Bangkok. After the Khmer Rouge victory in April 1975, she began visiting refugee camps on the border of Thailand to help Cambodians who fled their country and sought refuge in Thailand. Plying the border with a small car, she brought them food and medicine and took into her house in Bangkok as many as she could help escape. In 1979, the Thai government forcibly repatriated thousands of Cambodian refugees. Pierpaoli, along with American Lionel Rosenblatt, rescued as many refugees as possible before they were forced across the border, especially at Preah Vihear Temple, where 40,000 Cambodians were pushed off a cliff into a minefield. Thousands died as they attempted to cross the minefield. Refugees International In 1985, Pierpaoli left her business and returned to France, settling near Uzès. She met a young monk from Guatemala, who described the plight of his country, just emerging from civil war. She founded a charity, collected money and went to Zaculeu, a village in Guatemala. Joined by several volunteers, she undertook to rebuild the houses, to dig wells and to return the land to cultivation, demonstrating that "a single person can sometimes achieve what large organizations cannot....I realized what made me different from others in how I conceptualized humanitarian work. They assumed that a project had to have ideas, personnel, and materials, and funds, all the elements of a project, first. In my mind, things happened in the opposite way....The idea of having to decide in advance how things were going to happen in order to arrive at a fixed objective seemed unnatural to me." Pierpaoli published her autobiography Woman of a Thousand Children in 1992 and became the European Representative of Refugees International (RI) the same year. During the 1990s, along with colleagues RI President Rosenblatt and Advocacy Director Larry Clinton Thompson, she undertook missions to humanitarian disaster areas in Mali, Niger, Bangladesh, Albania, and Southeast Asia. On April 18, 1999, while on a mission to assist refugees from Kosovo, she was one of four people killed in an automobile accident while traveling from Tirana to Kukës, Albania. References 1938 births 1999 deaths French humanitarians Women humanitarians Amateur radio people Amateur radio women