Faculty and Staff Opportunities

• College of Engineering’s Jordan Ermilio traveled to CRS-MG to deliver and install water monitoring equipment and train water utilities personnel to use it. He recruited interns and developed the orientation for the 8 week summer internships.  Jordan and Jim O’Brien were in MG in August to participate in a workshop with CRS/MG partners.
• The first phase of collaboration was piloted successfully in 2014-15 with Villanova incorporating some of the data from Madagascar into its academic programs. Two fall courses in the College of Engineering – Design of Gravity Water Networks and Water Resources Engineering Design – worked on designing solutions for clean water and sanitation systems.  In the spring semester, students in a French Internship course taught by Etienne Achille in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences translated major program reports from French into English and Villanova’s engineering designs into French, while students in a team-taught Business/Engineering Course (Global Social Entrepreneurship and Microfinance course) designed a template for assessing the business plans of the private utilities companies with whom CRS-MG works. There is one undergraduate senior research project and one graduate international development research fellow’s thesis.
• Five Villanova undergraduates and one graduate engineering international development fellow have interned with CRS and their partners in Madagascar for eight weeks during the summer.
• A Villanova team of faculty traveled to Madagascar in July where they visited CRS’ programming in sectors related to water and sanitation, business, and health and nutrition; offered initial observations and recommendations; gathered information and data for use in potential teaching, courses or research; and determined how to integrate this relationship into Villanova’s colleges and research centers. They also met with officials at the Madagascar and U.S. Embassies and government and church officials.

"One of the key themes of the partnership between CRS and Villanova this year is peacebuilding," says Maureen McCullough, director of the CRS northeast regional office in Philadelphia, who also went on the trip. "This was an opportunity for these faculty members to see peacebuilding in action and to deepen their understanding of CRS models of peacebuilding."

McCullough explains that the trip was also designed to enhance the CRS-Villanova partnership, a collaboration designed to strengthen both institutions' commitment to Catholic social teaching and other commonly held mission goals.

"An experience like this broadens our understanding of who we are as a Catholic university," Horner says. "CRS provides us with an opportunity to see ideas that are theories on campus actually play themselves out on the ground."

The trip took members to a variety of sites that memorialize the deaths, including the Catholic church in Nyamata where bullet holes poke through the tin roof of the sanctuary in which thousands died. Its basement is now a catacomb for the bones of the genocide victims.

"CRS opened doors for us," says Suzanne Toton, who teaches in the religious studies department and coordinates Villanova's partnership with CRS. "Never in a million years would we have had access to things we saw if not for the relationships CRS has built."

A major motivation for heading to Rwanda was the One Book Villanova program, which urges everyone on campus to read the same book and participate in discussions. The book for the 2007-08 academic year was Left to Tell by Immaculee Ilibagiza. Subtitled Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust, it chronicles Ilibagiza's horrifying experience during the killings and her subsequent discovery of the power of forgiveness. As part of the program, Ilibagiza gave a lecture on campus in January 2008.

"I was so impressed with her ability to forgive, to move on—not to forget, but to get to the place where she is at peace with herself," says trip participant Tom Mogan, director of student development, who was co-chair of the One Book program.

"After being there, I am even more impressed with her story, how she was able to find the strength to forgive the killers of her family," he says.

Rwanda is not like Germany and Eastern Europe after the Holocaust of World War II, where few victims survived and most who did, then left.

"Fourteen years later, the specter of genocide is still alive, the country is still in trauma, still grieving," says Horner. "It is trying to move forward, but there is no model to follow. The perpetrators are still amongst them."

Frances Keen, assistant dean and director of the undergraduate program at Villanova's school of nursing, says this is hard to imagine until you see it.

"If that had happened to me—if I knew that the man down the street had killed my parents—I would just move away," she says. "But they don't have that opportunity. This is the land they have, where their house is, their livelihood. So they are forced by their economic situation in many ways to find a way to deal with this."

The Villanova delegation visited both a Gacaca court—dealing with more minor crimes perpetrated during the genocide and using the community as the jury—and a CRS-sponsored workshop where Rwandans learn how to teach principles of reconciliation.

"In that room there were the widows of men who had been killed in the genocide and of those who committed genocide," Toton says of the workshop. "There were survivors and released prisoners. There were diocesan leaders. There were all these people who had come together—first of all—to work with one another on forgiving and rebuilding relationships and restoring community, and then to train others.

"Here were these people in the same room—which in my mind was just unimaginable, to bring them all together—now praying and singing and committing themselves, for the sake of their children, to building a different future," she says. "For me, this is the Church, this vision of justice and mercy and compassion and dignity that was very palpable in that room."

The delegation did not turn away from the controversy about the Rwandan Catholic Church's role during the genocide. Some clergy acted heroically, many died, but others have been accused of complicity in the killings.

"I asked a rector: How do you preach about God post-genocide? How do you restore faith in a God who was apparently silent? How do you restore trust in a Church that cooperated with the genocide?" says Toton. "I think the only way to do that is by the Church proving itself, telling the truth, not only individually but institutionally, proving that it is indeed committed to restoring life and dignity.

"CRS is helping the Church do this work," she says, "the work of justice, mercy and dignity."

Horner points to what he calls "a grass-roots movement in the Church."

"The country will heal from the bottom up, from the ground up, not from the top down," he says.

The group also visited a CRS agricultural program and another helping people dealing with HIV and AIDS, as well their children. Many in the group were impressed with their visit to a microfinance program run entirely by the Rwandan women who pool their money and decide how to lend it out.

"These women were just so diligent in making sure the money was appropriately accounted for," say LaRasz Moody, the academic support director in Villanova's law school. "It was really empowering to see that: these 24 women helping each other.

"Many were survivors of the genocide or had husbands killed because they were Tutsis. Others had husbands who were jailed as perpetrators," she says. "But they were all working together, supporting their children, able to rise above that to work for the common good and help each other."

All agree that what they saw in Rwanda would affect their lives at Villanova, whether it was Arvanites explaining a concept in a business class, Mogan talking to student groups about the importance of leadership, Horner adding another dimension to his teaching of the Holocaust or Keen telling nursing students about how complex health questions are in developing countries.

Horner says he came away particularly impressed with CRS.

"As a historian, I went in borderline cynical on how you go about helping people. The ads look good on TV, but I was very skeptical. So I was surprised I felt so impressed by CRS on all levels—the genuineness, the sincerity, as well as the practical side," he says. "They are really trying to build up programs in the country to be self-sufficient. They know the best thing that could happen is for CRS to work itself out of a job."

Toton took away her own lesson, which she plans to pass on to the Villanova community.

"I came out with a sense that forgiveness is possible, that reconciliation is possible, that hope is possible, that transformation is possible," she says. "I saw things happening in the most dire circumstance that I never would have believed could have been possible."

Michael Hill is CRS' communications officer for sub-Saharan Africa. He is based at the agency's headquarters in Baltimore.

Bridget Bucardo Rivera, '02
CRS Regional Technical Advisor for Capacity Strengthening; Regional Growth Manager, Latin America and the Caribbean Regional   

Lou Charest, '04, '08
CRS University Programs Advisor

Scott Hollingsworth, '09
CRS Director of Planning and Financial Analysis

Jennifer Maez, 13
CRS Manager Advocacy and Action

Ian Purcell, '05
CRS IT Project Manager

Jerica Youngken Itterly, '08
CRS Senior Program Funding Officer