Gaetana
Enders
International
Editor
Hola & Hello Magazines
2000 Recipient
Gaetana
Enders, Italian by birth was born in Tangier, Morocco.
She met Tom Enders in 1953 after she had secured her Italian
baccalaureate and he had graduated from Yale University.
They married in 1955 in Tangier, and moved to Boston where Tom
completed his graduate work at Harvard.
By 1959 when Tom joined the Foreign Service, they already had four
children: Domitilla, twins named Alice and Claire, and a son, Tom.
Throughout
their diplomatic life, she has been deeply involved in the visual arts.
While in Washington she served on the Ladies Board of the Corcoran
Museum and helped to organize the docent programs, an innovative method of
introducing public school children to art.
During the years that Tom was an Ambassador, Gaetana was
responsible for sponsoring exhibitions of American Art and opening the
Embassies in Canada, Belgium and Spain to school children and art
students.
When
her husband served in Cambodia, Gaetana founded a refugee organization
that took care of seventeen camps.
For her work she was honored by the chief of staff of the Cambodian
Army with the highest decoration of the Kmer government.
After
the fall of Vietnam in 1974, she was named by President Ford as the only
woman member on his Committee for Refugees which was responsible for
placing the first 375,000 refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
In that capacity, she traveled to refugee camps in the United
States and Thailand.
Tom became Ambassador to Canada in 1976 and Gaetana continued to
oversee refugee camps, working closely with the House of Commons to bring
about a change in the immigration laws to allow for greater number of
refugees to enter Canada.
Tom left the Foreign Service in the mid eighties and the Enders took up residence in New York. Gaetana accepted the position of International Editor Hello/Hola Magazines, two major weekly publications, for whom she is currently employed. She became President of the American Friends of Canada, an organization that promotes cultural exchanges between the United States and Canada, and currently serves on the Board of The Mexican Cultural Institute.
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