Christy Delafield has made a career out of giving on a global scale, helping some of the world’s most vulnerable people during times of crisis.
Diane Kramer gives back at a local level through activism and advocacy, despite her own battle with multiple sclerosis.
Barry Peters gave an extremely personal gift on an individual level to keep a family member alive and healthy.
While their motivations, their gifts, and their stories are very different, there are some striking similarities. All exude positivity and a sense of optimism about the future, and each express some version of the same sentiment: “How could I not do this?” Their experiences are inspiring, showing that there are endless avenues for each of us to make a difference in our own way.
This is part 1 of 2 of Town&Gown’s annual profiles of People Who Make a Difference. Part 2, featuring three more community members, can be found here.
Christy Delafield: ‘Work worth doing’
While evacuees from the Bahamas were fleeing the destruction of Hurricane Dorian en masse this fall, Christy Delafield was making her way to the Abacos Islands.
As she has done so many times throughout her career as a humanitarian aid worker, the 39-year-old State College native was heading to a location that others were trying to escape. Her stay in the Bahamas would involve sleeping on a barge, distributing food and water, resolving supply-chain issues like finding sanitary warehouse space, and working with water engineers to develop reverse osmosis machines that are currently being used to generate 7,500 gallons of clean water from seawater each day.
The assignment was as close as it gets to “typical” for Delafield in her role as director of communications for Mercy Corps, a global organization that works to meet the urgent survival needs of residents during times of crisis, while also giving communities the tools they need to eventually rebuild. In addition to being a part of any and every aspect of the “boots on the ground” efforts during a crisis, a large part of Delafield’s job is to interview members of the local communities.
“Part of my role is to collect information and share it back,” she says. “Part of being a humanitarian is bearing witness, helping people who aren’t familiar with the crisis to understand what’s happening.”
Of course, every crisis is unique, and Delafield says humanitarian needs have been changing over the past couple of decades.
“Twenty years ago, it used to be that the bulk of humanitarian assistance went to people that were in need as a result of natural disasters,” she says. “Today, if you look at the breakdown of people who are in humanitarian need, something like 80 percent are in need as a result of violent conflict in their communities. That’s a huge challenge, even as we’re seeing an increase in natural disasters around the world.”
According to Delafield, Mercy Corps has almost 6,000 team members across the world, and has provided aid to more than 28 million people in more than 40 countries in 2019.
“Eighty-five percent of the people we hire are from the countries where they work. I’m certainly not the norm at Mercy Corps, being from State College,” she says.
Now based in Washington, D.C., Delafield has found herself deployed to some of the most dangerous corners of the world, including the war-torn areas of Syria, Yemen, and Iraq; yet for the most part, she feels safe wherever she goes.
“I really believe in and trust our security team, and they’re very careful. We do a lot of training, we do a lot of drills, we’re given security briefings, and our movements are very restricted,” she says. “But the people that we are helping, they have no escape route. They don’t have a choice. [For example], you never see refugees from Yemen, because there is no way for people to get out of that country. They flee from village to village based on where the front lines are moving. … If they’re going to be brave like that, and I have this great security team backing me up, making me feel comfortable – I just don’t see how you cannot do that work, and not support people that are living it every day.”
After graduation from State College Area High School, Delafield attended Penn State, where she majored in French and integrative art with a minor in international relations. Unsure of her career path, she was scheduled to fly to France for a year-long study abroad opportunity on September 11, 2001.
“Spending that year in France after September 11 really changed a lot for me,” she says. “I witnessed a lot of Islamophobia in Europe and then again when I came home.”
After graduating, she returned to France on a Fulbright assistantship, teaching Moroccan students who continued to experience discrimination and Islamophobia.
“That really drew me into feeling some compassion for people feeling disenfranchised and for people suffering. Ultimately that led me to Syria, but I was always kind of building with this desire to listen and understand someone else’s pain and someone else’s life story,” Delafield says.
She was working with Syrian-American groups who were providing medical aid to Syria when she was introduced to the work of Mercy Corps. She has been working with the organization for five years.
“In a lot of ways, I feel like I’ve found my calling, my vocation, in this work,” she says, yet she remains humble about her role. “I’ve met some amazing heroes, people who’ve inspired me. I take from their example and I want to live up to the courage that they show. … It’s a gift to work with them, and it’s a gift to know them. I’m the recipient of something beautiful here.”
Despite experiencing firsthand some dire situations, Delafield remains optimistic about the state of the world and its future.
“The work we do is really human-centered and it’s about empowering people to move forward themselves. We’re putting forward a vision of a positive future, and that hope is really important,” she says. “It’s easy to get frustrated by the number of crises you see in the world, but you can make a difference and you can make change. … It’s work worth doing.”
For more information about Mercy Corps, visit mercycorps.org.
Diane Kramer: ‘Preparing for a life without MS’
After living with multiple sclerosis for nine years, it would be understandable if Diane Kramer chose to focus entirely on taking care of herself. After all, as she puts it, “Staying well is a full-time job.”
Much of her time is spent doing physical therapy or vision therapy and traveling to and from The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for treatment. She has bad days when she wakes up unable to see, or to walk without her walking sticks, or even to get out of bed. She also has a husband and a daughter whom she loves to cook for and spend time with.
All of this would probably be enough for most people to juggle from day to day. But Kramer also has a passion for helping other MS patients, a passion that consumes the rest of her time and energy. The self-described “firebrand” has poured her heart and soul into her purely voluntary role as an MS advocate and activist, striving to connect the local MS community, educate people about available resources, fight for MS-friendly legislation, and work toward a cure.
Kramer, 36, was first diagnosed with MS in 2010, after experiencing a loss of feeling in her left hand and leg and across her trunk. At that time, she was not given much hope – in fact, doctors told her she’d need a wheelchair in a year. She didn’t know anybody else with MS and she felt extremely isolated.
It did not take long, however, for Kramer to spin negatives into positives.
“That doctor who told me I was going to be in a wheelchair in a year inspired one of my greatest things, and that was to run 500 miles that year. I was not a runner or anything, but that was an ego thing,” she says.
She also discovered the National MS Society, which turned out to be the ultimate game-changer for her. Not only did she find its website to be a tremendous source of information, it also led her to the MS Navigators, a network of highly-trained experts across the United States who are on-call 24/7 to help MS patients and family members.
MS Navigators helped Kramer get referred to Johns Hopkins, the closest comprehensive care center, giving her access to a case manager that helps her navigate a multi-disciplined approach to care. At Johns Hopkins, she found a vibrant community that included professionals actively working on groundbreaking research and innovative treatments, and fellow MS patients who were young and full of hope – the community she felt was lacking back home in State College.
The National MS Society had already identified this void in State College, and asked for Kramer’s help in establishing a support network here. Seeing the opportunity to help others avoid the isolation she initially experienced, she jumped at the chance. Since then, she’s been hard at work stitching together a local community of MS allies. She has established a local MS Community Council, which will kick off in January with the goal of bringing together local MS patients and families for support groups, happy hours, and educational events on a regular basis.
Kramer has a medical background, having worked as a nurse until MS-related cognitive symptoms led her to retire early. One of her goals is to arm local doctors with stacks of information about MS resources to hand over to patients as soon as they are diagnosed. In the meantime, Kramer is operating as an unofficial one-woman support group, providing information and a listening ear for newly-diagnosed patients who are often referred to her by word-of-mouth.
“I spend a lot of time listening. … We’ve all had those nights where you have the thought that tonight might be the night that the sun does not come up,” she says. “If I can be there for someone in those moments, I’m willing to do that, because I’ve been there.”
Diane Kramer. Photo by Darren Andrew Weimert
Kramer continues to defy that doctor’s nearly decade-old prediction of soon needing to use a wheelchair. Along with her team, The Myelinators, she is a proud regular participant in Walk MS and Bike MS, the two biggest fundraisers for the National MS Society. The team name refers to “myelin,” the protective nerve covering that an MS patient loses when their immune system attacks the central nervous system.
Kramer not only works tirelessly to raise funds, but she has biked several times in the Keystone Country Ride, a two-day, 150-mile Bike MS event going from Hollidaysburg to State College and back. While this year she was unable to ride because of July’s record-breaking heat – “Heat is very difficult for people with MS,” she says – she did speak at the event.
In fact, public speaking has become an unexpected but important piece of her advocacy. She recently was appointed as a district activist leader for the National MS Society, a role that sends her to Harrisburg to make the case for state legislation to help MS patients. She will also be traveling to Washington, D.C., in February to speak to Congress about federal policy points.
Kramer peppers her conversation with statistics and facts about MS: One in 330 Americans has MS … Pennsylvania has the fifth-highest prevalence of MS in the country … the first FDA-approved drug for MS was not introduced until 1994.
She volunteers as a subject for every research project she can at Penn State’s Multiple Sclerosis Research Center, and she stays fully informed about current research findings, of which she says there are many that offer hope that a cure is close at hand.
“The research is light years ahead of what it was in 2010. This is an exciting time to be a part of the movement, because there’s something big coming. You can feel it,” she says. “I am passionate about this because I am preparing for a life without MS.’
Diane Kramer can be reached through her public Facebook page, @mrsdianekramer. For information about the National MS Society, visit nationalmssociety.org.
Barry Peters: Kidney donation a ‘no-brainer’
“What’s the big deal?”
That’s what Barry Peters thought about his decision to donate a kidney to his older brother, Mike, in April.
Mike Peters, 51, had been suffering with polycystic kidney disease since 2001 – a fact that he kept quiet from his mother, father, and brother until October 2018, when doctors told him it was time for him to get on a transplant list in order to avoid kidney failure and dialysis.
When he surprised his family with the news, Barry’s reaction was swift.
“He was talking about getting on the transplant donor list. And I said, ‘Wait a minute, aren’t siblings supposed to be better matches?’” he says. “‘I’ve got two [kidneys]; if I’m a match, what’s the big deal?’”
The brothers learned that siblings are actually not much more inclined to be a match than anyone else, but they began the testing process, thinking that if they were incompatible, they could get on the paired kidney exchange list – meaning Barry could swap his kidney with another, more compatible donor’s kidney. The process was extensive, including blood tests, kidney function tests, stress tests, and even psychoanalytical tests.
“Then I got a phone message in December saying we were a direct exchange and I could donate directly to my brother. I’ve never deleted that message from my phone. … We were very fortunate,” Barry says.
“It saved so much time,” Mike adds. “Doctors told me that people can be waiting on a transplant list for years.”
The surgeries were scheduled for April 12 at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh. The risks they faced included all of the normal ones associated with surgeries, with Mike having to be particularly watchful of infection and organ rejection, but everything went smoothly. After removing Barry’s kidney, surgeons placed it into Mike’s abdomen in front of his existing kidneys, which remain in his body.
The brothers recuperated for three days in adjoining hospital rooms before being discharged, completing recovery together in their parents’ Huntingdon home.
Recovery looked different for both of them. Barry’s surgery was a bit more invasive, requiring five incisions to heal as opposed to just one for Mike. Barry also immediately felt the draining effects of dropping from two fully functioning kidneys down to one, while Mike suddenly found himself with a shot of energy as he gained a fully functioning kidney for the first time in many years. Barry’s remaining kidney picked up the slack and he recovered quickly.
Barry was able to get back to his work as a mortgage loan officer with Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation in State College almost immediately, answering emails on his phone in his hospital bed, whereas Mike had to take a two-month leave of absence from his job at the ACCO Brands plant in Alexandria.
Barry Peters. Photo by Darren Andrew Weimert.
“A week after surgery, I was home walking about two miles a day,” Barry says. “I felt great. I was thinking, ‘Everyone should do this! This is a breeze!’ I was getting my energy back, I was drinking a lot of water, I was getting my appetite back, I was not taking much pain medication.”
Unfortunately, Barry soon developed an unusual complication. He began having shooting pains down his right leg, eventually being diagnosed with nerve impingement that doctors believe was caused by pressure on his spine due to the way his body was positioned during surgery. He is still undergoing physical therapy and chiropractic treatments and says he is slowly but surely getting better.
“I’m ruining all the feel-good statistics about kidney donors, but I am a really abnormal case,” he says. “I would not expect other people to have nerve issues as a result of this surgery.”
Once this obstacle is behind him, Barry, 49, should have no lingering complications, as his kidney should continue to grow and take on more functionality to make up for the missing one. Although Mike will be on anti-rejection medication for the rest of his life, his new kidney should remain fully functioning into old age, as any other healthy adult’s would.
Regardless of his complications, Barry says he would do it all over again in a heartbeat.
“My brother is one of my best friends. We do a lot together. He plays in a band and I like to go listen to him jam. We used to kayak together. … I’d like us to be able to keep kayaking together, and do all this stuff together again, so for me, giving him a kidney was a no-brainer. I’m really just hoping to keep him around. In a way it’s a kind of selfishness,” Barry says. “It’s the people that just do it randomly for strangers that completely blow my mind. There are people out there who are way better than most of us.”
“I would not associate ‘selfishness’ with anything he did,” Mike says. “He stepped up from the very beginning. He did the ultimate. I don’t know how to say thank you properly.”
While the brothers are private people, Barry hopes that sharing their story might encourage others to consider organ donation.
“I would encourage everyone to look into it. It’s amazing. A week out of surgery I was thinking, ‘Why doesn’t everybody do this?’ If you’re a match for somebody and you’re in good health and your kidneys are functioning – why not?”
Barry and Mike Peters
Part 2 of this story will be published on Dec. 24, 2019.
Karen Walker is a freelance writer in State College. Vincent Corso is a staff writer for Town&Gown and The Centre County Gazette.
