On June 10, Thomas Maresco blogged about his excitement for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, where he would root for the USA while serving as a Peace Corps volunteer.
On Aug. 5, he wrote about “the blood, sweat and tears” it took for him to obtain a pig to roast for July 4.
On Aug. 17, Maresco blogged for the last time on how surreal it felt to eat lunch “less than three feet” away from South African President Jacob Zuma.
On Friday, Maresco, a 24-year-old UF grad, died from a gunshot wound in Lesotho, a small country landlocked by South Africa.
He was serving as a secondary science teacher in Katse, a village in Lesotho.
According to a CNN report released Sunday, Lesotho Police Inspector Lekhotla Mojete said Maresco was observed leaving a function at a hotel in the capital city of Maseru when a stranger shot him Friday.
His family is still trying to obtain his body.
“Tom embodied what being a Peace Corps volunteer is all about,” Amy Panikowski, a UF Peace Corps recruiter, wrote in an e-mail. “He was a kind and enthusiastic individual who genuinely wanted to make a difference in the world. Our UF Peace Corps community is devastated by the loss of Tom, but we are comforted by the fact that we know Tom didn’t want to be anywhere else but in Lesotho.”
Originally from Port St. Lucie, Maresco graduated from UF in 2008 with a bachelor’s degree in biology and a minor in classical studies.
In November 2009, he arrived in Lesotho and began his Peace Corps service, which was to end in January 2012.
Besides teaching science to children, he also played guitar for them and coached them in a number of sports. In one of his blog posts, he described his basketball hoop-making project and posted pictures.
“A lot of planning, designing and hard work has gone into them (the hoops) so I hope you enjoy them as much as the students will,” Maresco wrote.
“He was a really unique individual and had a lot of different interests,” said Brett Owens, president of Sigma Chi fraternity, to which Maresco belonged to while he was a student. “He made the most out of life every single day and he was also concerned with where the world was going.”
Sigma Chi is planning to raise money to donate to the Peace Corps on behalf of Maresco, since members feel that is what he would have wanted to do. They will hold a memorial service the weekend of Sept. 25.
