I take my favorite picture from the pile: Shelby in the home of a Mozambican family. Mother and father are sitting side-by-side, their baby on its father’s lap, and Shelby stands behind them, leaning in, her arms wide open. On the baby’s shirt is a pink balloon that says, in English, Happy 2000. And I love this photo because it’s so genuine and everyone is smiling a truly happy smile. And when l can bring myself to hold it up and get a glimpse of my sister’s sun-blistered, angelic face, I am overcome with admiration for my little pioneer and the remarkable work she’s done for AIDS education. In a time when our country has all of its energy focused on one enormous, terrorist-inspired tragedy, I think about all the Volunteers out there who were focused on tragedy well before September 11th. The ones already in the trenches, so to speak, helping others, dedicated to the thousands of tragedies around the world that didn’t end when the towers came down.

In one of the last moments I spent with my sister she told me that she loved Mozambique so much that she might never come home. And I saw in her face then such bravery, such raw emotion, such honest love. And I know now that even in death, even as she slipped from her own dead body and hovered above it, limp on the side of a South African road somewhere that my sister didn’t stop. I see her simply turn away, watch her body become smaller and smaller below, as she transforms herself into wings that cut the air, and fly further and further away.     

SHELBY BOND WAS BORN in Dallas, Texas on February 16, 1976. A natural leader and 1994 graduate of Countryside High School in Clearwater, Florida, she was Homecoming Princess and active on the debate team, cheerleading, in student government and in many other activities.
     Shelby attended Stetson University in Deland, Florida for two years. There she was a political science major, secretary for student government, an Alpha Chi Omega sorority sister and was honored to study at the United Nations in New York as a representative for Stetson University.
     She then transferred to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she continued her major in political science and minored in African studies. She did further travel abroad as a student in Ghana, West Africa at the University of Accra. Shelby graduated from University of North Carolina with highest honors and distinctions in 1998.
     Shelby’s dream was to serve in Africa as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Being the pioneer that she was, she was among the first group of Peace Corps Volunteers to open up an English education program in Mozambique in October 1998. She grew to love the country and its people so much that she extended her service there for a third year to work for Population Services International (PSI) as an AIDs educator at schools throughout Mozambique. Her plans were to return to the United States in April of 2002 to obtain a graduate degree in public health and further her service to others.
     Shelby died on December 28, 2001 in Richland, South Africa. She had recently completed service as a PCV in Maputo, Mozambique.