The founder and president of Volunteers Without Boundaries, Mary Lightfine will illustrate how one person can make a difference. After working as a registered nurse in emergency rooms throughout the United States, Lightfine, a self professed adrenaline junkie, decided to join the international humanitarian movement by affiliating with Doctors Without Borders and International Medical Corps. That decision changed her life.

Since then she has lived and worked in more than a dozen countries, including some of the most dangerous spots on earth. She was ambushed and shot at in Somalia, and has delivered babies in Sri Lanka. Lightfine had to step around bodies to feed the living in Southern Sudan and saw children who had been forced to watch their mothers mutilated by rebels in Uganda. She brought food to remote villages by helicopter in Nicaragua, after hurricane Mitch and was also one of the first to provide medical aid to Kosovar refugees who had experienced unthinkable horrors.

In January 2002, Lightfine returned from Afghanistan where she traversed perilous mountains swarming with land mines, forged icy rivers by foot and on donkey to help isolated inhabitants. In 1999 she was among those distinguished members of Doctors Without Borders to have been honored with the Nobel Peace prize.

For more information about Lightfine’s talk, please contact the Office of Communications at 301-447-5366.