[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 145 (Thursday, October 8, 2009)]
[House]
[Pages H11144-H11145]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  HONORING CAPTAIN BENJAMIN A. SKLAVER

  (Ms. DeLAURO asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute and to revise and extend her remarks.)
  Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Speaker, I rise to commemorate the life and mourn 
together with his family the death of Captain Benjamin A. Sklaver of 
Hamden, Connecticut, who served his country and the neediest people of 
the world honorably.
  Captain Sklaver was killed in an ambush last Friday while on patrol 
in Afghanistan. Struck down at the age of

[[Page H11145]]

32, he leaves behind a legacy of humanitarian works and honorable deeds 
that would do any man or woman proud. Before serving in Afghanistan as 
an Army reservist, Ben had worked for the Centers for Disease Control 
as an international emergency and refugee health analyst. And he was 
the cofounder and director of ClearWater Initiative, an organization 
which aspired to provide clean drinking water to refugees displaced by 
an international emergency. In the past 2 years, his leadership at 
ClearWater had managed to provide over 6,500 people in Uganda with 
clean drinking wells.
  To the thousands of lives he changed in Uganda, Ben was known as 
``Moses Ben.'' But to his grieving family--his parents, Gary and Laura; 
his siblings, Anna and Samuel; his fiancee, Beth; her son, Danny; and 
her parents, Barbara and Jimmy Segaloff--he was simply Ben, a warm, 
kind, generous, and loving young man with so much life ahead of him 
taken from all of us too soon.
  Connecticut mourns and America mourns this family's loss today.

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