of the United States Agency for International Development in Washington, D.C., and Timor-Leste, respectively, and Acting Director of the Peace Corps.

 

 

 

	OFFERED BY:	_____________________________

Report Title: 

Peace Corps East Timor.