City of Falls Church resident and Peace Corps volunteer Patricia Solley, 70, has successfully raised funds and completed project that transformed her English language classroom in Moldova. Before Solley’s work, the classroom was an austere, lecture-style facility with only a chalkboard.

After her work, the classroom became a student-centered English Resource Center packed with a high-tech smart board, a white board, a cork wall for displaying projects and a library full of English language books.

“I wanted to join at the start in the 1960s, when Sargent Shriver raised the banner, but my parents had other ideas,” Solley said of her decision to join the Peace Corps when she did. “So, when former Peace Corps Volunteer friends encouraged me to join upon my retirement, I felt the hand of fate on my shoulder.”

As a Peace Corps volunteer, Solley teaches English to second through sixth-graders, as well as to grades eight, nine and 12 at Liceul-Teoretic Vasile Anestiade in the village of Saratenii Vechi, Moldova. Prior to joining the Peace Corps, she worked at the FBI for 23 years, most notably serving as the chief speechwriter for FBI directors William Webster and William Sessions from 1986 to 1990, and as chief of Research/Communications for FBI director’s Louis Freeh and Robert Mueller.

Solley joins the 274 Virginia residents currently serving in the Peace Corps and more than 7,542 Virginia residents who have served in the Peace Corps since 1961. For more information, visit peacecorps.gov.