Health diplomacy between US, WHO has made positive global impact
US using Peace Corps Vols-Kenya-WHO health diplomacy collaboration helped eradicate smallpox
originally published in Asheville Citizen Times
Guest Opinion by Liz Colton Sept. 14, 2025 & Sept. 17, 2025
The remarkable “bush-telegraph” would have immediately alerted Samburu tribes
people of our arrival in their vicinity. The speedy word-of-mouth system had already
spread news throughout northern Kenya that young foreigners were bringing special
healing medicines.
We were Peace Corps Volunteers working in several small teams on a joint USA
Kenya-World Health Organization expedition in December 1968. Our mission was to
help in the worldwide campaign to eradicate smallpox from Earth. Our task was to
offer vaccinations to people in the world’s last pockets of smallpox in Kenya near
Ethiopia and Somalia.
We were definitely not tourists in a luxury safari camp with guards.
Locating a site to set up camp before equatorial sunset, our team of four could find
no human in sight in that remote region. Each night the only sounds were local fauna
— likely, rhinoceros, elephants, lions, buffalo, leopards, hyenas — snorting and
howling nearby. Though I’d grown up camping often in Western North Carolina’s
wild mountains, I remember those nights in Kenya’s high desert, listening, worrying
those animals in total darkness might trip on our tent cords.
Awakening at sunrise a few hundred miles north of the equator, we would quickly set
up our vaccinating operation in the shade of a few acacia thorn-trees: a table with little boxes of bifurcated smallpox needles and camp chairs to wait for our first
voluntary visitors.
Soon groups of people, initially women with children, began appearing on the barren
landscape and slowly, but determinedly, walking to greet us. Advance word had
already prepared them that medicine would be delivered by our injecting a number
of quick punctures with a sharp little spear-needle in each person’s arm.
A larger group of us volunteers had initially gathered in Isiolo town to learn how to
administer the smallpox inoculations before we spread north in different directions
the next two weeks.
All in our 20s or older, we recalled getting our own still visible smallpox
vaccinations. Each of us also remembered from childhood in U.S. knowing friends
suffering, some dying, from polio, and also our own measles-chicken pox-mumps’
feverish nightmares before vaccines for all those diseases. I recalled hearing my
grandmother talk of surviving yellow fever and her describing friends debilitated by
malaria and deformed by smallpox.
We PCVs were proud of medical-scientific advances by American scientists shared
freely, globally by U.S. Centers for Disease Control in coordination with WHO.
Throughout those memorable days working to reach people in smallpox’s last
domain, it was always like a miracle that suddenly people began trustingly showing
up. Many smiling women came with their arms outstretched for their shots and
holding children’s hands to help bravely extend their little arms.
At first there would be no men with them, but, slowly, tall, regal warrior-men holding
long spears would arrive, standing like sentinels for hours on the periphery. Often
the women would indicate to us, some speaking in Kiswahili, a second language for
them and us, or just in sign language, that they would persuade the males, young and old warriors, to come next day if we would stay another night. Eventually the men
would step forward for their jabs.
This voluntary program was health diplomacy in action. In this case also it was
vaccines diplomacy.
Americans serving our country by serving the world in sharing our bounty was what
President John F. Kennedy and his brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, the first Peace
Corps director, envisioned upon establishing the volunteers corps in 1961. The idea
was the United States should lead by sharing our wealth through soft power,
practicing positive diplomacy of all kinds, including health, medical, voluntary, and
vaccine diplomacy, around the world.
A little over a decade after our vaccinating mission, WHO with international
scientists in December 1979 announced final eradication of smallpox. It was an
achievement ending a scourge that had devastated human communities thousands of
years. Along with fellow volunteers involved, I felt proud reading the news,
remembering our participation in the global medical effort to eradicate the deadly,
ancient disease.
Our vaccinating expedition, diplomatically coordinated by Kenya-USA-WHO, had a
positive impact on eradicating smallpox. We U.S. Peace Corps Volunteers had
participated in global health diplomacy. Our small diplomatic contribution helped
make a big difference in the world. ###
Elizabeth “Liz” Colton, Ph.D., author, diplomat, Emmy Award winning journalist,
professor, former UN development planner and Peace Corps Volunteer in Kenya,
now teaches diplomacy and the media worldwide for UNITAR and partner international universities. She’s an active member of the Western North Carolina
Returned Peace Corps Volunteers and National Peace Corps Association.