“Being exposed to a much larger world and the way others live, I learned about how to enjoy life. If they had enough food to eat, they were happy,” he says. “After doing that, I couldn’t imagine doing anything else with my life other than serving.” After returning to OSU to pursue a master’s degree, Dambach began a consulting firm with speech professor and debate coach Dale Stockton. “He included me in a group of students who would stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning just talking,” Dambach says. “He was my Socrates — he would pose a question, I’d give an answer, and he’d say it wasn’t good enough. We’d dig deeper and deeper.” In 1970, when waiting at the airport to pick up Stockton, who was returning from a debate tournament in Dallas, Dambach learned that an unknown assailant had murdered Stockton in his motel room. “Much of my life has been dedicated to the memory of Dale Stockton,” Dambach says. As president of the National Peace Corps Association, Dambach focused his attention on the news coming from Rwanda in 1994. Dambach, outraged at the lack of response from the international community, worked to mobilize about 30 former Peace Corps volunteers who had previously served in Rwanda to help with the immediate stabilization process after the genocide. “The importance and value of that program led us to believe maybe we can do some other pretty special things where there is a need,” he says. When war broke out between Ethiopia and Eritrea, Dambach and California Lt. Gov. John Garamendi created another team of former Peace Corps volunteers that became the primary voice of communication between the prime minister of Ethiopia and the president of Eritrea. On the phone, Eritrea’s President Isayas Afwerki made one last concession to end the war. Dambach took a cab to the Ethiopian embassy to deliver the news. “A couple of weeks later, the prime minister of Ethiopia was in Washington and invited us to breakfast,” Dambach says. “I’ll never forget it — at breakfast, he leaned forward and said, ‘I want you to know the war’s over, and I want to thank you for making it happen.’” Today, Dambach is CEO and president of the Alliance for Peacebuilding, which works with organizations, government leaders and professionals to help build peace worldwide. He says his passion to help will never be extinguished. “It is pure luck of the draw that we are born in America,” he says. “We didn’t earn it. Let’s help people so that they can have a small portion of the comfort that we have.” Stacy M. Pettit ’09 photo / Genesee Photo Systems During the 1960s, studying speech communications at OSU, Charles F. “Chic” Dambach did not know he would later visit 55 countries and help negotiate peace for quarrelling countries. He did not foresee caring for the broken and helpless left behind after the Rwanda genocide. Instead, Dambach focused on causing some trouble at OSU. “Any time there was a demonstration, other students would call me to organize it,” he says, “civil rights and anti-war protests — anything that would stir up trouble.” In fact, Dambach says he helped arrange an anti-war demonstration that resulted in the university cancelling classes for the rest of the day. Decades later, when some of the students reunited, Dambach learned that many of those who went to protest the Vietnam War at New York’s Columbia University or the University of California, Berkeley, found it boring because everyone was doing it. “They told me that doing it in Oklahoma took more courage,” he says. After graduating, Dambach joined the Peace Corps and volunteered in Colombia, sparking his life of service into motion. photo by Genesee Photo Systems Oklahoma State university 5 Charles F. Dambach Distinguished Alumnus 2004 ’67 Speech Peace First
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