Catching up with Rotary Peace Fellow Margaret Carolla Maues

The Warrensburg Rotary Club was honored to receive Missouri’s first Rotary Peace Fellow, Margaret Carolla Maues, as featured speaker during its meeting this week. Margaret was selected to join the first cohort of Rotary Peace Fellows in November 2001 which led her to studies at the Universidad del Salvador in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2003.  Prior to the Peace Fellowship, she graduated with a BA in Political Science and Spanish from Davidson College in 2001.  Following graduation, she served in the Lutheran Volunteer Corps in Washington, DC, where she was a case manager at Miriam’s Kitchen, providing direct assistance to chronically homeless men and women.  In Argentina, Margaret received a master’s degree in international relations, and was able to pursue an applied field experience in Cochabamba, Bolivia. She also volunteered regularly at a soup kitchen in downtown Buenos Aires.

After returning from Argentina, Margaret worked as a grantwriter at CentroNia, a bilingual, multicultural learning center in Washington, DC.  Following that, she joined the Latin American and Caribbean office of the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and worked on democracy projects in Colombia and Guatemala. After meeting her husband Luis at NDI, Margaret and Luis moved to Lima, Peru, to begin their careers as foreign service officers with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

The short video above highlight USAID’s mission.

After two years in Lima, Margaret and Luis moved to work at the USAID office in Mexico City, Mexico.  The couple and their 14 month old son, Santiago, now reside in Durham, NC, where Luis is pursuing a graduate degree in Public Policy at Duke and Margaret continues to work for USAID, for the Office of Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment. Both are active with their church and enjoy playing and watching sports.

Margaret is just one of the outstanding representatives of Rotary’s Peace Fellowship program; although one we are particularly proud of in District 6080.

Aren’t you glad to be supporting this program, designed to bring people and their perspectives, together?