madam chairman , i thank the gentleman for yielding me this time . 
i too rise , madam chairman , in strong support of the dreier amendment . 
i , as many of my colleagues know , was a peace corps volunteer in south america ; and as a returned peace corps volunteer elected to congress , i realized that what we needed was some activity in this country that would start educating people somewhere between the peace corps and the work corps . 
as the ranking member just mentioned , we have countries where we have been in with the military , but it is the ability to respond to the post-conflict issues that we need , a fema-type , a response-type corps of people who are linguistically capable of speaking that language , that know the country culture , can work with the nongovernmental organizations that are abroad , with military personnel that are still in the country , with the host country governments , with our united states usaid , with our united states department of state . 
and where i am very pleased that the first one of these activities is going to take place at the naval postgraduate school on august 1 with ambassador pascual coming out to california where , for the first time , the military , the civilians , the state department and so on will all be together in developing this . 
i look forward to this as one of the great new initiatives of this congress and of this country to really give us the ability to respond to stabilization and respond to conflict reconstruction . 
