[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 18]
[House]
[Page 24395]
[From the U.S. 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 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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