Nikki Gamer: Hi, everyone, this is Nikki Gamer for Catholic Relief Services. And thanks for tuning into Behind the Story, a podcast series that gives you a backstage pass to putting your faith into action for global impact. In this episode, we’ll be talking to Sean Callahan, president and CEO, about his decades-long commitment to making a difference in some of the world’s toughest places. Sean shares his special relationship with Mother … now Saint … Teresa of Calcutta and some stories of her getting things done in sometimes surprising ways. And Sean will be talking about his bold new vision for the future—and about being at the precipice for creating transformational change for the world’s poorest people. Sean, welcome. It is so great to finally have you with us.

Sean Callahan: Thank you. Wonderful to be here.

Nikki Gamer: All right. Before we talk about what the future holds, I was hoping we could talk for a few minutes about some of your experiences. And you’ve been working for CRS for most of your career in the field. I don’t know how you would choose what to highlight—but, tell me, when you think about your career at CRS, what stands out?

Sean Callahan: Well, certainly working with Mother Teresa and some other Nobel laureates like the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu and Oscar Arias, some people like that. But Mother Teresa, I spent several years working with her in Calcutta and she was always very bold and wanted us to be bold in what we do. And so one of the occasions she called me up and said, “We need some trucks and supplies to go to Bangladesh.” And I said, “I can get you the supplies, but I can’t send them to Bangladesh because they were sent for India, and we need permission from the government.” So she said, “What do I have to do?” And I told her, and so she said, “Meet me at 2 o’clock.” So I loaded up the trucks, got down there at 2 o’clock, and there’s Mother waving these pieces of paper and saying, “Let’s go!” But she did something strange. She had six sisters with her, and put one sister in the first six trucks. And I thought, “Well, that’s a little strange, but if Mother wants to put a sister in the truck, great.”

Sean Callahan: It turned out, I found later that when they got to the border, there were 1,000 trucks. And as they got to this line of trucks, the first truck was going to pull behind the other ones. And he looked over at the sister, and the sister gave a hand motion, just said, “Keep going.” And he looked at her again, and she did it again, said, “Keep going.” So he passed the trucks, and the other trucks followed him, and they went down a little ways. And then the other truckers stopped them and started pulling out the driver because he was cutting in line, and they were a little bit upset. And he pointed over at the sister, and then they all got out of the truck and just waved them through. And so …

Nikki Gamer: Brilliant.

Sean Callahan: … there it goes. So one of her first miracles, you know.

Nikki Gamer: Brilliant. I love it. How do you bring your experiences to the vision you have for the next phase of our work?

Sean Callahan: You know, I must say, you stand on those who came before you. And I think the mission of CRS has just been an unbelievable mission, and I think we’re now poised to do even greater things and reach to the next level. And so, when I talk about us trying to be bold, you know, I reflect on Mother Teresa. She never said there was something she could not do. It’s just, how do we get it done? The other thing that Mother Teresa always taught me was humility. We need to be a little bit humble in what we do.

Nikki Gamer: Is there a danger in being too humble?

Sean Callahan: There can be a danger being too humble if we don’t tell people the right way to do things. And what I mean by that is the reason why I’ve supported CRS personally, and I’m really proud of what we do, is because our development is the best way to do development. When we did HIV/AIDS programming, and started out with our programming in that area, we did some research, and we went out there and we worked with the local communities. When the PEPFAR—the President’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief—when they did some investigation of which programs have worked the best, they looked at four organizations. And we happened to be one, and our numbers were double the others. Now, they naturally thought, “Oh, this religious organization against these universities and these professional organizations, their numbers must be wrong.”

Sean Callahan: Well, they came back and found out that the numbers were right. And the reason the numbers were right, it was, basically, trust, that we had the trust of the local communities and so they could change their behaviors. So the fact that we’re linked to those local communities gives us the credibility to do that. And so the Church allows us to do that because it’s so present throughout the world. And that humility that our staff has in working with those local communities, and with the local Church, helps them become part of those communities. I was in Niger and took this bishop. And as we were going to these projects, he turned to me and he said, “I can’t tell the difference between the CRS staff and my staff.” And I just turned to him and I said, “Thank you, bishop.” Because that was …

Nikki Gamer:  … the best compliment.

Sean Callahan: … the best compliment. Exactly.

Nikki Gamer: What’s kept you at CRS? Why stay for decades instead of going to another organization?

Sean Callahan: It’s really kind of, kind of funny. As I look back, I always considered myself one of the young ones at CRS, you know, when I first came in as an intern back in the good old days. And now it’s been 30 years, so over half of my lifetime I have been with CRS. My aunt and uncle were both Maryknoll missionaries. And so I grew up on the old slideshows of Maryknoll missionaries clearing landing strips in the highlands of Guatemala and things like that. And I felt that calling and all at different times. But I didn’t think that there was a place for a lay person, and so seeing it in CRS, seeing the contributions we could make …

Sean Callahan: And the job never stays the same because the world is constantly evolving. And in CRS, you can progress to different ranks. But each country you go to, each community—it’s like being a cultural anthropologist—you have to figure out how to solve the next problem. And we have fantastic staff … you just learn from them every day. And it’s really motivating to see the commitment that they have seeing people come out of complete destruction, and holding their heads high and having that dignity. I thought, “Other people need to know this, and we need to continue to support that.” And so that really touched me and has kept me with CRS these 30 years now.

Nikki Gamer: Let’s talk for a minute about your faith and what faith meant to you before starting at CRS, and how maybe your faith has even evolved over time.

Sean Callahan: As I’ve mentioned before, my aunt and uncle being missionaries and all, it was kind of part of the family. So you always contributed to the Church and you always did the Church, and it was part obligation and part who you were—that we went to church every week. And, of course, the priest loved us because they could get the Callahans there for 7a.m. Mass. And they had the three boys … would be out there being altar boys, because there’s six in my family. So, you know, good Irish Catholics. But then actually I saw my faith in a different way, and it was really living my faith as opposed to being of the faith. And so with CRS I see that we live that faith every single day and we see others living it. Seeing that we can live our faith in many different countries and with many different people, and that we’re not alone and it’s just not those Irish Catholics, but it’s those Hispanic Catholics and those African Catholics and those American Catholics. And we had one bond, one unity to move things forward.

Nikki Gamer: And what I didn’t know about CRS is that it’s in so many non-Catholic countries, and it’s across the Middle East. And even despite that, there is a lot of solidarity.

Sean Callahan: That’s one of the things I’m most proud of at CRS. I’ve been to Niger and the head of our program in Niger, his name is Ali Abdoulaye. And went up there, and with the bishops we were visiting various programs and the bishop said, “You know, Ali Abdoulaye, the head of a Catholic organization …” He said, “We got a problem here.” But he said, “That’s before I went out and saw your program.” He said, “Now when I look at the programs,” he said,” I’m thinking, ‘Wow,’ I was just looking down. Now I’m looking out and looking up. And we need to welcome other people in.” And he said,“The fact that in your programs you have an imam and his wife teaching smart couples how to better communicate and prevent diseases in their communities, how you have the Christians and the Muslims in this area that’s fraught with violence—and where some churches most recently were burnt—working together…” He said, “That is the true Gospel of the Church.” I’m hoping that we can be more and more of that convener of all different faiths because of that universality of the Catholic Church and the principles that we espouse.

Nikki Gamer: We’ve heard you say that we’re at an important point in our work here at CRS right now, where we can bring real transformation for the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people. What do you mean by that?

Sean Callahan: What I mean is, when I started with CRS, we did excellent work—but it was with a community, with a village, with a diocese. We have now grown that we do it with a country, with a region of a continent, with a whole continent. And so I think now we’re at the time that we can make worldwide change. So, the moment is special because right now we’re at the precipice. For instance, with malaria, we’ve done some work and we’ve got to a point where we can really just move that ball from the 10-yard line. We can move it down to the goal line and get it across that goal line. Similarly, with HIV/AIDS, we had built a reputation over the past 75 years that has helped people understand that they’re not fooling around when they say they’re going to do something. They actually get it done, and they do it.

Nikki Gamer: I want to talk about impact. Because critics of U.S. foreign aid, they might say, “Well, how do we know we’re making change? We keep sending money to the same poor countries over and over again, and we’re going to keep having to send them money.”

Sean Callahan: So, I love that question. Our current strategy is here to prove that—and we’re going to put out numbers that say exactly what we’re going to do. So when people say, you know, what can you do? Since our malaria programs have been operating in West Africa, the World Health Organization estimates that 5 million children are alive today that wouldn’t be alive. So to me, there’s 5 million lives that you have saved. When we look at agriculture, how many people are we going to bring up above poverty? So our goal that we’re looking at and our new strategy is, “Can we help 10 million farmers get out of poverty and earn a sustainable income for their families?” So this isn’t about, we’re “hoping” to do good. You’ll start seeing that these numbers are going to prove what we’re doing, and we’ll have third parties proving it.

Nikki Gamer: Those are amazing goal posts. However, to push back one more time, you know, so why does that matter to American Catholics? Why does that matter?

Sean Callahan: Well, it matters because we’re—you know, as many people say—we’re not in a world that’s isolated. I was just in Mexico and visited with a community that had migrated to Mexico. And I saw this woman holding a 2-month-old baby, and at her skirt was a 2-year-old girl. And so I went up to her, and I said, “Why would you have migrated from your home with a 2-month-old baby, you know, and a 2-year-old?” And she said,“’Cause the gangs tried to kidnap my 2-year-old, and I knew that if I stayed there, they would get her the next time. And so I just ran and got out.” So this woman isn’t looking to America as the economic opportunity. She’s looking for safety for her children. And so we need to be there, and we need to provide that security in her home country, so she’s not forced to migrate.

Nikki Gamer: And how do you see us working differently to accomplish this vision?

Sean Callahan: Let me give you a specific example. In Syria, they didn’t have much of a social service network or organization there, and so as we started working in Syria, we said to the local churches, “Do you have some people that you recommend that we build the capacity?” And we started off with one group—and to be honest with you, that group didn’t hang on, and they wanted to leave the country, and they left. And we did it with another group, and they didn’t stay either and they left. And then we got this third group, and now they’re staying and they’re building up. So it’s not that it works the first time when you try to do this. But we had the commitment along with some of our other partners, and we work with Catholic agencies around the world from Europe, and from Oceania, and from Africa and other places all together trying to build the capacity of these local partners. And so once you build those capacities, then it’s continuing to elevate their level. And we see now in the United States when you go to the various parishes and, and my parish, I’ve had a Cameroonian and a Kenyan priest in my diocese. And so they’re now, the people that we were building the capacity, coming back and giving back to us in the form of priests and religious communities. And we can continue to go and learn from them. So it’s really a two-way street of capacity building.

Nikki Gamer: It’s a little bit like success looks like working ourselves out of a job.

Sean Callahan: It is. And we constantly say that. Now I will caveat that, unfortunately, I don’t see us working ourselves out of a job tomorrow because there’s too many countries that are in strife right now, too many countries that are subject to violence and too many countries where the human dignity of the family is not respected. So once people understand that peace costs a lot less than war,when people understand that helping your brother and sister is a lot better than exploiting your brother and sister—then we will be truly out of a job.But then the Kingdom of God will be here already, and we’ll be ready to take our next step.

Nikki Gamer: What do you see as some of the biggest challenges as we try to make this transformational change?

Sean Callahan: The first challenge is in the United States.We are very busy people, very generous, generous people, but also very busy, and it’s to convince the people in the United States that it is worth it for them to invest in their brothers and sisters overseas. I’d say the second one is, internationally, a movement for peace—that we really have to assist as we can as Americans and as universal and global citizens—is stopping the wars or preventing wars that are going to happen. Because war ends up setting back the time clock on development for all these different people. That’s why, in our new strategy, not only do we have these ambitious goals moving forward, but we also want to interject peacebuilding and nonviolence into everything that we do.

Nikki Gamer: And social cohesion.

Sean Callahan: Social cohesion—building and binding these people and strengthening their capacity. We want communities to be together.

Nikki Gamer: For our Catholic donors, our amazing Catholic partners here in the U.S. They’re listening to this podcast, and they really believe in the mission of CRS and where we’re going. What can they do to be a part of that transformation?

Sean Callahan: The contributions they make—and hopefully they’ll continue to make and see—are really having definite results and we’re committed as an agency to show them the positiveness of that result. The other thing that I think they need to do is welcome others. I think we need to be able to share this wonderful work that we’re doing, these experiences with others.

Nikki Gamer: So how does being a faith-based organization make us different than secular organizations?

Sean Callahan: Well,the first thing is, the most important aspect of development is trust, is gaining that trust of local community. So some organizations parachute into areas because they don’t have a natural network or setup in there. As a faith-based organization, we have local organizations throughout the world. So, we’re part of a Caritas international organization. There’s 165 members, and we have a Catholic diocese or a Catholic religious order or social community in every country in which we work in. And so right away, we’ve got an acceptance with the local community because we’ve had people who have earned that local trust.

Sean Callahan: We also have the ability to raise things up to a different level within countries because of that Catholic community. I happened to be in Guinea at the time when they said, “Uh-oh, the Ebola virus has arrived here.” And there was real panic, and in there and Liberia and Sierra Leone. But what ended up happening is the governments took some steps, and the steps were to separate people, and they often did it by force. And that wasn’t accepted by the local community. It made people more panicky and didn’t solve the problem. Because the problem was behavior change.

Sean Callahan: So, the governments finally reached out to the religious community and the faith leaders and said, “How can you help us?” And the first thing we did was safe and dignified burials, because a lot of the virus was being passed in the traditional custom of washing people and caring for them after their death. And so our staff went in with protective gear on and helped them have these traditional customs taken care of, but done in a safe way. And so it wasn’t force that stopped the Ebola virus, but it was behavior change. And because these religious communities had the respect and trust of the local communities, they were successful in doing so.

Nikki Gamer: You really can see that this work impacts you in a really deep way. What does this job mean to you?

Sean Callahan: I always kind of reflect and, you know, I think about things before I’m going to say ’em, so I try not to get emotional. But, you know, as I see the faces of these little children and think of my own kids and things like that, and think, you know, “What should I be doing, what can I be doing?” These children around the world aren’t some foreign kids. They’re a gift from God, and we need to play that role in helping those lives thrive. And so I personally see each one of these as one of my own children and that we need to do something to make sure that they have that safe opportunity like I would for one of my own biological children.

Nikki Gamer: What does your wife or your kids think about the work that you do? And you must travel so much that you might not see them as much as you’d like.

Sean Callahan: I think my family, on the one hand, kind of curses the work I do ’cause I’m away. But we’re blessed in the United States to have a relatively easy life. But I’ve also been blessed that my daughter was able to spend a summer with the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta working in their centers. My wife has been out to visit the programs, and my son, because my wife is from Calcutta, that’s a second home to him, and he’ll be going back this coming summer. So, they need to be able to see and experience, and see that they’re not just an Irish American from this little town in the United States, that they’re actually a citizen of the world. And so when they hear about our work and they see it, they don’t like me being away, but they do love the work that we’re doing.

Nikki Gamer: Sean, what do you see as the next frontier?

Sean Callahan: I really think the next frontier is ensuring a peaceful world where we work. And so really building on that peace and reconciliation, the different countries and stopping wars before they start. Because after a war, it takes 10 years to recoup to the same level and 20 years to get any development. So for us to be successful in the future, we can’t respond to wars. We have to be there to prevent the wars, and so we need to do more in the advocacy, more in mobilizing people in the United States, more in using our influence to not allow the Syrias and the Iraqs to happen. We’re lucky at CRS to be able to do the work that we do and to work with the people. I just invite others to join with us in this work because I think once they feel what we feel, and once they see what we see, and once they know the people that we know, it can’t help but enrich their lives. And then they can’t help but assist these people in a new way that will make the world a better place for their children and ours.

Nikki Gamer: Well said.

Sean Callahan: Thank you.

Nikki Gamer: Sean Callahan. It has been a real pleasure. Thank you for sharing this with us.

Sean Callahan: Pleasure’s all mine. Thank you.

Nikki Gamer: As you’re heard, behind every CRS story are the people who put faith into action to help the world’s poorest people create lasting change for themselves and for their communities. Sean—he is certainly one of those people, but there are thousands of other stories like his … and we want to share them with you. Thank you so much for listening.

The post Looking Forward first appeared on CRS 75th Anniversary.

Nikki Gamer: Hi everyone, this is Nikki Gamer for Catholic Relief Services. And welcome back to Behind the Story, a podcast series that invites you to celebrate the people behind 75 years of our history—the people we serve, our partners, our staff … and especially the supporters like you who make our work possible. In our last episode we spoke to Nathalie and Dave Piraino—both former CRS staff—about the Rwandan genocide that shocked the world in April of 1994 and changed the way we approach our programs in the midst of conflict and cultural tensions. But today we’ll be talking about a time—less than 20 years ago—when people said it was just too expensive …  too risky … too hard …  to stem the deadly tide of HIV and AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. They said it couldn’t be done. But, of course, they were wrong. We’ll be talking to Michele Broemmelsiek, CRS’ vice president of Overseas Operations, and Dr. Carl Stecker, CRS senior technical advisor for HIV and global health—both of whom were on the front lines of our HIV work … and the impact it had on millions of people. Michele, Dr. Stecker, thank you so much for being with us and for taking time to tell this important story.

Michele Broemmelsiek: Well, thank you, Nikki. I’m really excited to be here.

Dr. Carl Stecker: And we’ve got some great stories we want to tell you.

Nikki Gamer: All right, so we have a lot to cover here, but I want to start with you, Michele. Can you take us back in time to sub-Saharan Africa as we were entering into our HIV work, and can you paint us a picture of what it was like in one of the hardest-hit countries—like Zambia?

Michele Broemmelsiek: Thank you, Nikki. My own story, in my career with CRS, intersected the HIV crisis in the year of 2001. And that was when I moved my husband and my 2-year-old daughter from Indonesia, where I was working for CRS. And I had my first job as country representative in Zambia. And actually, CRS had just opened our office there, and I had to learn on the ground what was going on. And, really, that was an experience of HIV. So maybe to connect the dots between what I saw and what the statistics were at the time … if you can imagine in Zambia, which had a population of 12 million, about that time. It’s a very large country. It’s twice the size of the state of California.

Nikki Gamer: Oh, wow.

Michele Broemmelsiek: So they had every month, 10,000 people dying from HIV. So that was like a 747 crashing every day in that country, every day of the year, that entire year, which led to 120,000 people died that year.

Michele Broemmelsiek: We had about seven staff. Two of us were American and the other five were Zambian. And every week someone on that team had a significant family member—a parent, a spouse, a sibling—die. They were going to significant funerals every week. So in the first year, I ended up attending a funeral. There were a row of people digging graves, and the grave diggers finished a row of graves 12 wide. So the funerals would all start simultaneously at those 12 graves, and they were digging another 12. And this was happening in three or four parts of the same cemetery that entire day.

Michele Broemmelsiek: So one of the reasons so many people were dying is there was no drugs. That means basically you’re just doing care for the sick. And the Catholic Church was really at the forefront … was help people die with dignity. You’re trying to pray with them, but you couldn’t offer them anything other than death.

Nikki Gamer: What does that mean when someone is diagnosed back in 2001? What does that mean for him or her?

Dr. Carl Stecker: I lived and worked in Cameroon, in the Central African Republic, for almost 20 years. And starting in the late ’70s, early ’80s, my wife and I—both as registered nurses—worked as missionaries in health care. In the early 2000s … I come to CRS in 2002 and begin work providing technical assistance to country programs who are struggling, as Michele described, how do we deal with HIV?

Dr. Carl Stecker: And I specifically remember arriving in Entebbe in Uganda, and there’s about a 40-minute drive from Entebbe to Kampala, the capital, where the CRS office was. All along the way were furniture makers making coffins … big billboards, scary billboards about “HIV kills.”

Nikki Gamer: So you go into a clinic back then and you get your blood tested and you’re told, “Yes, you have HIV.” How long from that point to developing full blown AIDS to passing away from this disease?

Dr. Carl Stecker: Test kits didn’t become available until in the late ’90s, and available in Africa until much after that. So you went through everything: It’s not a cold, it’s not the flu, it’s not just diarrhea, it’s not amoebic dysentery. And then you figured out with the combination of many different illnesses—Oh, this is AIDS, acquired immune deficiency syndrome—that this person must be HIV-positive. So then you began to treat what illness you could treat, but then you cared for the person because eventually they were going to die. But there was no cure for HIV. There is no vaccine for HIV. And so this was just hospice care, helping people to die with dignity.

Nikki Gamer: So we think of HIV here in the U.S. nowadays as chronic, but it’s treatable. But back then, it was really a death sentence.

Michele Broemmelsiek: And people would try so hard to do the few things they could to help their family. And so one thing they would do—Carl mentioned that you’d see all these coffin makers. It really was the best income-generating activity you could support people to do … which is, which is horrific because everyone was dying. But people would go out, because they didn’t want to pauper their family, and they would buy their coffin ahead of time. And they would literally sleep on top of it because that was the only piece of furniture they would have left. They knew if they didn’t, the cost to the family would be devastation beyond just the loss of that person’s life.

Nikki Gamer: What did HIV do to families, and then communities? Because I read that once someone was diagnosed, they were literally ostracized or isolated.

Dr. Carl Stecker: Yeah, so we saw shame, discrimination, stigma. We were often within our programs trying to get across the message that the only way that you can get HIV is exchange of bodily fluids. At one point in time in the early 2000s, the 10 countries with the most orphans and vulnerable children in the world were in Africa—all 10 of them having more than a million children that were orphaned.

Nikki Gamer: So Michele, can you talk for a minute about what that does to an economy, or even an entire country?

Michele Broemmelsiek: So we think in our head that this was mostly poor people, and, of course, there were many poor people who had HIV. But really the drivers—the people who are moving around and had multiple partners or were going to school and contracted HIV while they were in school—were people who were getting education. This destructive disease, in and of itself, would have been enough, right? To just, you know, take apart families, take apart culture and society. But on top of that, if you layer the stigma that Carl was speaking of, you know, which grew out of the fact that in the U.S., HIV in the beginning was passed mostly through homosexual contact. So that wasn’t true in Africa.

Michele Broemmelsiek: One of the things that for me was the most heartbreaking, was, building on what Carl said, about the million orphans. You know, the aunts, the uncles, the parents—and sometimes even the grandparents—were dying. You ended up with child-headed households, usually a teenager caring for their siblings. And I visited many of these households where you would have a 13- or 14-year-old taking care of a 2-year-old, trying to get the 2-year-old to hospital because they kept getting sick. So that that sense of the burden and the breakdown of what we even considered to be a family, and the care of a family, wasn’t even happening at the height of the crisis.

Nikki Gamer: Wow. That’s a pretty dire picture. Give me the scope when this was at its worst. What are we talking in terms of number of countries affected and number of people?

Dr. Carl Stecker: The height of the epidemic in Africa arrived in the mid-2000s—2004, 2005—when there were over 2 million deaths a year from HIV on the African continent, estimated, for both of those years each. So 4 million deaths just in 2004 and 2005. A lot of it was in southern Africa, eastern Africa … less so in central Africa, and even less so in West Africa.

Nikki Gamer: Can you tell us: Why did HIV spread in this part of the world in particular … and why so rapidly?

Michele Broemmelsiek: If someone is HIV positive, and they’re driving a truck thousands of kilometers across Africa and they’re stopping multiple times and they have relationships in those communities, then it spreads, right? So those people in those communities may have relationships. So that’s one factor … is the trucking routes. The other is that in southern Africa you have a lot of mining companies, so you have gold mining, diamond mining. So usually men leave their family in Zimbabwe or Zambia or South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, Botswana. They go to the mine, and they return home. So while they’re away, they have relationships in that town where they’re living at the mine.

Nikki Gamer: Would you say the Catholic way of approaching HIV… how is that different than what others were doing at the time?

Michele Broemmelsiek: I think that the main response before there were drugs was to encourage people to use condoms. And that was something that the Catholic Church never felt was the right response. We instead added another voice, which is to say, we care about you, we care about your dignity, here’s some other options that we want you to think about—positive living, abstaining, delaying sexual debut and being faithful. And how do you provide hope? How do you fight the fear? I think that the home-based care was one small way, because we could say we are people who care, we will care to the day you die and beyond, we will care about you, we will care about your family.

Nikki Gamer: Let’s talk about the turning point in the epidemic. Dr. Stecker, what was the game changer?

Dr. Carl Stecker: Oh, it was definitely the announcement at the State of the Union address by President Bush in February of 2003 for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, what we call PEPFAR, which announced $15 billion to work over the next 5 years, 2004 to 2008, in what they were calling 13 high prevalence, or high priority, countries. By Thanksgiving Day of 2003, we had the announcements of two large global grant opportunities that were only open to those organizations that could respond in at least three different countries. And then on World AIDS day, December 1, 2003—so just less than a week later—the large announcement on the availability of antiretroviral therapy. So when the announcement was made in 2003, we had the availability of a cocktail of drugs—and the U.S. had already been treating with three drugs and finding very good results.

Dr. Carl Stecker: I think one of our biggest challenges in thinking about providing antiretroviral therapy was that it’s not a cure. It’s like high blood pressure, for which you’re taking some medication for the rest of your life. And while there’s $15 billion available over the next 5 years, how are we—as Catholic Relief Services, involved in HIV in many countries around the world—going to start somebody on antiretroviral therapy knowing that the funding might end after 5 years? We knew that we couldn’t meet the criteria on our own. And so we had to create a consortium of partners at a central level. Then to propose that we would work in a number of those 13 high priority countries that would become PEPFAR countries.

Nikki Gamer: Can you tell us a little bit more about some of the obstacles to addressing this epidemic? I would imagine even basic infrastructure … like hospitals … were not in place in many of these communities.

Michele Broemmelsiek: They’re not like the hospital that we imagine. They’re very modest, you know, maybe around 50 beds. The doctors have no experience with HIV or AIDS. The nursing staff have to know about how they care for these patients. If you went into a hospital at the beginning of the rollout of treatment and you asked to see their records, they would often tell you they had no records. Or you’d go into their record room and it would just be stacks of pieces of paper that didn’t have a filing system—and in treating HIV, you cannot do that.

Michele Broemmelsiek: You also have to have a pharmacy that functions. In addition, you had to have a lab that had to run lab tests using the latest technology and the latest laboratory equipment. You’d have to have the support of the government to make sure that all of these pieces came together. There were some hospitals in Zambia that didn’t have any electricity or running water. So the fundamental step wasn’t, “Can I get them the lab equipment?” It was, can I get them water and electricity so that they can serve all of these hundreds of people who are dying in their community.

Michele Broemmelsiek: But it was amazing what that team did. And everyone was there because they really wanted to end AIDS. We had partners on the ground where we knew that there were good, strong hospitals that we could develop. Even if they didn’t have everything in place, we knew we could build their capacity because the vision from the beginning of the proposal design was that we wanted to end this project by handing it over to local organizations.

Nikki Gamer: What was it like to be out on the front lines of this epidemic at that time? And then when you’re working around the clock trying to build this thing, what was that like for you and even your families?

Dr. Carl Stecker: We quickly put together three startup teams and went out concurrently. And over a period of 3 months, we went to nine countries and made the initial contacts with, or the subsequent contacts with, all of the in-country partners, with the ministries of health, their national AIDS control councils, with the U.S. government entity that would be overseeing our work in the country. We met our targets of putting over 14,000 people on treatment in the first year, which doesn’t sound like very much. But to start up in nine countries—really, it was huge. We met our second-year targets as well, and had over 40,000 people on therapy at the end of year 2. And then it just exponentially, you know, developed after that. Personally, and with my family, I was gone almost 70% of the time. Sometimes at the drop of a hat. I remember a Thursday afternoon getting called from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta saying,“There’s a meeting in South Africa on Monday morning at 9 a.m. You need to be there.”

Nikki Gamer: Michele?

Michele Broemmelsiek: I was experiencing this whole rollout from a different seat on the field side, of getting the team together there. You’re in an environment, as we talked about, of stigma and fear. And yet now if there’s treatment—that’s a totally different world. So, you started to see people accepting the possibility that there might be light at the end of this tunnel instead of death, right? That there might be life. And that’s why you do it.

Nikki Gamer: So, is there a story that particularly stands out for you about the importance of this project and the real impact it had … or maybe even continues to have?

Michele Broemmelsiek: One of the project directors said, “I just had a meeting, I need to tell you about it. I went to a community meeting and there was a mother there with her daughter.” And the mother’s name was Frieda and she was dying from AIDS, and her daughter was on her lap and she was called Pretty, and she said it was true. She was this beautiful, pretty child, and the mother said, “I’m going to die. How is this program going to take care of my child?” And that, that sense of like, wow, that’s all we can say is we’re going to do our best to help you take care and to have a good death. This was before treatment and, and then to have that image of that mother who loved her child beyond measure and could only imagine,“What’s going to happen to my child? I don’t care about myself. What’s going to happen to my child?”

Nikki Gamer: Carl, I want to turn to you for a minute. What story drives the impact home?

Dr. Carl Stecker: I remember Bridget came from Zambia. She had lost her husband to HIV, discovered that she herself was HIV positive, got very thin. We saw a Lazarus effect. And what we mean by that is that people were sometimes literally brought into the hospital or the institution in a wheelbarrow. And you would see them up and walking and go back to work. She was a schoolteacher.She is one of those people that had that experience of the Lazarus effect—of being really, literally brought back to her former life. But she continued on, to provide home-based care and to be a treatment buddy to other members in her community that were living with HIV … to be an encouragement for them,that they needed to take their drugs everyday.

Dr. Carl Stecker: We brought Bridget over to be a spokesperson for AIDSRelief, coming from Zambia. And she was here for a month, and she went and spoke in several parishes and dioceses at meetings. We also took her down to Washington and introduced her to decision-makers of whether PEPFAR would continue or not.

Michele Broemmelsiek: I would, I would say if I was thinking about the impact and what I’m taking away from this, this experience of working on this amazing effort of AIDSRelief. I feel like at the end of the day, we can imagine the end of AIDS if we treat at least 80% of the people in a country who need treatment. If you get a certain percentage of your population on treatment and virally suppressed, you no longer have an epidemic. And what can we imagine? Africa without AIDS. The world without AIDS. That’s possible.

Michele Broemmelsiek: They said it couldn’t be done.And why don’t we believe in an AIDS-free world, even if it’s hard? But I think that this is the kind of work that CRS is about. And this is why we should continue to believe that it can be done.

Nikki Gamer: It sounds like there’s still a lot of work to do.

Michele Broemmelsiek: Definitely.

Dr. Carl Stecker: Yes.

Nikki Gamer: Thank you both so much.

Dr. Carl Stecker: Thank you, Nikki. It was really good to relive some of that experience. It really was an amazing time—and being in the right place at the right time with the right people and the right organization to lead and do this. It was an amazing thing to, to have a role in eradicating AIDS.

Michele Broemmelsiek: I’m so happy to have had the opportunity to hear Carl’s story and to tell the story of what happened with AIDS relief at CRS.

Nikki Gamer: It is hard to believe, but we’ve come to the end of our year-long journey celebrating 75 years of CRS history through our Behind the Story podcast series. And I’m truly inspired by all we’ve learned through 12 podcasts and 75 years of compassion, partnership and solidarity that define who we all are as part of the CRS family. And I hope you have too.

Nikki Gamer: But we’re not done yet … not even by a long shot. We have a little surprise for you. We thought: What better way to wrap up a year-long journey through our history than to take a look at what awaits us in the future? So we’re putting away our way-back time machine and taking out our crystal ball … with an extra podcast … it’s a bonus that will feature CRS President and CEO Sean Callahan. And he’ll be talking to us about his bold new vision for 2019—and way beyond—to create real and lasting change for the world’s most vulnerable people.

Nikki Gamer: Be sure to check it out on 75.crs.org. Or search “CRS 75th Anniversary” on iTunes to download all your favorite episodes. And from all of us at CRS, we wish you all a very Merry Christmas and all the best in the 2019! And don’t forget to keep an eye out for what’s next!

The post first appeared on CRS 75th Anniversary.

Nikki Gamer: Hi everyone, this is Nikki Gamer for Catholic Relief Services. And welcome back to Behind the Story, a podcast series that invites you to celebrate the people behind 75 years of our history—the people we serve, our partners, our staff … and especially the supporters who make our work possible. In our last episode we met Dave and Nathalie Piraino, former CRS employees, who began telling the very difficult story of events leading up to the Rwandan genocide of April 1994 … when nearly a million people were killed in just 100 days. Nathalie is Rwandan, and they met and married when Dave took an assignment to Rwanda in the late 1970s.

Last month, Nathalie took us back to her childhood as part of a fun-loving, devoutly Catholic Tutsi family that began to feel the effects of civil war and discrimination years before the genocide.

Nikki Gamer: We left the story just as Nathalie and her Tutsi classmates were kicked out of school because of mounting violence. Through the kindness of strangers, they began making their escape on foot through the mountains, hiding in tall grass as homes were being burned around them. Let’s listen to what happened next …

Nathalie Piraino: We heard somebody whistling. Uh-oh, they found us. It was a Hutu priest. God bless you—they killed him in the genocide. Anyway, he said, “Other kids are at the parish.” “Where is the parish?” So he said, “It’s like 10 minutes from here.” He said, “But I cannot take you with me.” “Please, please.” We begged. He said, “No, if I take you, they kill you.” He showed us how to go down the hill. Then, he said, “Go down, turn left.” Oh my God. We felt like we died and went to heaven. We walked a little bit. There were these guys, the killers—sweating and with machetes, and it’s like, oooh, your heart is beating and you’re whispering Our Fathers, Hail Marys, as many as you could handle. Oh God, if we die here our parents will never know where we died or who killed us. We run up there, and poor priest, he was waiting for us at the gate.

Nikki Gamer: Wow, what a story. Dave, can you give us some context about how CRS was working in Rwanda in those days, before the genocide? And how we might have seen what was coming?

Dave Piraino: Yeah, CRS Rwanda worked through partners, particularly the Catholic Church with different parishes, but also with other local partners. And, in fact, one of our bigger programs was all the high schools were boarding schools, and CRS supplied those schools with food so that the students could have a good meal during the day. At that time in Africa, we were just starting what became our largest program across Africa, maternal child health programming.

So it was a way to encourage and educate people more to the link between health, eating and growth.

Nikki Gamer: Nathalie, you were fed by CRS as a child, right?

Nathalie Piraino: They fed me when I was a kid. So when we lived in the refugee camp, we left everything behind. So my parents and my older sister Tereza will go to get food, milk with that USAID hand check on the powdered milk, rice and yellow cornmeal. We were fed by CRS in elementary school. Lunchtime, you lined up, they give you two scoops of rice and milk, and you gobble it down.

Dave Piraino: In addition to the food and the weighing and the education, we would do some small projects related to food, like chicken raising or vegetable gardening, and relate those to health and the well-being of the child. We also had some agricultural projects in Rwanda.

Dave Piraino: But just to get back to one of your questions about the tensions between Hutu and Tutsi, there was a quota system for a lot of things in Rwanda. The government said they were basically 10% of the people in Rwanda—although that was questionable … many people thought there were more. But only 10% of the people could go to school and get jobs, and all of that. So one day, not too long after I got there, I was called into the office of the police, and they wanted to question me about our hiring practices. And they said, “Well you have a problem. And here’s the problem: You have 18 people, and you have two Tutsis. You’re only allowed to have 10% and you don’t have 20 staff so you must fire one of your Tutsis in the next week and come back in that period of time.”

Dave Piraino:  And I thought that is terrible. So I talked to the embassy to see if they could help us. I talked to the apostolic nuncio. I talked to some other nonprofits there, and they all said that’s the way it is here. So we ended up looking at the two Tutsis. One was an older gentleman who had actually been set to retire in another 8 months or 10 months, so we ended up firing him. And the other one luckily was younger, who had just started working with CRS, but that was a real wake-up call for me.

Nikki Gamer: Yeah, how did that impact your morale? I mean, because here you are married to a woman who’s a Tutsi and your children are Tutsi, I can imagine. So how did that impact you?

Dave Piraino: I felt helpless. I was in a system that promoted this and it appeared there was no way to get around it, and you have to bite your tongue, and figure that you’ve got to keep going and do it the best you can.

Nikki Gamer: What year was this?

Dave Piraino: This was 1978.

Nikki Gamer: Okay, so quite a few years before the actual genocide …

Dave Piraino: Yes, it was …

Nikki Gamer: The question then becomes, how did CRS not see this coming If we are in the country, if we are experiencing things like that. What went wrong in our own system?

Nathalie Piraino: I think every institution, with the exception of those who planned it, were taken off guard. If they knew they would have tried to flee, even if you cannot have the entire family run away, at least a few. I know within my family, at least my youngest siblings would have fled if they knew that they were going to be wiped out.

Dave Piraino: Well, for Catholic Relief Services, we were very focused on social economic development. That’s what we did. And we were an agency that didn’t get into politics. And for us, by not looking beyond our projects, we didn’t really look at the relationship between people.

I think as an agency, we looked at our work. We looked at what has to happen and what we could do differently. What were the relationships within the country that could affect the people? What was the government? Not that we wanted to feel we had to get involved with government issues, but we realized we have to know how those relationships, whether they’re good or bad, would impact on the people that we were working with—and then we might have to change how we would approach our projects.

Nikki Gamer: And from my understanding, the focus on peacebuilding came out of that.

Dave Piraino: Yes, that’s correct. And out of that, where we ended up is going back to Catholic social teaching. And we wanted to look through what we called the “justice lens” and look at the principles of Catholic social teaching, which basically were the idea of the dignity of every human person, the rights and responsibility of people. We wanted the people closest to problems, the people that knew the problem best to not only help solve it, but to identify what it was.

And of course, solidarity—together as a team and with various people in agencies. So the next 2 years after these initiatives were taken, every country program, including headquarters here in Baltimore, had to go through a process that we call the justice reflection. They had to look at their programming, they had to look at the relationships within the office, within their staff, within management and within the country, through this justice lens that basically focused on these principles of Catholic social teaching.

Nikki Gamer: So it’s 1994. You are living in Baltimore, and Nathalie, tell us what was going on at that time in Rwanda. What you were hearing from your family in the days leading up to the genocide?

Nathalie Piraino: I remember the last time I talked to my mom was the 26th …

Nikki Gamer: What month was this? …

Nathalie Piraino: Of February, a month and a half before they killed them. I used to call, not too often, but she wouldn’t say much on the phone because this is, again, the fear people carried over the years that the government may be listening in so she wouldn’t say much. But, friends in Kigali, or siblings in Kigali, they were more open, they would say, “Things are not good.”

I say, Mom, please this phone call, it’s going to cost me money. Can you please answer my questions? Because my mama was supposed to come here to live with us. You know, I had my citizenship since ’83. So to sponsor a parent wouldn’t be difficult. So I told her, I said, ”Mom, tell me, do you feel comfortable for me to come at Easter? Because we keep moving it.” She said, “Sounds good, but why don’t you keep saving money and come at Christmas instead of this Easter?” But, because she was suspecting something. And I thought,  it’s Mom, being Mom … just said, “Okay, I will work hard, but please at Christmas you’ve got to come.”

Nikki Gamer: Do you remember the last thing you said?

Nathalie Piraino: Well, I told her, “I’m going to tell the kids. We are excited, we are going to be together at Christmas.” She said, “Well, you will call again, right?” I said, “Yeah, I will call …”

Nikki Gamer: What was that like for your family back in Baltimore?

Dave Piraino: Well, one thing I remember is on April 6th, I came home from work, went down to watch television, and that’s when they announced Habyarimana’s plane had been shot down. He was the president of Rwanda at that time. He returned to Kigali from Arusha, where they were having peace talks, and the president of Burundi was with him. Basically, people were trying to encourage the president of Rwanda to have peace in Rwanda. It’s felt that Hutus actually shot down his plane because they were afraid he was giving too much away. And that was a signal to start the genocide. And we were here for that. And when I told Nathalie it was on the news, she said right away, “Oh my God, that’s going to be the end of Rwanda. It’s going to start the killing.” One time, she was in CRS here, and we were talking to her family and her sister said, “I have to go right now. There’s somebody knocking at the door!” And, of course, what they were doing in Kigali, was going door to door to see if they could find Tutsis. So it was a very, very unsettling time. Her whole family basically was killed, over 100 people. And it was a terrible, terrible time that we went through. And it impacted our family, our two children, especially Nathalie who had to go through this.

Nikki Gamer: I want to ask Nathalie, you’re Rwandan and you talk so beautifully about people in Rwanda. How do you wrap your head around the violence in that complete evil that sprung forth in these days? How do you explain that?

Nathalie Piraino: Every Rwandan person or friend of Rwandan person has a story to tell. I remember I used to cry all the time. All the time. I’d be in the middle of shopping. I would ask a person who was driving, could you pull your car there? I need to scream. I mean, I would just scream in the middle of a city. You didn’t know where it came from. It took me 7 years to get rid of it. I was guilty because, remember the story of my mama coming over? I was supposed to be there that Easter and I remember Easter was April 3rd, 1994.

Nikki Gamer: And the genocide … it began April 7th  …

Nathalie Piraino: I carried that guilt. But I learned my ways, and it’s through prayer and talk.

I was very, very close to everyone in my family. Every one of them was unique in a special way. To this day, I live with those memories. Thank God I had those good memories. But during the time, I had guilt for every one of them.

Nikki Gamer: Dave, do you want to add anything?

Dave Piraino: I was just going to say, during this period, it was also a traumatic time for Catholic Relief Services. Five of our staff in Rwanda were killed during the genocide. And as an agency, CRS really supported us as individuals, but they also looked at Rwanda as something the agency had a very strong connection to.

Nikki Gamer: So, what does Rwanda look like today? I understand Paul Kagame, who had commanded the rebel force that ended the genocide, is now president of the country?

Dave Piraino: Rwanda is amazingly moved ahead from where they were, and to this day it’s almost a miracle! What Kagame did, he said, we are no longer Tutsis and Hutus, we are Rwandans first. And we are not going to be labeling ourselves. So he’s really working to break down the different classes, and the hatred and the separation that’s out there, that hopefully by doing that will be a partial movement toward a more equitable, peaceful, just society.

Nikki Gamer: Twenty-four years later. Nathalie, when you think back on those family members you lost, how do you honor them?

Nathalie Piraino: Because they were so dear to me and such beautiful individuals, they are with me every day, every day, every hour I’m awake. The good life they give me when I was growing up, thank goodness, made me the person I am today. I pray all day long in the car, in bed, all the time, because I envision them in a better place. There is no way a good God with love wouldn’t receive these guys immediately. Their soul must be with Jesus.

Nikki Gamer: My last question—and both of you can answer it any way you want, any way you interpret it—what do you hope for? And Dave, if you want to start …

Dave Piraino: Well, I hope that we continue to have the strength, especially Nathalie, who lost her whole family, to keep going, to somehow see a world that is not going to be an evil world because we know what evil can do. There’s so much responsibility—and it’s not just the leaders, but they play a big role. It’s what we all can do to find our own way, our own means of contributing somehow to do a justice lens, not only in our own lives, but in the lives of people around the world. Because in the end we are one family. It’s what I believe.

Nikki Gamer: Thank you. Nathalie?

Nathalie Piraino: People got to know Rwanda after the genocide. And if we don’t teach this in schools—what happened and what can we do about that … and teach really everybody respect, respect, being a man or female, young, old black, white, blue … We will see things similar to the genocide in the future. Every one of us has a role to share—what you heard or what you went through in life. You never know who may learn from you, so my hope is that as an individual, families and organizations like CRS, take on the daily responsibility. Even if it’s one person on your bus or in your neighborhood, make a difference. And hopefully they will learn to understand others who don’t look like them.

Nikki Gamer: My goodness, Dave, Nathalie, thank you both so much for being here and for sharing these stories that I know are not easy to recount, but as you said, are so important to all of us to think about. So thank you very much.

Nathalie Piraino: You are welcome to invite us over.

Nikki Gamer: I will!

Dave Piraino: Thank you. Thank you so much for the opportunity to share these things.

Nikki Gamer: Thank you for listening to that harrowing story. And please do join us next month when we talk about a time—less than 20 years ago—when people said it was impossible to stem the deadly tide of HIV and AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. Until then, check us out online at 75.crs.org. And if you’re enjoying this podcast, please do go subscribe so you don’t miss an episode.

The post November first appeared on CRS 75th Anniversary.

Nikki Gamer: Hi everyone, this is Nikki Gamer for Catholic Relief Services. And welcome back to Behind the Story, a podcast series that invites you to celebrate the people behind 75 years of our history—the people we serve, our partners, our staff … and especially the supporters who make our work possible. In our last episode, we spoke to the Trujillo family of Atlanta about our work to help resettle thousands of Cuban refugees to the United States in the 1960s. Today, we’ll be talking to Nathalie and Dave Piraino, both former CRS staff, about a very difficult moment … April 1994 … when the Rwandan genocide shocked the world—and pierced the heart of CRS. In just 100 days, more than 800,000 people were massacred, including five CRS employees, and many, many family and friends. Nathalie, Dave, welcome. Thank you both so much for being with us and for reflecting on what I can imagine was a very painful time for both of you.

Dave Piraino: Oh you’re welcome. It’s a pleasure to be here, back at CRS.

Nathalie Piraino: Thank you for having us.

Nikki Gamer: I heard there were so many people who knew who you are … that you’ve been getting stopped, you know, every 5 minutes before even getting up here.

Dave Piraino: Well, we’ve got a chance to see some good friends, old friends that we haven’t seen for a while. So that’s a bonus here.

Nathalie Piraino: We are part of the family.

Nikki Gamer: Love that. Love that. All right, so we’re going to go back in time, the way-back time machine, and we want to know how the two of you met.

Dave Piraino: Well, I joined CRS in 1977, and so I ended up in Sierra Leone working on a pilot school project near the Liberian border. And about 18 months later I was contacted by headquarters asking if I wanted to go to Rwanda. I knew they had mountain gorillas, and I knew Rwanda was called the country of a thousand hills with perpetual spring. So I arrived in Rwanda on July 1, 1978.

Dave Piraino: I was met at the airport by an American, and she took me to a small Catholic guesthouse in Kigali. So I found my way down to the dining room around 6 o’clock and went in, and there was one person sitting in the dining room. Yes, believe it or not, it was Nathalie. And she was the very first Rwandan that I met in Rwanda. And I knew immediately she was pretty special. And we started the next few days helping each other. She helped me learn my high school French a little better, and I worked with her on her high school English. And before we knew it, 6 months later we were married.

Nikki Gamer: What about her struck you? You said you knew she was special right away.

Dave Piraino: She was so friendly, outgoing, caring. After a little while, some people came in. They all came over and hugged her. And whether it was the server or the cook, or whoever, it didn’t matter. She just was someone that loved people besides of course being beautiful.

Nikki Gamer: And Nathalie, what did you think about when you saw him for the first time?

Nathalie Piraino: Well, um,  he was cute back then.

Dave Piraino: Back then?!

Nathalie Piraino: So after we talked a little bit and I found out that he was Catholic. I knew I was in business because Dad was going to approve.

Nikki Gamer:  And what positions were you both holding at the time at CRS?

Dave Piraino: Well, I had arrived as the country representative in Rwanda at that time and had a typical job is to be overseeing and developing country programs and what our focus would be.

Nathalie Piraino: I worked for the government, the Ministry of Youth, as a social worker.

Dave Piraino: We stayed in Rwanda 3 years after I arrived, and we had two children. And from there we moved to Zaire.

Nikki Gamer: So Nathalie, I want you to take us there and describe Rwanda the way you remember it as a girl.

Nathalie Piraino: It was a fun place to live in, to be. The climate was perfect. My parents had 12 kids. So families tended to be bigger, which to me was a great thing because then it’s more cousins to play with. But as I was growing up, also, there were some bad things, because I grew up after the revolution, which took place in 1959. But being a child, having a family and friends was really the most important thing for me. Even though we were going through civil wars, I felt safe because of the family and the community and the Church. So, my childhood was the best time of my life.

Nathalie Piraino: After sixth grade you had to go through the process of passing a national exam, and because Rwanda had a quota between the main ethnic groups of Hutu and the Tutsis—I was Tutsi—only 10% of the Tutsis were allowed to go to school. And so I was among the blessed ones who went to high school. And high school, then you had to go away from home to a boarding school, Catholic boarding schools. And it was fun too. It was challenging because then I discovered discrimination. So to study under those conditions, thank God for prayers. It was very hard, stressful, fearful. But through prayer, the Holy Spirit shows you the way and you learn how to become friends with the enemies.

Nikki Gamer: Nathalie, how did your parents make their living?

Nathalie Piraino: During that time, even now, the majority of Rwandese were all farmers. The economy of Rwanda is based on tourism and agriculture … subsistence economy. So we helped when we were home, we helped with the chores at home and in the field. It was fun because when you help your parents—let’s say it’s the season to grow beans, or squash—then you see every step of it. And after the harvest, you feel proud. My parents were super, super sweet and generous. Because when I was younger, we lived in a refugee camp after the revolution. So we knew what hunger felt like.

Nathalie Piraino: So as we moved out of the refugee camp, and there were widows in our neighborhood whose husbands were killed during the revolution and during all the civil wars. So Dad, God bless him, no one asked him, but every harvest he had to have a portion to take to the widows in the area. And guess who carried that on our heads? Us. Ten kilo here, 25 kilo there. We did it because we had to obey, but we didn’t like it. “You’re taking our food away … we work hard for it!” But as I got older, I appreciate what my parents did. As a 10-year-old, you go take care of your little brothers and sisters who are 3 and 4. We never left each other. We worked together. We ate with each other. It was beautiful.

Nikki Gamer: Do you remember anything else you’d want to share about your mother?

Nathalie Piraino: Oh, my mom was goofy. My mom, God bless her. I don’t know where she got this sense of humor, but she was a very, very hardworking woman. But she was very, very funny. Because being so many at home, there will be times we were hungry, and you come back from school … Before you go to school, you do your chores, then you come back running to do more chores at home. But we would tell mom, before we go fetch water, can we please have a little bit to eat? Because she didn’t want to make us upset, she would throw in a joke. She would kind of hand you her hand, and said, “Here, have a bite.” It’s like, “Mom, seriously. I’m hungry.” So you knew you had to go do what she asks you to do. Just laughing and do it anyway. But then you come back. She gives you a lot of food, gives you compliments: “You’re a good kid,” and those kind of things. And so we worked for compliments too.

Nikki Gamer: All right, I want to talk about your faith. What did being Catholic mean to your family?

Nathalie Piraino: We prayed so much when we were growing up. We prayed before we went to school, we prayed the Rosary every night before we eat dinner. It was something we grew up with, so it was really part of us. So being Catholic was a good thing, and that’s what we knew. We lived our faith all the time. You know, if you mess up at school, your sibling will tell on you, and then, guess what happened? Confession. And we went a lot!

Nikki Gamer: Dave, when you hear your wife remember and talk so beautifully about her childhood, what comes up for you?

Dave Piraino: Well, I had the opportunity to really get to know her family because we lived there basically 3 years, and we spent a lot of time there. Family was the most important thing. Her father was this wonderful person who watched over everything. And her mother was a funny woman. I didn’t speak a word of Kinyarwanda, she didn’t speak a word of English, but somehow she got across to me when she was happy with me or a joke that she was telling.

Nikki Gamer: So getting back to the dynamics between the Tutsis and Hutus. How did that play out on a daily basis?

Dave Piraino: Well, I lived in Rwanda from ‘78 to ’81, and during that time it was really pretty peaceful. Hutus and Tutsis were friends, generally. And we were aware, of course, that there were tensions between Hutus and Tutsis. But when I hear the stories—and of course then the genocide happened—it’s just so hard to fathom. How people who really were so loving, so kind … Family was important. They intermarried. They were one. Their culture, their language, their holidays, their everything was one. How that could happen. And how scary that was as they went through it.

Nathalie Piraino: When there were so-called peace, we were one people. Now I remember back now after the civil war in 1973, they kicked all the Tutsi kids out of school. And I think that civil war lasted 3 months. I was away, hiding, far away from my parents’ place. And when we got back home, the president said on the radio, “Peace and unity.” Whatever they will say, people will listen …

Dave Piraino: … back then.

Nathalie Piraino: And how the president said this, there was peace—you play with your friends again, you know?

Nikki Gamer: So it wasn’t like, “Oh, my neighbor is a Hutu …

Nathalie Piraino: No, no …

Nikki Gamer:  … we’re not talking to them.”

Nathalie Piraino: We had our farming, our Church, our community. We felt comfortable, and until there will be a civil war. When there was civil war, you always felt fearful.

Nikki Gamer: So, Nathalie, this was going on during a period of civil war …. before the genocide … while you were at boarding school … is that right?

Nathalie Piraino: We all went away to boarding schools. So they had a campaign mainly at the boys’ schools, telling them that they need to kill every Tutsi student and kick them out. And in the middle of the night the principal comes and picks every one of us. We thought we were in trouble. So we went in the convent. She said, “I’m sorry, children, you have to leave.” I said, I just passed the national exam and now you’re going to kick me out before the end of the semester?” We said, “What did we do?” She said, “Well, there is something going on, and it’s out they’re after Tutsi children.” So we have to leave. And she said, “Make sure you don’t tell your friends.” But at that time we didn’t know anything. So we said, “So how are we going to get to the main town?” Because we were hoping they would drive us. They didn’t want to do that because they didn’t want to be implicated. So I knew a priest, Father Augustin, who was a friend of the family. So this person took us to his house. When we got there, God bless them, they give us food and milk, and we said, “Can we stay here?” Because we didn’t know what was going on.

Nikki Gamer: Yeah, that’s terrifying.

Nathalie Piraino: And she said, we are known in the area. If you stay here, they will kill you with us. And the family is the one who told us what was going on. So they advise us go to the commercial center. Don’t say anything. It was very bad. We walked very long distances, and Rwanda is very mountainous. So these two guys said, “What’s wrong? What’s going on?” We said, “Well, they just kick us out of school.” So they turn around with us. So we followed them. So we walked 2 days, 1 night. And one of these guys was Hutu, but they were nice to us. Thanks to God we have them because at night we were afraid. Guess what? The next morning, noise going around, burning houses. It’s like, oh my God, I had no clue where we were going because we were in the hills where we’ve never been before.

Nikki Gamer: Sure.

Nathalie Piraino: So we walked another day up and down, and then we run into other students.

We ended up, we were like 13 girls and these two guys. The killers start running toward us. And those guys said, “We cannot stay with you. If we stay with you they will kill us.” We were close to a parish, the grass was tall. So we went, kind of hid in the grass, and those guys walked on top of us. They didn’t even feel us. But the type of fear you have at that time, it’s like you are numb. It’s like your brain goes to sleep even though your eyes are open.

Nathalie Piraino: We heard somebody whistling. Uh-oh, they found us. It was a Hutu priest. God bless you. They killed him in the genocide. Anyway, he said, “Other kids are at the parish.” “Where is the parish?” So he said, “It’s like 10 minutes from here.” He said, “But I cannot take you with me.” We said “Please, please.” We begged. He said, “No, if I take you, they kill you.”

He showed us how to go down the hill. Then he said, “Go down, turn left.” Oh my God …

Nikki Gamer: What did Nathalie and her classmates find at the bottom of that hill? Refuge? Or something else? Join us next month as Nathalie tells us how the situation in Rwanda went from bad to worse … and how this catastrophe changed CRS forever. Until then, check us out online at 75.crs.org. And don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast. Thank you.

The post October first appeared on CRS 75th Anniversary.

Nikki Gamer: Hi everyone, this is Nikki Gamer for Catholic Relief Services. And welcome back to Behind the Story, a podcast series that invites you to celebrate the people behind 75 years of our history—the people we serve, our partners, our staff … and especially the supporters, like you, who make our work possible. In our last episode we spoke to Donal Reilly, our director for humanitarian response, about how we’ve become a leader in emergency response. But today, we’ll be talking about a little-known piece of our history—one that helped more than 100,000 people right here in the U.S.

Nikki Gamer: We’ll be talking about the 1960s, when CRS worked with other Catholic agencies, and churches across the United States, to welcome and support Cuban refugees. From our office in Miami’s Freedom Tower, CRS registered more than 124,000 Cuban refugees and resettled more than 57,000 between 1961 and 1965. Thousands of them were unaccompanied children. This was our last refugee resettlement project in the United States. We’ll be talking to the Trujillo family about their experiences … Michael Trujillo, a relationship manager in our Church Engagement department, and his parents, Annie and Raul Trujillo of Atlanta, who were both helped by CRS in the early 60s.

Nikki Gamer: Annie, Raul, Michael Trujillo, welcome to Behind the Story. We are so glad to have you.

Raul Trujillo: Oh, thank you for having us.

Nikki Gamer: All right, so I’ve noticed you have a very playful dynamic. And so I wanted to just start with Michael. Tell us about your parents.

Michael Trujilo: Yes, my parents have been together for more than 50 years, but I think what’s awesome about them is they can be serious when they need to, but also be fun when they need to. So sometimes I’ll come up here to watch the Latin awards shows, and my mom and I will dance, but then we can also be serious, and then we can go and celebrate God at Mass or different cultural celebrations.

Nikki Gamer: Wow. Okay. Fifty-four years of marriage, Raul and Annie. Raul, how does a relationship last for so long?

Annie Trujillo: A miracle.

Raul Trujillo: I give her a medal for patience and understanding, but I mean, it’s been great.

Nikki Gamer: I see you shaking your head, Annie. What’s your take?  How have you lasted?

Annie Trujillo: Well, I think you had to learn how to listen more than talk, have to remember only the things really made you get together and pray a lot.

Nikki Gamer: Yeah, faith plays an important part of your family. Does anybody want to talk about that?

Michael Trujillo: My Dad is the official prayer person anytime we get together as a family.

Nikki Gamer: All right, Dad, you’re up.

Raul Trujillo: I think the faith has been ingrained in our lives from when we were kids. We both went to Catholic schools.

Raul Trujillo: When we came to United States, I think we saw the fact that the Church in Atlanta was really kind of a small community. We’re only three percent of the population of Atlanta, and we were involved in some of the activities, especially when the Cuban exiles came to Atlanta.

Nikki Gamer: Annie, do you have anything to add?

Annie Trujillo: I think what really kept us together, it was the same faith and practicing the same faith—we didn’t have to fight for that. That you have problems like everybody else, but faith put us in the same road to keep on going.

Nikki Gamer: All right, so Annie, I want to talk for a minute about your arrival to the United States. So tell us how old you were, and tell us what that journey was like for you. Were you alone, or were you with other family?

Annie Trujillo: When I first arrived in the United States, I was 18, and I went directly to Miami where family friends of my mom told me to come over, and, you know, we can be there tilI find something else. And then, you know, I was looking for jobs.

Nikki Gamer: Now, did you speak English?

Annie Trujillo: Very little. I could read and write, but it was the hardest thing for me.

Nikki Gamer: What were you feeling at the time when you first made that journey?

Annie Trujillo: I felt very lonesome. Even though I, you know, went to her house, and I know everybody, and there were a lot of people, but, you know, you can be lonesome among 100 people. But, at the same time, I knew then I will see my parents soon, and I think that kept me going.

Nikki Gamer: Because they were going to come after?

Annie Trujillo: Yeah. Hopefully. And I always have that hope, you know, in front of me. I say it, “they’re coming, they’re coming.”

Nikki Gamer: All right. So, so when you got to the U.S., when you arrived in Miami, how did you get resettled?

Annie Trujillo: Okay, the next day after I got to Miami, they told me I had to go to the refugee center, and the first thing they say, “What denomination are you?” And I told them Catholic, and they send me to Catholic Relief Services.

Nikki Gamer: That’s amazing. So, CRS helped you at this time, at this incredibly difficult time in your life. And now your son works for CRS. That’s just a crazy coincidence.

Annie Trujillo: And that’s the way I found out. Then that was the agency who helped me, because Michael saw a letter they sent me to give me the waiver to be sent to my parents. And Michael said, look, “This is the same company I work for!”

Nikki Gamer: Wow. So Raul, now tell us about your journey here into the U.S.

Raul Trujillo: In my case, it was my uncle who was already left Cuba with his family. That time in Cuba, I was working, also studying architecture at the University of Havana. In order to leave Cuba, I had to quit both my work and my studies.

Raul Trujillo: So finally in September ’62, I left Cuba, arrive in Miami, there was my uncle waiting for me.

Raul Trujillo: I could not go to live in his house because his house was packed with people. So he gave me a little money—I think $2, $3 in a little envelope—and said that there’s some coins that you can call me if you need something because you might need to find … also, he tried to find me a room at a hotel, actually rented a bed at a hotel. I was 23 at the time.

Raul Trujillo: I learned that we can go to the refugee center, which was located at the Freedom Tower, downtown Miami. And I was interviewed. There were four agencies really helping the Cuban refugees. And one of them was Catholic. The other one was a Protestant, another Jewish. And then when they assigned me to the Catholic—because I was a Catholic.

Raul Trujillo: I was interviewed and later on, as Annie said, years later, I realized and I found out that these letters that they had next to the interview were C-R-S–that’s Catholic Relief Services. So here we are. Michael. Years later there was the guy who was really involved now with Catholic Relief Services.

Nikki Gamer: That’s an incredible story. So both of you were resettled by CRS and Michael now works for CRS. So what I hear in your stories is this idea that refugees, they have to leave everything behind, completely change their lives.

Raul Trujillo: Yeah, I think that’s important really too, because nobody really wants to leave their country and their families and friends and all that. Really, when I was in Cuba, I really never expected to be living in the United States.

Michael Trujillo: I think what’s amazing about the American community is that we’re a loving community. I think it’s amazing when I travel the Southeast, I see people opening their hearts and minds to migrants and refugees.

Michael Trujillo: All migrants and refugees want is to build a better life for themselves. All people here in the United States want to build a better life for themselves. So when they see that we are exactly the same, we should not let the place that you’re born determine the person that you are going to be.

Nikki Gamer: Michael, tell me about how your parents’ journey here to the U.S. has shaped your own life, because you were born here.

Michael Trujillo: I feel like I grew up in a bicultural community, so family being Cuban, but then my studies were all in English, and many of my friends were American, anywhere, African American, Asian American, Latin American.

Michael Trujillo: My parents have been able to thrive here in the United States. They’ve been able to be productive in this community, just like many of the other migrants, refugees that have arrived here in the United States. So I feel like their journey helped shape me. No one’s going to hand you something. You have to go look for a job, you have to go look and apply to different schools. So I think, you know, they fought for what they had and just kind of gives me that drive to continue fighting not only for me but to help others learn how to fight.

Nikki Gamer: Is that why you work for CRS now?

Michael Trujillo: Definitely. I work for CRS because it’s an organization that’s helping to fight for other people. And it’s helping people to get those skills and tools to better themselves.

Nikki Gamer: When you hear how, how deeply felt your mom is about being Cuban and Cuban-American, what comes up for you?

Michael Trujillo: I’ll start to cry sometimes, and she starts to cry. Going to a celebration we have each year … It’s Our Lady of Charity. It’s a Catholic celebration we have here. I see the Cubans come together to pray, but also see the Cubans come together to recognize the beauty of the Cuban culture. And I just see the Cuban community just smiling, laughing, eating some pastries together, singing songs together.

Michael Trujillo: And it’s just, it’s awesome. And I know that once this generation gets a little bit older and older, maybe unable to travel and move, I know that my siblings and I need to be the one to carry that banner to represent our Cuban culture. We can’t forget where we’re from. The Catholic Church is the organization that gave my parents hope. And I hope and pray that Catholics will continue to be that source of hope for migrants and refugees.

Nikki Gamer: Michael, Annie, Raul … Thank you so much for sharing your story with us.

Raul Trujillo: Thank you for having us.

Nikki Gamer: Join us next month when we talk about a very difficult time … April 1994 … when the Rwandan genocide shocked the world—and pierced the heart of the CRS family. Until then, check us out online at 75.crs.org. And don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast. Thank you.

Find out about the surprises we uncovered when the Catholic community in the United States welcomed thousands of Cuban refugees in the 1960s.

The post September first appeared on CRS 75th Anniversary.

Nikki Gamer: Hi everyone, this is Nikki Gamer for Catholic Relief Services. And welcome back to Behind the Story, a podcast series that invites you to celebrate the people behind 75 years of our history—the people we serve, our partners, our staff … and especially the supporters like you who make our work possible. Now, in our last episode we spoke to Caroline Brennan, our director of emergency communications, about the resilience of children in emergencies … and about the work we do to help families rebuild their lives after witnessing violence and fleeing their homes. This month—in honor of World Humanitarian Day—we’ll be talking to one of our great humanitarians. Donal Reilly is CRS’ director of humanitarian response, and he is going to give us a peek behind the curtain … to see how we’ve built on 75 years to become a leader in emergency response and recovery. Donal, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today.

Donal Reilly: Great to be here.

Nikki Gamer: Donal, tell us how you got into the emergency response business. I understand you came to CRS in 2000.

Donal Reilly: I’m a civil engineer, and I was at a time in my life where I’ve always wanted to do this type of work. I always felt like, you know, a desire to get involved in it. A moment that sort of triggered it for me was I was at my old company’s private sector annual golf tournament and they were giving out clocks to people who are retiring, and I just kind of felt if I kept going the way I’m going, I’ll get a clock at the end of the day. And that might be all I get out of life. So, I decided I wanted a bit more than the clock. Now I’m sure CRS might give me a clock as well someday but …

Nikki Gamer: If you’re lucky.

Donal Reilly: If I’m lucky. But at least if I look at that clock, I think I can say I made some contributions to helping people when they were most in need.

Nikki Gamer: Donal, so you started working in Haiti about 10 years before the big earthquake that hit there in 2010, right? What was your impression at the time?

Donal Reilly: Well, I will always remember when I got the job offer, I wasn’t even quite sure where Haiti was. And I went to my ma, because I was thinking Tahiti, actually.

I’d been to Jamaica, but it was nothing like Jamaica. It was just so different. So underdeveloped. Security was quite an issue at times. At the same time, I really fell in love with it and, you know, I’ve been back a few times for different emergencies. I just find the people fascinating. They’re so resilient. CRS had a large feeding program in Haiti at the time, distributing food to about 1,500 different centers, hospitals, schools, clinics, orphanages.  And I took on the job as commodity manager overseeing that work. It wasn’t quite emergency work, but it was very much operations and logistics. And then from Haiti I moved to Afghanistan in about 2002.

Nikki Gamer:  Nothing like going from Haiti to Afghanistan.

Donal Reilly: No, that’s true. Two completely different environments. But Afghanistan was very interesting. I was there for about 31/2 years, and that was emergency work ‘cause we’re dealing with a lot of people that have been displaced …

Nikki Gamer: From the fighting?

Donal Reilly: … from the fighting, yes. Then there was a couple of isolated winter emergencies as well that we dealt with, you know, just extreme cold and people being isolated by large snow falls.

Nikki Gamer: What was the biggest change for you when you started this new career?

Donal Reilly: I think the big change was from being a civil engineer and managing construction sites, and being the guy in charge and making, you know, decisions. The change was really about involving communities and having to understand that I could make all the decisions that I wanted, but nothing mattered unless the community were involved, unless it was something that they really wanted.

Nikki Gamer: You know, “emergency” is our middle name—it’s at the root of our history and our work. Can you tell us about CRS’ core emergency work?

Donal Reilly: We have a response department that’s made up of different types of staff, but we have one group that works on technical areas like shelter, water and sanitation, protection, disaster risk reduction, market-based response, food security—and I supervise that team.

Nikki Gamer: Okay, let’s say, like an earthquake just hit, you’re the head of this emergency team, what are our emergency responders doing?

Donal Reilly: Well we’re, first of all, looking at what capacity exists on the ground ‘cause normally it’s our partners and our country programs that lead the response first. And they’ll see, they’ll tell us or we’ll be communicating to them where are the gaps, what’s happening, how big is this response, how much additional support do you need to be able to respond. And, based on that, then we start to mobilize team members, based on where the gaps exist within the country program or the partners.

Donal Reilly: In Haiti there … so you’ve got the 2010 earthquake. That was a massive response that required global mobilization on the part of CRS. Our local partners did a lot of work, but it was beyond their capability to be able to respond to all the needs. So, we mobilized ourselves alongside our partners. We’d go out to the regions and country programs, and find what we call temporary staff to come in and fill positions until we could staff up for the longer term.

Nikki Gamer: Okay, so you have staff. What else do you need in that type of emergency?

Donal Reilly: A lot depends on who’s on the ground and what experience they have, where we fit in. We always try to build that local capacity and work alongside it. Sometimes we have to take a more of a leadership role if, say, for example, the people on the ground were not that experienced in emergencies. And then if you have a CRS country program office there, I mean, 95% of the employees are local staff.

Donal Reilly: Most countries we work in, we have the Church and they are already involved. They’re been involved perhaps in development projects or some form of social welfare or helping the most vulnerable. They know the context much better than we do. They know who would be the political leaders. They know the social context. They just have a deeper knowledge of the environment.

Donal Reilly: An example was in South Sudan about 4 or 5 years ago.  And there was aerial bombardment right between Sudan and South Sudan, an oil field area. And we sent a team up there because the Church had called and said, we’ve got a local father up there, so we’ve got some issues over here. We need some help. So, we sent a small team up there and they got there. And the other NGOs, international agencies are there, said, “Why are you here? There’s no need to be here. We’ve covered all this.”

Donal Reilly: And the Church said. “Well, hang on.” They took us out … I wasn’t with … it was a team that went out … they went out into the field, and in the bush there was 5,000 people that were being missed by everyone else, but the Church knew where they were. So, there’s this local outreach and knowledge they have that many other agencies can miss because they don’t have that connection to the people on the ground.

Nikki Gamer: Now, at CRS I know we like to talk about the three Rs of our emergency response cycle: rapid, response and recovery.

Donal Reilly: It’s this idea of saying that we’re going to get there quickly, we’re going to do our response, it’s going to be an appropriate response. And then we’re also there for the recovery side. We’re not just there to dish out emergency …

Nikki Gamer: … food or water …

Donal Reilly: … food or whatever. We’re there actually to help you recover as well.

Nikki Gamer: Can you give us an example of what a recovery would look like?

Donal Reilly:  A recovery would be helping people recover their livelihoods. So, it could be agricultural crops were damaged. So how do we support people to replant and recover that livelihood? It could be shelter. For example, during an emergency shelter straight after the response. Now we need to find—how do we get you into a place where you’re going back to your permanent shelter?

Nikki Gamer: Right. So, if your house was destroyed by an earthquake. We help that family or that community decide, okay, well maybe this isn’t the best place to rebuild. Maybe we go, maybe like 100 yards this way. Is that kind of the idea?

Donal Reilly: Now you’re getting into disaster risk reduction, which is when we do work with people to recover and rebuild, it is about trying to make communities more resilient. Like so, yes …

Nikki Gamer:  We love resilient, but what does that mean?

Donal Reilly: Well, how can they be better prepared for the next cyclone or hurricane or earthquake. So, for example, if we build back shelters, we want to make sure they’re stronger and more resistant, and in a better location maybe might have been some of the initial reason why it got damaged so …

Nikki Gamer: So what does success then look like, and how long does that recovery take?

Donal Reilly: It can take a long time, and often recovery goes on for years that we might not even be part of. I mean, the communities themselves will continue.  Our role is really to try to set them on a right track.

Donal Reilly: Padang is in Indonesia. There was an earthquake there. So, we’re doing a lot of shelter, but we found people were trying to recover their shelters themselves, but are having to go into debt to do so. So we actually started doing a cash-based response whereby we give people cash to buy the shelter material, but we also get them technical advice at the same time and how to build our shelters back safer. So, success there was very much the community being involved and engaged, and kind of leading their response.

Nikki Gamer: So, CRS really prioritizes the dignity of the person, and what we call a “holistic” approach. How does that translate in an emergency setting?

Donal Reilly: So, holistic means when we deploy, we deploy a team that is usually of mixed sectors. We will employ our shelter or water or sanitation or livelihoods or food security people, or protection people. Try to give them as much choice as possible to suit their individual needs on the ground.

Nikki Gamer: So, would you say that that approach, it makes CRS unique?

Donal Reilly: I find, compared to other agencies, we’re less siloed. So, it does make us unique, I think to a degree. There is a lot of conversation, the wider humanitarian community now, on support to move towards a more holistic approach. So, I like to think we’ve been feeding that conversation and leading it along with some other agencies as well, but we’re hoping that’s the way it’s going to go. And we intend to keep pushing that agenda going forward.

Nikki Gamer: So, what you’re describing in CRS “inside baseball-speak” is the definition of what we call “integral human development.” Do I have that right?

Donal Reilly: Well, yeah, this is kind of our DNA, and this is why we take a holistic approach. So, integral human development looks again that household is not a single component. It’s got all these different components that help a family make a decision. So, you look at what are your financial assets, what are your physical assets, what is your human assets, what are the other systems and structures in your community that can help you?

Nikki Gamer: So, in CRS’ 75 years of history, we’ve responded to so many disasters. Can you take us through some of the big moments and what we’ve learned?

Donal Reilly: I know Hurricane Mitch was a big one, but I wasn’t with CRS at the time, 1998. A huge hurricane that formed in the Gulf of Mexico and just came straight into Central America. Think it went up through Nicaragua, Honduras … About 20,000 people died, actually. It caused a lot of damage and destruction. But I think that was one where CRS recognized the link and the strength of our outreach to U.S. constituents, to the people who support us normally.

Nikki Gamer: Yeah, and then there was the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, when more than 200,000 people died …

Donal Reilly: I was not a part of the tsunami response. But that was obviously a huge emergency around Christmas 2004 and then going into ’05. That was a massive—obviously—and huge response from CRS. But to help people recover they gotta have a sort of a stable place to go to. Even if the initial emergency area is a tent or a tarpaulin, that is your first part where your family’s together again.

Nikki Gamer: Can you remember how you felt like when you got to one of these hard-hit areas, what that was like for you?

Donal Reilly: Yeah, you are focused on getting the job done. There’s no doubt.  But you’re also seeing things sometimes that are not very nice, and, especially if you’re in there the first few days. You see huge needs, but you also see huge resilience. People are not just sitting on their hands waiting for CRS to turn up. They’re trying themselves to do with whatever they have, with whatever small resources they have, to protect their families, and to find food, whatever their gaps are.

Nikki Gamer: That must be so overwhelming, and hard to take on a personal level.

Donal Reilly: Yeah, you feel it. And I think part of being out there is you have to make sure you take time to, you know, let people understand you are aware of what happened, you know, offer your condolences when there’s loss of life—which is usual—and make sure you use … just spend time not just gathering the information you want, but hearing what they’re saying their issues are and what they’ve just been through.

Nikki Gamer: How about for you?

Donal Reilly: Um … we all handle it differently. I like a bottle of beer, and sit in a quiet place and reflect, and deal with it. But CRS is also very good now making sure our staff have resources available if they need to decompress, and try and understand what they’ve been through. We do have support systems in place these days to help with that.

Nikki Gamer: So, I’ve heard you talk about how technology has helped in certain responses, especially hurricanes. Can you tell us a little more about that?

Donal Reilly: The technology now around, you know tracking hurricanes and cyclones is just so much better. You get 5 days’ notice of roughly where it’s going to hit. So, you know, just clear your calendar, and then just watch and see what happens.

Nikki Gamer: And we’re using drones, aren’t we?

Donal Reilly: Yeah, we’ve used drones. I’m a drone fan and not a drone fan, depending on the context. ‘Cause I think one of the important things is communicating with people. If you put a drone up in the air, what message are you sending? Oh, look at us. We’re making decisions for you based on what we see from our little drone. What we want to do is engage people in the response and talk to them. There’s not much empathy in a drone. You know, being on the ground, turning up, talking to families, seeing their conditions is important. So I think it’s a mixture. I’m not saying don’t use a drone, but, you know …

Nikki Gamer: It’s not a silver bullet.

Donal Reilly: It’s not a silver bullet.

Nikki Gamer: How has emergency response changed over the years? For instance, how do we use local markets and cash?

Donal Reilly: Back in the day we used to call it a “truck and chuck” sort of mentality, which is basically pulling in with a truckload of gear and just basically throw it off the back of the truck to people.  But we’ve moved on from that now. We’re very much into understanding local markets now. So, look at the local markets. If it functions, can we give people either cash or vouchers—cash is preferable—to make decisions. And it’s so much more dignified.

Donal Reilly: Giving someone cash, allowing them to go to the shop and choose what they want is a lot more dignified than standing in a queue, where there’s sometimes pushing and shoving, where you’re made to stand in the heat perhaps for hours to get something. If we can’t do a direct cash distribution to the people who are affected, then we will look to see can we buy … if we have to buy the stuff, can we buy it locally?  Again, trying to have a greater impact on the local market as well before we go out to some global procurement. It’s more dignified and it makes people less dependent on us as well in some respects. They can start to recover themselves.

Nikki Gamer: What about the forgotten emergencies that might not get public attention? Can you tell us about the importance of donations for these types of emergencies?

Donal Reilly: With the smaller emergencies, yeah, there’s lots of ones that happen that don’t make headlines these days. And if they’re not newsworthy, then often the public donors are not that keen to fund because there’s not much pressure on them. And, so, there’s people who are very vulnerable who are suffering. They’re suffering as much as someone who would have been in a large emergency. So, the private funds allow us to go in there and target these smaller emergencies.

Nikki Gamer: So, Donal, you’ve gone to so many places, you’ve seen so many things. Who are you inspired by? I understand you had an incredible experience in Central African Republic?

Donal Reilly: Bishop Nestor in Central African Republic. I thought he was an amazing person and character. There was an internal conflict between the sort of non-Muslims, which some are Christians, and the Muslim community. He was basically sheltering 20,000 people in his compound, and making sure that they were getting access to food and shelter and water.  And then also looking after the Muslim camp as well, and making sure they were safe. And dealing with conflict.

Donal Reilly: The more ex-military guys are well armed. And we went in and we met with these guys. We sat down, and they were speaking local dialect. I didn’t know what was going on, but it was quite a tense conversation. It wasn’t friendly. And I was getting a bit worried. I was like, wow. But the Bishop’s sitting there. He’s a big man. He’s just chatting away, and he’s quite firm in what he wants to happen. And after about an hour, we get up, and he says, “Right, come. We gotta go.” And we go.

Donal Reilly: And we follow this car of military guys out. And we come to a place. And, basically, what he’d done is he’d negotiated the release of a Muslim cleric and his family. We loaded the family into the car, and drove into the Muslim camp, and I always remember when the bishop got out and he let out the Muslim cleric, and the camp just exploded into joyous welcoming of this family, because they thought they were dead. They didn’t realize that this family was still alive. I was just overall impressed with the way he operated there and his commitment to working on both sides to look for solutions.

Nikki Gamer: But, if you go back to yourself … back to that golf course, and you’re watching this guy get a clock. Do you think now that you made the right decision?

Donal Reilly: Oh yeah.  I knew that within the first 6 months of being in Haiti. I knew then that I wasn’t going back.

Nikki Gamer: Donal Reilly … thank you so much for joining us.

Donal Reilly: Yes, thank you.

Nikki Gamer: All right everybody, join us next month as we look back at the 1960s, when the Catholic community in the U.S. welcomed thousands of Cuban refugees. In fact, it was our last resettlement effort here in the United States. And we uncovered a few surprises that you won’t want to miss. So, don’t forget to check us out online at 75.crs.org. And if you are enjoying this podcast, like I know you are, please subscribe so you don’t miss out on the next episode. And, just want to say, thank you so much for listening.

 

The post August first appeared on CRS 75th Anniversary.

Nikki Gamer: Hi everyone. This is Nikki Gamer for Catholic Relief Services, and welcome back to Behind the Story. It’s a podcast series that invites you to celebrate the people behind 75 years of our history, the people we serve, our partners, our staff, and especially the supporters, like you, who make our work possible. In our last episode, we spoke to Dr. Shannon Senefeld and Sister Pauline Acayo about the right of every child to laugh, and to learn and to grow, and about how important play is to every child’s development. So today we’ll be having a conversation with Caroline Brennan, who is our emergency communications director. And she’s going to talk about the work we’re doing to help some of the most vulnerable children on Earth … the resilient ones facing and fleeing violence in their villages and homeland. Welcome Caroline, thank you so much for joining us.

Caroline Brennan: Thanks so much for having me. I’m delighted to be here.

Nikki Gamer: So, I want to get right into it. You know, you have been to places that are in such crisis. You know, you’ve been to countries next to Syria, tied to the Syrian refugee crisis …

Caroline Brennan: For many families that I’ve met, I’ve heard very similar accounts of how they fled. Many people describe fleeing during a moment of an attack of some sort, either on their city or their town, or even directly into their home from overhead, from the sound of bombs coming from planes, or even through their front door.

Caroline Brennan: And in those moments the husbands turning to the wives and saying, “Take the kids and run.” Usually hopeful and thinking that they’ll be going back when things calm down. And here we are 7 years into the Syrian crisis, and many people haven’t been able to go back and what they often talk about is what and who they left behind.

Caroline Brennan: You know, it’s so interesting in my conversations with so many families, almost without fail, one of the first things that they want to tell you about is the house that they had before and the number of rooms that they had and the garden they had, and this life that they lived before.

Caroline Brennan: It’s so important for me to convey that I get it, that this madness swirling around them does not define who they are. And as one woman said to me, you know, going on this raft, I would never have put my child on this raft unless it wasn’t safer than where we were coming from.

Nikki Gamer: You know, on a related note, so many of our listeners probably haven’t been to where you’ve been and just read about things like the Syrian refugee crisis in the news. Can you tell us what that experience is like versus what it might be like for us, when we read about these things in the news?

Caroline Brennan: People who are waking up far from their homes, not knowing what options await them and just struggling to keep their family safe and a semblance of stability and protection. Not only just the experience of interacting with individuals and hearing their story, but just visually. You know, we see and hear about war in a very physical sense. You see the destruction of buildings, you see ghost towns that were once vibrant cities. In Jordan alone, women and children make up more than 70% of the refugee population. As a woman visitor, it’s actually an advantage because I have access to women. I can hear what they have to say.

Nikki Gamer: Yeah, I want to emphasize that point—I mean, you make an important one. We see in the news, you know, people here in the U.S. are so afraid of refugees, but the reality is a lot of these refugees are women and children, they’re not scary people who are coming to these other countries because they want to destroy and destruct.

Caroline Brennan: Nobody wants to leave their home, especially in a situation where you’re leaving your loved ones behind or maybe something truly horrific has happened to them in front of you. You are just doing your best, with the circumstances you have, to keep the people you love most in this world safe. This is not a first choice. It’s a Hail Mary pass for so many families that I meet.

Nikki Gamer: You know, you and I, we’ve both met Syrian refugee families. And I remember in Jordan, a woman told that her kids, you know, when they would hear a plane overhead, they would immediately start crying, and I know you’ve heard the same things from parents.

Caroline Brennan: What we see in so many children who are arriving in the centers where we’re providing support is that many have simply just regressed in your basic milestones. So they may be wetting the bed again, even if they’re 10 years old. Many of them have simply stopped communicating—they just don’t talk. We know that for children to grow healthfully, just like a plant needs water and air, children need some basic pillars of their foundation. They need a trusted adult in their lives. They need to feel safe, they need to have peers, some of that social engagement. We see children coloring pictures and images of things they experienced and clearly witnessed as they struggle to express themselves. So we know that as responders, we have to look at the full needs of children to be able to help them heal not only in their physical environment, but to heal those wounds far beneath the surface.

Nikki Gamer: When you say drawing pictures of what they’ve experienced, can you just be a little bit more specific?

Caroline Brennan: You see, these are very young children, who draw these pictures in color. You see body parts strewn about, you see lots of teardrops falling from a young child who’s standing nearby. You see what are clearly planes overhead and bombs dropping. These are children expressing something they’ve gone through and have seen. It’s so sad and devastating.

Nikki Gamer: This is a perfect segue into the great work that CRS does with children, and I would love for you to talk about how CRS addresses, you know, some of this trauma.

Caroline Brennan: If you’re 7 or 8 years old and you’re from Syria, all you’ve known is war at this point. Many children have missed years of school. They lose that sense of identity really of what they’re supposed to be in their family and their community, and also that engagement with children in that sense of play. So you want to create all of those aspects just to get to that sense ultimately of normalcy and a healthy foundation to be able to grow again rather than regress, but to be able to recover and move forward. We know they can become extremely healthy, contributing adults in their societies later in life. We really are working with our local partners in these neighboring countries to help refugee children have access to education.

Caroline Brennan: What we do is we offer these safe spaces. So again, you’re offering a place of safety for children—we call them child-friendly spaces. We have skilled teachers and counselors in these spaces, and we provide support to help children catch up to their education level and stay current if they need tutoring, if they’re already at their grade level in the local schools. But what’s a critical component of this is the emotional care and support. If you are a child who’s suffering from extreme distress or even showing signs of trauma, you are not going to be in a position to learn math and we know that.

Nikki Gamer: I want to go back to the child, the idea of the child-friendly space, because I’ve been to some child-friendly spaces in places like Iraq and you don’t expect to see laughing and, and happiness in a place of such … what you would think would be sorrow. Can you take us there?

Caroline Brennan: It’s incredible. They’re such happy places—and for people who are trying to visualize what it looks like—if you imagine a large rectangular tent, that can fit the size of two classrooms really and very decorated. So the children decorate the walls and they set the rules. So you know, no fighting, every story that they read to each other has to have a happy ending. That’s very important for many children.

Caroline Brennan: And you have the teachers, many of whom are refugees themselves. Counselors in the room. And a lot of the activities—in addition to the education and emotional counseling support—are physical because so many of the children are living in a really tight space and they don’t have a chance to move. It’s a very happy place where parents or mothers, if they’re on their own, know they can send their children and they’re safe. Sometimes it’s using puppets to teach about hygiene in areas where there’s a cholera outbreak, and the use of puppets helps children learn behaviors that they might not absorb as quickly or as interestingly, you know, if the puppets weren’t there.

Nikki Gamer: I just remember meeting a mother, a Syrian mother in Jordan who said that the best part of her son’s day was taking the bus that we provided to get him from his home to the class. I said, “Wow, why? Why does he like the bus so much?” She’s like, because that’s what he remembers he used to do and it makes them feel like all the other kids in the world again.

Caroline Brennan: Right. Right. He’s got connection to the life that they had before. We’re often unfortunately meeting people in their darkest moment, when everything has been stripped away from them. And it’s really stunning how people show themselves to you and what they’re holding onto, which might just be their sense of self and their identity, and what defines them when everything that defined their life is gone.

Nikki Gamer: You know, I can even remember before I started working at CRS, I thought most refugees lived in camps. Literally, I had this picture of rows and rows and miles and miles of people living in tents, and that’s not where most refugees live. So can you give us, our listeners, a sense of what do they live in and what is their life like?

Caroline Brennan: I mean, of course there are these huge refugee camps existing around the world, and that’s usually the images that we see—these settlements and these camps and of course they exist in their massive and really difficult conditions. But a majority of the refugees, especially the refugees we serve, are actually living in urban areas. Meaning they’re living in the kind of the town where they came into, the city. They’re finding a one-room apartment that they’re sharing with other family members. You might have 21 people of all ages living in two rooms, and it’s very stressful because there’s just frankly not much to do. We know if we’re helping one child, it’s not a stand-alone. You have to be able to help their parent or their caretaker too. Because they are going home at the end of the day, and they need that support also at home.

Nikki Gamer: Yeah. I’m so glad you mentioned that—because in our last podcast we talked about the importance of supporting parents so that they can help their children. Give us an example of what that service for the parents looks like.

Caroline Brennan: You know, you have a lot of mothers who have children who are showing signs of severe stress, distress. So we have a counselor there who talks about signs of stress among children, signs of trauma, how to handle those, what services are available, getting referrals for more severe care that might be needed for their children. And then just bringing them together for their own interaction because that sense of community is so important. I mean, ultimately, what we hear from mothers and fathers is just this sense of frustration of not being able to provide for your family and your children in the way you are used to doing …

Nikki Gamer: You’ve just talked a lot about this loss of identity and having to sort of chart life in this new environment. And I know you met a woman. I believe she was in Lebanon, in the Bekaa Valley …

Caroline Brennan: Ah, right.

Nikki Gamer: …which is where a lot of refugees fled. So can you tell our listeners that story?

Caroline Brennan: Yes, I met Zahiya, she was one of the first Syrian women I had met in Lebanon. Met her in the Bekaa valley, where we’re working with the Good Shepherd Sisters, the missionary order partners. She’s about in her mid-to-late twenties, and she was there with her husband and their son. And she, just like many women I’ve met, you know, brought me into her tent. She really wanted to talk. But as she was telling me about the house that she had before, she was getting really upset because she kept referring to this photo album of photos of this house, but she didn’t have the album because the photo album was destroyed when their house was destroyed. And so she was, she was really getting worked up.

Caroline Brennan: The last thing I wanted to do was to cause stress to her by even being there, and we never want to cause further harm by just having a conversation with someone. So I was like, I can picture your garden. It sounds so peaceful, it sounds so beautiful. Please don’t worry. And she said, no, you don’t understand how frustrating it is to not have my photos. And just that deeper sense of loss—and what they thought their lives would be at the deepest level of how they envisioned that, who they would be and who they are. She kept wanting to offer me something like tea or something, and she was reaching into thin air for what wasn’t there.

Caroline Brennan: But as we were leaving her tent, it was a really hot day, dusty brown, and we’re walking out, and off to our right there is this little yellow flower. And it caught her eye. And she literally just reached over, and she plucked it out of the ground. She said, please take this. Thank you for being with us. Please don’t forget who we are. And it was so important for her to be able to demonstrate, you know, this hospitality that is so defining of the Syrian culture. I feel so fortunate to experience moments like this.

Nikki Gamer: Wow. Told so beautifully, Caroline. Oh my gosh. I love that when you tell that story.

Caroline Brennan: Well, I know you’ve had a lot of your own experiences, Nikki, and these backdrops too.

Nikki Gamer: Yes.

Caroline Brennan: Somebody is going through their worst moment, their worst nightmare. And to have someone offer a hand of help, an extended hand of help, you know, is really significant. We’re able to do that through our local Church partners, through all of the support we get here from so many people here at home. I mean a little goes a really long way in these moments and in people’s lives, and it is really powerful.

Nikki Gamer: I’m so glad you mentioned our partners because that is so crucial to what we’re able to do in these contexts. So I especially want to give all the props to the religious sisters. Can you speak about, you know, the work that they do and how vital it is?

Caroline Brennan: So, we work through the local Church, which really gives us such insight and genuine grounded perspective on the ways in which to best provide and respond. And then, of course, our missionary order partners and sisters, the Good Shepherd Sisters, the Sisters of the Sacred Heart. I mean they are just incredible. And they manage a lot of these education programs that we’ve been talking about, and care and counseling for children and for families. And they are just in the heart of where these refugee families are living.

Nikki Gamer: Do you have any one particular sister that’s stuck out to you?

Caroline Brennan: Sister Michelene [Lattouf] of the Good Shepherd Sisters.

Nikki Gamer: I met her!

Caroline Brennan: And she’d been running a school for vulnerable Lebanese children for years, and then expanded that to Syrian refugee children. And the children—who just love her, they’re all pulling on her skirt and they just, you know, they just love her. The children had saved up all of their pennies. These are children who live in the tents, like I described. And yet, somehow, they had saved up whatever they had in their families to be able to purchase little bags of potato chips. And little cans of soda that they spread across the table to offer as a thank you to her for all that she was doing for them in this school.

Caroline Brennan: She was so moved that she says she just looked back at them and she said, “Look at what this shows about who you are and the character you have. You may have lost your dad, you may have lost your home. You may be afraid sometimes, but look at what you haven’t lost. Look at what this says about who you are. Never forget this.”

Nikki Gamer: Well it just says so much about the generosity of spirit. Not only Sister Michelene, but also the kids. I want to ask you, what would you say is the most important aspect of how CRS accomplishes our work to help these children?

Caroline Brennan: You know, we really emphasize the dignity of the human being and are looking at those whole needs of that person or that family unit, and we address them comprehensively. That is very important to us, because one really can’t happen without the other. We know that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to providing emergency support or humanitarian support. Lebanon is very different from what it is in Jordan and they’re neighboring countries dealing with some very similar issues. But the ways you respond in each place have to be reflective of that local reality. And we really invest in local talent. In any country where we work, the majority of our staff are from that country.

Nikki Gamer: Why is it so important to share these stories of Zahiya and the experiences? I mean, you travel all over the U.S. to talk about what you’ve seen. Why is that so vital to what we do?

Caroline Brennan: At least the people I get to meet genuinely feel a connection to people in need and I think, especially right now, there is this hunger for connection and for meaning and for impact. And stories are one of the ways that we can have that. But it’s a really important time. Especially in acknowledging how much we actually have in common. You know, so often when I’m traveling, I’m not struck by how different a place is. I’m just thinking, wow, there is so much that reminds me of home.

Nikki Gamer: I know that’s right. That is very true. And thank you for, you know, bringing these stories to the U.S., and thank you for talking to us today. It’s been so great to hear your stories.

Caroline Brennan: That’s so great, Nikki. Thank you so much.

Nikki Gamer: Join us next month as we talk about the history of our emergency work … from our roots as an emergency relief agency during World War II to our focus today, on recovery preparedness and customized approaches that help communities build better futures. And don’t forget to check us out online at 75.crs.org. And if you’re enjoying this podcast, please subscribe so you don’t miss an episode.

The post July first appeared on CRS 75th Anniversary.

Nikki Gamer: Hi everyone, this is Nikki Gamer for Catholic Relief Services. And welcome back to Behind the Story, a podcast series that invites you to celebrate the people behind 75 years of our history—the people we serve, our partners, our staff … and especially the supporters who make our work possible.

In our last episode, we spoke to Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo about the women who inspire us. And today we’ll be focusing on how we see the future … especially for the children and families in most urgent need.

We’ll be having a conversation with two remarkable women who have devoted themselves to this work…

Dr. Shannon Senefeld, our vice president of overseas operations. Dr. Senefeld is a champion of programming that ensures that children are raised in families so they can learn and grow to their greatest potential. And, she’s a mom of four children of her own.

And we’ll talk to Sister Pauline Acayo—one of the Little Sisters of Mary Immaculate—who works for CRS in Kenya. Sister Pauline has devoted her life to helping families on the margins—of violence, hunger and disease—raise healthy children. And she’s been inspired by the results she’s seen.

Welcome to you both.

Nikki Gamer: So, as I understand it, one of the most critical times of a child’s life—early childhood—happens from birth to age 8. And sometimes it’s important to remember that the simplest things are the most important to children, right? Like love, and play, a nurturing environment. And so many times we take those things for granted, but for some of the people and some of the children that we work with, love and play is not given. So Dr. Senefeld, can you tell us about the role of play in a child’s early development? Why does a child need to laugh and play?

Dr. Shannon Senefeld: I think every child deserves the right to laugh, and what they need to be able to do that is love. They need to know that they’re cared for. They need to know that they’re safe. They need to know that there’s some stability in their lives, and they need to feel like they’re protected and in an environment where they can truly be themselves.

Dr. Shannon Senefeld: Scientifically speaking, we know that children whose emotions and well-being have been neglected over their lives, that they have much poorer outcomes. As adults, they’re much less likely to get jobs. They’re much less likely to finish high school, and to have less personal achievement in their lives as well. So we know that the children really need to bond emotionally, and I think that for me is one of the most important things. It’s that one person loving them, knowing that that person’s always going to be there for them.

Nikki Gamer: Sister Pauline, do you want to share? What happens to a child when they don’t have the opportunity to play?

Sister Pauline Acayo: With many children I’ve interacted with, when a child has no opportunity to play, that child is not happy at all, cannot even smile. Always the child wants to be alone, and play helps the children to learn a lot, which means that child is missing a lot of learning.

Sister Pauline Acayo: Play helps a lot for them to develop cognitively. The child is not able to express his emotion. Children, they express their emotion more in play, so when a child miss that, he’s not going to express emotion in play. When the child plays with the mother, there is that bonding. With the father there’s that bonding. Play is together with communication. You can’t separate the two.

Nikki Gamer: Do you have a story of your work where you saw a child who—where play was just was missing?

Sister Pauline Acayo: Yes. I’ve interacted with a lot of those type of children. I would just give one example—a boy called Dennis. He’s now 4 years. In the center where we were working with the sisters, that boy would come to school, want to be at the corner, doesn’t want to mix with people, and then could not even smile to anybody.

Sister Pauline Acayo: You go to give them food, he’s hiding somewhere. So, you begin finding out what happened to this boy. We found the boy lost their mom, and then the caregivers who took care of him didn’t want him even to interact with others. So it affected him so much. As I talk today, the boy’s very healthy, although he missed something. But he’s very active, and he can laugh, jumps around. He’s beginning now to take the leadership, he’s socializing.

Nikki Gamer: Wow, there’s so much resilience I hear in that story. What about stress or trauma or depression for the child or the mother? What does that do to the way the child learns and grows?

Dr. Shannon Senefeld: Well, scientifically speaking, we know that especially if a primary caregiver—in most cases the mother—has some sort of a mental health condition that they’re less likely to spend time interacting with the children. Less likely to bond with them, less likely even from birth to look into their eyes to provide that early infant stimulation that children need.

Dr. Shannon Senefeld: For moms who have their own hard things that they’re dealing with every single day, it’s hard for them to pay adequate attention to their children’s needs. Even though they may want to, they oftentimes just can’t do it. And unfortunately for those children, it alters their brains in the long run.

Dr. Shannon Senefeld: They are less likely to develop as quickly, as normally, as their same-age peers. They’re less likely to achieve the same things they might have otherwise out of life. And so we know that we need to be responding to parents as well, so that the parents can respond to their children.

Nikki Gamer: Sister Pauline, have you seen any examples of this?

Sister Pauline Acayo: I give an example—parents we work with who are HIV/AIDS positive and so stressed and depressed. You look at a child, the child look so stressed and depressed at the same time, like the mother.

Sister Pauline Acayo: Because the child who is growing, especially those who are still under 2, they look at the face of the mother. When the mother cannot smile, the mother cannot even play with the child. That child is stressed, it does not know what is going on. But it stresses the child, and this make the child not to develop completely.

Nikki Gamer: What happens when a child isn’t getting that connection? What does it do to a child’s development when he or she is an adolescent or an adult?

Sister Pauline Acayo: With the children I’ve interacted with, when they undergo that, you find that their development is very slow in all ways. Socially, the child doesn’t want to interact with anybody.

Dr. Shannon Senefeld: Just to add to what Sister said, we also know that when moms actually look their babies in the eye, the baby’s heart rate actually increases. It actually makes them perk up. And so, if a mom is not providing that eye contact, we know babies eat less, they’re less likely to breastfeed, they’re less likely to have positive nutrition overall.

Nikki Gamer: I want to hear about the work we’re doing to support children and families. What do we do to nurture them and make sure that children have a chance to laugh and play, and learn and grow to their full potential?

Sister Pauline Acayo: Okay, the project that we are implementing is called Strengthening Capacity of Women Religious in Early Childhood Development. We try our best to make sure that those children—conception to 2 years—they attain age-appropriate developmental milestones. And we work with Catholic sisters who are working in the community. The community respects them. When they talk, people listen to them. Working with the community leaders—they’re the ones who mobilize the community and they know where the children are based, especially those who are the needy.

Sister Pauline Acayo: And we have sisters who are trained as master trainers, and they’re working with community health volunteers and the mothers—on positive parenting, exclusive breastfeeding, and then stimulation. We train them on clean environment, clean water and sanitation to help the children. The sisters and caregivers make home visits every month at the household. And through that also they continue with mentoring and accompanying those who are not doing well so that they’re able to catch up and do the same to the children. Nutrition is paramount to our project.

Nikki Gamer: So, what we’re talking about here, really, is about a child’s survival, right? So Dr. Senefeld, what’s different about the way CRS looks at child survival?

Dr. Shannon Senefeld: We’re really working on making sure that children have the environment that they need to grow and not just to survive. I think there’s been a lot of attention placed on child survival over the years to really make sure that kids live. We really need to make sure that they thrive and not to waste any of their potential.

Dr. Shannon Senefeld: In the U.S., my kids, when I take them in for their doctor’s visits, they ask about their social development, their cognitive development, how they’re doing, what we do for discipline, etc. And I think that’s the sort of message that we also want within our programs— that we have to have a comprehensive view of children and their development.

Nikki Gamer: All right, so you’ve both been talking about CRS’ SCORE and THRIVE early childhood development programs, which focus more on helping very young children. But I understand you’re also toymakers, using local items like bags or wood?

Dr. Shannon Senefeld: The homemade toys.

Sister Pauline Acayo: Oh, the homemade toys. That’s I would say our most important thing in our project. The toys are connected to the play we have talked of and are connected to communication. Because we have seen—for sustainability—we need to use the local things that we have and the parents are able to make it. When they make it themselves, they’re going to take care of the toys. And the children, they love the local toys—like the ball, like the baby. They have made their baby using maybe banana fiber or a piece of cloth.

Sister Pauline Acayo: All those local toys are helping the children really to be stimulated or to grow—cognitively, social, emotional, physical. And … must be colorful! So you color them, you know. And sometimes you involve them in coloring. It’s part of the development.

Nikki Gamer: So, what about storytelling? Do you encourage parents to read to their kids?

Sister Pauline Acayo: So, we are trying to tell parents to use more stories in the evening or read a story book to the child or tell a story. Let the child count, using maybe stakes or the beans, rather than a child being on the television and watching what is beyond their age.

Nikki Gamer: All right, Sister Pauline. Many years ago, as a religious sister, you were asked to help CRS in its work with children. But I understand it, your work with children started long before coming to CRS and is related to your early life.

Sister Pauline Acayo: I grew up in northern Uganda where there was a lot of war, there was a lot of poverty, a lot of destruction. Infrastructures were mostly destroyed, the schools, the health facilities, the roads. You couldn’t move freely. Even before I became a teacher, people used to bring their children in the convent at night, and for them they go and spend in the bush, meaning under the grass. And working with those children, it impacted a lot of interest for me to work for children, especially the vulnerable ones.

Sister Pauline Acayo: And then one time as we were sisters already, we ran away from the house and we all went to the chapel. And the rebels, when they come, whether you have a gate very strong, they will cut the gate even for 3 hours until they enter. And you are behind the tabernacle, so they are shooting and telling you to come out. And when we came out, we are lined up in the compound, and then they are telling us, “We are going to abduct you,” and then they were choosing us. “Get up, get up, we are going with you.”

Sister Pauline Acayo: And all that they have looted, they put on your head and they tell you to run with it. And we were running with the things heavy on our head. And then, thanks to God that we went far away. For me, I was afraid because I thought today is my last day. They can chop you into pieces. So we ran, and then they told us, leave the things and you go, and run without looking behind. I was so afraid I thought we are not going to come back. So that’s the life I grew in, and I started working with CRS. I had that experience so it made me to help the community even better.

Sister Pauline Acayo: As a leader in the community, they are all looking at you. And then being a sister, they’re all looking at you, they’re confiding in you, even those who are so much traumatized—they don’t want to share their stories with other religious leaders who are men or traditional leaders. They are coming all to you.

Sister Pauline Acayo: So you need to have a lot of courage, a lot of faith, and you have to give hope to that person coming. The Church has an obligation as the leader, leading the people on behalf of Christ to talk on behalf of the voiceless. And then to take care of the flock, without any discrimination. And without any segregation. And that, I think, that was the backbone of the courage that I got.

Nikki Gamer: Wow! Sister Pauline, I get goosebumps listening to you. Dr. Senefeld, you’re a mom who works with children. When you look at your own children, what do you see?

Dr. Shannon Senefeld: I think for me, I see the future, I see all the possibilities. I hope that they will go on to make the world a better place. I hope they remember how blessed and privileged they are. And that they take that real calling to give back with them in whatever they do in the world. But just like I want my child to be happy, you know, I want that for all children. That magical laughter, you know, that, that …

Nikki Gamer: It’s intoxicating.

Dr. Shannon Senefeld: It’s so … right? It just gets you in your belly. Like you hear them start giggling, you know when you’re tickling them and you’re playing with them and you scare them when you’re playing peek-a-boo. And that, just, giggle, that, just, belly laugh like that. And I think every child should have that in their lives.

Nikki Gamer: All right, so for each of you, what is your best day? Can you share a moment or a story or an instance where you said, Wow, we are making such a difference? I am making a difference.

Dr. Shannon Senefeld: We’d been doing a whole series, a whole project around changing the way the world cares for kids living in orphanages. A lot of these are started by well-meaning individuals from the U.S. and Europe, who really have seen and believe in the plight of the children like we’re talking about today. And so they’ve started giving money, building orphanages to help. The reality is that about 80 to 90% of children living in orphanages have a living parent. The parent can’t take care of them or feels they can’t take care of them. The number one reason for that is poverty.

Dr. Shannon Senefeld: So the parent oftentimes can’t pay for the school fees or the health care fees or the other basic needs for their child, and they put them into an orphanage thinking that it will be a short-term solution. Unfortunately, over time they’re never able to get up to the same economic level of stability that an externally funded orphanage can provide.

Dr. Shannon Senefeld: The research has demonstrated severe negative effects on children, both in the short term and the long term. Certain parts of their brains don’t activate as much as others because of a lack of stimulation. They’re more likely to be incarcerated as they become adults. They’re more likely to enter into sex work. They’re more likely to be trafficked when they leave the institutions.

Dr. Shannon Senefeld: We are working very hard to support children to remain in their families so that they don’t get placed in institutions. And we were competing for a really large grant for $100 million. We weren’t the winner, but we were runner up and we got $15 million to implement the program.

Dr. Shannon Senefeld: And that was wonderful. But I was feeling very sad that we weren’t the winner. I came to work one day, and there was a card sitting on my desk and it was from one of our colleagues. He’d written a note and he said his 7-year-old son had earned the money inside from raking leaves in the fall, and it was in coins and $1 bills. And he said his son was so moved by our project that he wanted to give the money to us so that we could help to make a difference for all the kids in the orphanages overseas. And I thought, we are making a difference if we’re reaching a child here in the U.S. to give up his leaf-raking money, to help children overseas.

Nikki Gamer: Wow. Sister Pauline, how do you even follow that? But I think you can.

Sister Pauline Acayo: One time I was in a bus. I was picking money to pay. Somebody say, “I’m paying for Sister.” Turning, I don’t know this person. Working with many people in the community and they have grown, you may not know. Said, “I was a rebel. I came back, I was to be killed. And you stood, you talked…” We used to organize a joint meeting where we bring religious leaders, traditional leaders, government representatives. And I’m there among them, talking.

Sister Pauline Acayo: For that one child, he has grown. He is no longer a child. I am very happy. And then community saying, what you people have done … what you have taught us and what we ambassadors of change in the community is very sustainable.

Nikki Gamer: Well thank you both. You’re both incredibly amazing women. That’s an amazing story. Wow.

Dr. Shannon Senefeld: But it’s a normal story, right? Where around the world we hear these stories about how the community actually steps up on behalf of CRS and says they’re doing good work here, so we’re going to make sure they’re protected. And it’s not just in the Catholic communities—it’s in all the communities around the world.

Nikki Gamer: All right, in your big crystal ball when you look ahead to the next 25 years and see thriving children and families, why are they thriving?

Dr. Shannon Senefeld: I think that one of the most important things that people can have is hope. It’s the ability to imagine something different for yourself. Especially if all you’ve ever known is what you’ve seen, the idea that you’re actually pushing yourself beyond that and hoping for something is huge.

Dr. Shannon Senefeld: So I think if we’re talking about children thriving 25 years from now, I think that these children will have hope. I think that they will have laughter. I think that they will have love, and I think they’ll be looking for ways that they can give back themselves.

Nikki Gamer: That’s a beautiful picture you paint. Thank you so much.

Dr. Shannon Senefeld: Thank you, my pleasure.

Sister Pauline Acayo: Thank you.

Nikki Gamer: Join us next month as we continue our focus on children—this time, children facing some of the most challenging emergencies of our times—and how we are giving them places to learn and play … and heal. But until then, thanks for listening. And, if you want to find out more, check us out online at 75.crs.org. And, don’t forget to subscribe!

The post June first appeared on CRS 75th Anniversary.

Nikki Gamer: Hi everyone, this is Nikki Gamer for Catholic Relief Services. And welcome back to Behind the Story, a podcast series that invites you to celebrate the people behind 75 years of our history—the people we serve, our partners, our staff … and especially the supporters, who make our work possible.

Last month, we introduced you to the famous Maryknoll “Noodle Priest,” Monsignor John Romaniello, whose noodle machine fed hundreds of thousands of Chinese refugee children in Hong Kong in the aftermath of World War II.

This month, in honor of Mother’s Day and the women who inspire us, we’ll be talking to Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo, the former—and first woman—president and CEO of Catholic Relief Services, and herself a Chinese immigrant who was educated by Maryknoll Sisters in Hong Kong.

Welcome, Carolyn, thank you so much for joining us.

Nikki Gamer: When you were CEO of Catholic Relief Services, you often spoke about your experiences growing up in Hong Kong. Can you tell us what it was like for your family at that time? What did you take with you from that upbringing?

Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo: So, both my parents were sort of immigrants-slash-refugees. They were both in China, and the first time they left China was during the bombing by the Japanese during World War II. So, I grew up basically in an environment where the majority of people were dislocated, from China mostly. And I would say from that experience, I think I do know what it feels like starting over again.

Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo: I remember not only the challenges, but I remember the successes because I saw how people rebuilt their lives. In my mind, it’s not only just the trauma and the tragedy of leaving everything behind, but also the experience of how people can be successful in those situations. And I think that’s a very important formation for me because in the work that we do, we cannot just deal with problems—we have to imagine what success looks like. Family became very important, because in these immigrant families, you are what each other has, basically. So the solidarity of family, people taking care of each other.

Nikki Gamer: So as I understand it, you attended a girls’ school run by the Maryknoll sisters, and you’ve spoken with great affection about them. So can you tell us, what kind of women were they and how did they influence your life?

Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo: The Maryknoll Sisters were founded a little bit over 100 years ago—1912, 1915—around that time. And they were Catholic women who wanted to go into mission. Because then, at that time, U.S. Catholic women did not have overseas mission.

Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo: So the sisters tended to be very well educated—they went to college, they were teachers, some of them were nurses—but they were very adventurous from the very beginning. They went to difficult places. They located in China, mostly, and a little bit of activities in Hong Kong.

Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo: So, what I learned from the sisters were that they were can-do people. They started with very little. No money. So they didn’t accept obstacles as the final answer. Whether it is political objection, whether it is financial obstacles, whether it is bureaucratic sort of runaround, they just stuck with it. And I think I got a lot from them.

Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo: I remember they made us debate British school—boys—where English was their first language and they were part of the colonial sort of infrastructure, and we were these Chinese girls. And they said, well, you have to go and debate them. And I said, well, no, we’re not because English is not our first language. And they said, well, it doesn’t matter, and, you know, it was the very beginning of how I look back on my education: You know, you can have all sorts of reasons for why you shouldn’t do something. But I think that they took those reasons away, and today I so appreciate that they didn’t let us sit in our comfort zone.

Nikki Gamer: Do you think that it was especially important to learn that from other women as, as a young woman?

Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo: I spent my whole career talking to men whose first language is English. So, you know, I’m glad I found my tongue somewhere because otherwise I couldn’t have done what I did.

Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo: The second thing I will say that gave them this can-do spirit. It’s just that they really believe in the power of the Holy Spirit. I think particularly in my later years at CRS, I kept on reminding people, you know, we don’t just depend on ourselves. The Holy Spirit is working with us. We do our work, and the Holy Spirit multiplies our work. I think CRS also did some incredible things in terms of our innovations, and so on. I think the Holy Spirit was working with us.

Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo: The third thing I learned from the sisters is that they were actually very joyful in their faith. They didn’t just focus on all of the injustice of the world. God is very real to them. Because I saw that they did what they did because of their love for God. And the love for God really translated into their love for people. They loved us.

Nikki Gamer: Do you think that the Maryknoll Sisters led you to CRS?

Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo: Absolutely. I mean, they were not just people lamenting the problems of the world. They were out there solving the problems. I made a promise that I would continue the work of the Maryknoll sisters. Our lives have been so formed, and built up, and we had all sorts of opportunities—and we saw the world differently because of the sisters.

Nikki Gamer: You paint such a beautiful picture of the sisters. And, actually, this month, for Mothers’ Day, we are focusing our podcast on the women who inspire us. And we want to talk about a friendship and collaboration between two women in particular, who devoted their lives to the poor and who are linked to CRS history. And I’m talking about Eileen Egan and Mother Teresa. Can you tell us that story? Who were these women … to each other and to CRS?

Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo: You know, Mother Teresa has been written up extensively. And I would say this chapter of the story began when she went to India.

Nikki Gamer: Yes, that was in 1928, and I believe when she was only 18 years old.

Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo: Let me pause and go back to Eileen Egan. Eileen Egan was formed by a mother who was very much into social justice. Very much into peace—and not to be silent, but how to address those issues. She was a journalist, a correspondent, but here begins a story. She was not satisfied, Eileen Egan, just being a journalist, to just write about things. She wanted to experience things. She wanted to go overseas. And so she did. She joined CRS around 1943 and was our first lay employee, the first woman and also the first lay person to go overseas.

Nikki Gamer: Yea, and I read that she went immediately to Europe during the war and was so moved by the plight of refugees there that she asked to go to CRS’ first program in Mexico, where we were helping resettle Polish refugees. So, in our first podcast, our listeners heard from one of them, Julek Plowy, who was a young child at the time.

Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo: And then as she went to India, around the mid-50s, and she met Mother Teresa and saw the work. Eileen Egan kept on going back. She was just absolutely inspired and overtaken with Mother Teresa’s work. And so she actually brought Mother Teresa to the U.S. to a national meeting of the national Catholic women [National Council of Catholic Women]. This is now 1960.

Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo: I also want to mention that Eileen Egan had a very strong relationship with Dorothy Day. So while Dorothy Day did not go overseas, and did not work with CRS, Dorothy Day, just like Eileen Egan and Mother Teresa, was a prophet of her time. Social justice was also what propelled her to speak up and really take the Gospel message—for all three of them—and say, Does it look like we are living out the Gospel message in the way that we deal with the  people who have no power, people who are marginalized? And Dorothy Day’smessage is very much also the message we embrace at CRS.

Nikki Gamer: And now you have these three women starting to make their mark on the Church and on CRS.

Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo: Yeah, I think all these three women, they are distinctive in one way. For most of us, we care, we care about people who are poor, we care about injustice. We do something about it, but then, we hold back. We have other things to do, we have to make a living. We are concerned about the risk, we think that we’re not equipped for the job. I think for women to rise to this level of commitment and service, they put everything aside, and to put this mission to serve the poor in God’s name the very, very first priority in their life.

Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo: I think that we don’t know what we can do until we throw all of ourselves into something. And I think these three women—they are gifted in their own way—but it’s because they stopped at nothing. They didn’t let anything compromise their sense of wrong when they look at the people who suffer. They just didn’t stop, they just kept going.

Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo: Whether it is to use their voice, whether it is to change a ministry, whether it is to bump their heads against the power structures of those days. I think what’s distinctive about these three women was that they put this mission and they put God first. Everything was secondary. And I think for most of us, it’s the other way around.

Nikki Gamer: Let’s talk for a minute about this friendship between a future saint … Mother Teresa … and CRS’ first lay employee and first woman employee … Eileen Egan. Why was this relationship so important?

Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo: Well, I mean, the relationship itself is a gift, right? The fact that they found each other, that Eileen Egan found Mother Teresa and Mother Teresa found Eileen Egan. You know, our friends, the people we meet in our life, God sent them to us. And so this is a gift from God, for two women who probably needed each other’s strength, each other’s inspiration, and probably, you know, obstacles become smaller and joys became bigger in those ways.

Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo: A friendship with a saint is above and beyond most experience. But we don’t know who are the saints among us today. But to remember that when God said he’s going to be with us, he sent people to us. And it’s true for Eileen Egan, Mother Teresa, Dorothy Day and so on. But it’s also true for each of us today—that in our work, in our commitments, in particular, and when we choose to live in a way to love and to be committed when it is hard and we don’t walk away, that, you know, we don’t do it on our own. And this is reflected in that wonderful friendship.

Nikki Gamer: What does it mean to you that CRS brought Mother Teresa’s work out into the open and really helped expand its reach around the world?

Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo: Oh, of course, I’m very proud of that. It’s not so much even to focus on the saint, but on the commitment of Mother Teresa and how she honored that commitment. I think those are lessons that CRS could never forget. But it’s also an inheritance that comes with a set of responsibilities. We therefore know what it means to reach out to the lowest people because you’ve seen it done.  But that’s a responsibility to pass on that message, to continue that work in that particular spirit.

Nikki Gamer: Imagine a young woman, a young Catholic woman listening to this podcast and maybe hearing about these three women for the very first time. What do you think they should get out of these women’s stories? What would you want them to know?

Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo: I would say I would want them, first of all, to have a sense of God. Because these are not just great humanitarians who just stepped up. These are people who love God. I hope today’s women invest themselves in knowing God and knowing God’s presence in our life, in knowing God’s vision for the world and for us.

Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo: I think the second thing is to remember from these women that the love for God, or what we call faith, has to be lived out. It has to lead to action. And I think the third is that a certain point, they stopped being afraid. They stopped censoring themselves. They stopped worrying about whether they would offend this person or that person, whether they would be higher or lower in some hierarchy, and so on, that they let go of their fear. And that’s how they found their power.

Nikki Gamer: Now, there’s been a lot of discussion … some would say controversy … over the years about the role of women in the Church. What would you say to that, given your experiences as the leader of one of the biggest, if not the biggest Catholic nonprofits in the world?

Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo: There is not a yes-no answer to this question because it’s played out in the daily life of the Church. A lot of Catholic universities are run by women. A lot of Catholic social service agencies are run by women. I think those gifts of women are being recognized. Having said that, at that level, I still think that in different operations that women are not sought out.

Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo: I think there’s still sort of wariness about women. Particularly when women ask questions. Particularly when they have different points of view, that lack of capacity to engage in those conversations is something that I hope the Church would change. Because, in the end, they also have to believe in the deep faith of women. That when we ask questions, we’re not being difficult, but we certainly feel like we merit a conversation. And also women cannot pass on the faith if they can’t get, you know, their own sort of issues and questions discussed.

Nikki Gamer: Let’s go back to the point of, you know, women, girls in other countries just having no value. Can you link that to why it’s so important that we have programming relative to girls’ education and some of the work we do for women and girls all over the world?

Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo: I mean at worst they have no value, and sometimes actually people derive the value by selling girls, right? But, you know, there’s just not a lot of attention on the talented women. So why do we care? Well, first of all, it’s the social justice issue, but the second thing is that, you know, our analysis showed that if you can educate women, if you give them the proper tools, you could solve most of the world’s problems—whether that is health, whether that is human trafficking, whether that is war, the education of women, and the enablement and empowerment of women actually could get at the root cause of a lot of these community issues.

Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo: And so, you know, for the sake of social justice and also to know the impact of women on bringing about a better world, the investment in women to make sure that their health is good, that they have access to education. If they’re farmers, they have access to tools, sometimes they have access to land rights, all of those things are ways that would not only raise the dignity of women, but we stabilizethe well-being of society.

Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo: So that’s why the empowerment of women is very important. And I will say that I think our programs really reflect that. And by the way, our programs also do not place welfare of women to the exclusion of the welfare of the family. There’s a lot of secular programming that really almost take the woman out of the family, and CRS does not do that. CRS integrates the woman and the family while building up the type of capabilities and resources and so on that she would need to flourish.

Nikki Gamer: Is there any one story from your travels with CRS or experiences you’ve had over the years with CRS that you’d want to share?

Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo: One group is in Guatemala, a women’s group. We did a lot of programming with them, they learned how to plant crops—cash crops-—to increase their income. They were able to obtain clean water. The family became a lot healthier. Their husbands don’t beat them anymore. And when I visited with them, I asked them, what is the name of your group? And they said,“Our name is Intelligence.” And I said, why did you choose that name? And they said,“Because we are intelligent, and we found that out.” And I thought, wow, that sort of captures the spirit of our work.

Nikki Gamer: For the final question, what do you hope for, for CRS? What do you hope for, for women in the Church, and what do you hope for, for yourself?

Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo: CRS is such a talented and such a large organization. So I hope that it always will be willing to take on the most difficult, entrenched problems, that it thinks of solution which is scale because we cannot afford just to serve some small pockets of people. And that whatever we do, that has to be sustainable because we don’t have resources to come back over and over again to deal with the same problem. Everyone has to leave their comfort zone in order to really sort of step into difficult problems with solutions that serve many people, which can be sustained and really make life better.

Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo: In terms of women in the Church, I just hope that, you know, Church hierarchy, in particular, trusts women more. Trust their faith, that they also have deep faith. When they ask difficult questions, to not treat women as guests, or as help, but as part of the family.

Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo: For myself: To enjoy each day. To be able to serve. Now I serve in a very different way. And a way to serve is really to be useful, to be relevant, to lift up people wherever they are. I hope I could surrender more and more to God, and to truly trust God’s presence in my own life.

Nikki Gamer: Well, Dr. Carolyn Woo, thank you so much for joining us.

Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo: You guys all take care. And what a pleasure to be with you.

Nikki Gamer: Join us next month as we focus on the here and now—and look into the future. We’ll be talking with two remarkable CRS women who devote their lives to making sure that all children grow up in healthy families. But until then, thanks for listening. And, if you want to find out more, check us out online at 75.crs.org. And don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast!

Come Holy Ghost published with permission of Oregon Press.

The post May first appeared on CRS 75th Anniversary.

Nikki Gamer: Hi everyone, this is Nikki Gamer for Catholic Relief Services. Welcome back to Behind the Story, a podcast series that invites you to celebrate the people behind 75 years of our history—the people we serve, our partners, our staff … and especially the supporters who make our work possible.

Last month we took you on the Excellent Adventures of Monsignor Wilson Kaiser—on a VW bus, no less—setting up our first programs across sub-Saharan Africa in the 1950s. We talked to Ambassador Ken Hackett, former CEO of CRS, about Monsignor Kaiser’s lasting legacy.

This month, we’ll explore the 1950s from the other side of the world. We’ll learn about the important partnerships that helped millions of people in Asia recover from World War II. And about the famous “Noodle Priest of Hong Kong,” Monsignor John Romaniello, whose efforts to save 300,000 children from starvation put him on classic 1960s TV.

To tell us more, we’ll be talking to Frank Carlin, who had a 40-year career with CRS, both in Asia and Africa, starting in the 1960s.

Nikki Gamer: Frank, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us.

Frank Carlin: Thank you.

Nikki Gamer: You’ve written about our early work in Asia in the 1950s, and you credit four priests—whom you call the “Four Horsemen of Maryknoll”—for setting up CRS programs in Asia. Can you tell us about the conditions in Asia just after World War II?

Frank Carlin: In pre-war Asia, Japan had occupied major countries at the turn of the century: Korea and Taiwan, the Russian far east—as well as sections of China. In so doing, they created a lot of upheaval, fear and trauma. With the outbreak of the war in the ’40s, they started to go to war with countries throughout Asia. They took a lot of lives … they dislocated a lot of people.

Nikki Gamer: So, with all this upheaval, tell us what it was like for refugees.

Frank Carlin: First of all, refugees are always running. They’re in panic. They’re never sure where they’re going, and they’re chasing hope that’s rarely fulfilled.

They carry their most valued possessions, and often are forced to abandon them along the roads. Everybody hears, “Oh, if you go over here to this village they’re handing out food,” or “You go over to that town, and you can get plenty of water.” And then you get there, and there’s nothing. And then you start again—exhausted and impoverished.

Nikki Gamer: Tell us a little bit about the work of the Maryknoll priests and sisters in the immediate aftermath of the upheaval.

Frank Carlin: In the circumstances of CRS, we had a great blessing. And that’s where the story of the Four Horsemen comes in. In many countries, there were missionaries there—and they began to respond to the needs of the population, as best they could. Resources were a problem, and the infrastructure virtually nonexistent.

The role CRS undertook was to provide the assistance to the missionaries, who in turn would provide it to the people. And this marks the very big difference in Catholic Relief Services. We try to work through others to empower local indigenous organizations, oftentimes in the Church, to carry out that work so that we can do what we do best—and that is source the support and provide it with the technical assistance, to really make it work effectively.

Nikki Gamer: All right. So, did you coin the phrase, the “Four Horsemen”? Was that you?

Frank Carlin: Well, the “Four Horsemen” actually is a reference to the ’20s. Notre Dame had a backfield that they called the Four Horsemen, and the Four Horsemen ruled the playing field and they became famous.

And then out in Asia, I found my own Four Horsemen: Monsignor John Romaniello; Monsignor George M. Carroll; “the Duke,” Father Paul Duchaine; and Father Frank O’Neill. Each one of them came from a different location where they directed CRS operations. They helped to form my vocation in Catholic Relief Services.

Nikki Gamer: What can you tell us about Monsignor Romaniello? As I understand, he was called the “Noodle Priest of Hong Kong.”

Frank Carlin: Monsignor Romaniello was one of the old Asia hands who came out of China—all of these refugees that I had described earlier. He found that among their greatest needs was the need for food, which he was providing in the form of flour, milk and cooking oil—things like that—in a monthly ration from the American government. But what he quickly found out was that  people didn’t really have a recipe for milk and flour, and oil. They weren’t big bread eaters.

So Monsignor thought, “Well, hey, I can make the noodles.” But he didn’t know much about noodles. He was looking at two things: Number one, he wanted to have a noodle that had a very good nutritional impact, and he also started to design a noodle machine that could produce maybe 50 tons of noodles in a month, which is a lot. He could position the machine in the communities where the noodles would be consumed, and he could cut out the need for transportation. It was a very efficient operation. He transformed the nature of the assistance that was going into Hong Kong. And he was feeding, at the height of that program, 400,000 Chinese in Hong Kong. And he was providing a million pounds of noodles each month.

And as he put it together, he needed other funds. And he was a character—he was a colorful, colorful guy. He was born in Italy, and he had a twinkle in his eye. And he would go out and schmooze people and tell them, “You got to help me with the noodles.”

He always had this great capacity to engage others—whether it was donors, or the people in the community—to cooperate, to do something bigger than themselves. And, in order to draw attention to himself, he started to sing this noodle song that he had. Everybody would gather around, and they would find him just charming.

Nikki Gamer: Well, I think you know what I’m going to ask you next—and that is to sing the noodle song for our listeners.

Frank Carlin: Okay … well, I apologize for my poor singing ability but this one’s for you, Romi!

“Noodles in the morning, noodles in the evening, noodles at supper time. Eat them good old noodles, eat ’em all the time …”And I’m going to pause there because I don’t want to overdo it—I don’t want to overpower you with my singing prowess.

Nikki Gamer: I liked it. I was dancing along.

Frank Carlin: And when you add to that, when he came to the United States, he found his way onto TV shows that were running at that time.

TV Announcer: One of these three men is known as the “Noodle Priest.” What is your name, please? “My name is John Romaniello.” “My name is John Romaniello.” “My name is John Romaniello.” Only one of these men is the real John Romaniello, the Noodle Priest. The other two are impostors and will try to fool this panel: Merv Griffin, Betty White, Ralph Bellamy and Kitty Carlisle on To Tell the Truth, with your host, Bud Collyer!

Frank Carlin: In the late ’60s, when I’m getting on the Star Ferry to go across from Hong Kong to Kowloon, there’s a deckhand there, and he says to me, “So where do you work?” and I tell him I’m with Catholic Relief Services – 天主教护理会 (tian zhu jiao hu li hui). And he says, “Ah, Father Noodles, he saved my whole family’s life.” And he never met him. Never saw him. And wouldn’t recognize him if he did. But that’s the impact that somebody like Monsignor Romaniello had on people. He was first and foremost a priest.

Nikki Gamer: What do you consider the biggest legacy of CRS in Asia in those days?

Frank Carlin: Catholic Relief was very instrumental in organizing, establishing, empowering local organizations.

We didn’t just provide the assistance, and then boogie on out. We provided the assistance in a manner in which we were empowering and developing organizations to do the job. They learned how to do it. So we worked ourselves out of a job in every one of those countries that I spoke of where the Horsemen were: Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong.

Nikki Gamer: Can you talk, briefly, about the variety of programs that we offered in Asia at that time?

Frank Carlin: In the early years, late ’40s and ’50s, it was very much emergency focused. So, we were providing the food. We were providing access to water. We were providing basic shelter, health, sanitation—even a bar of soap was a big thing. We were supporting the clinics that were run by Maryknoll and Columbans and the Medical Mission Sisters.

Nikki Gamer: And, back in the U.S., I understand that Catholics were very responsive, and very compassionate in their support of all the people suffering overseas.

Frank Carlin: We had what was called the Thanksgiving Clothing Collection. For 40 years, every parish in the United States had a collection. And then you’d have the Legion of Mary and the Knights of Columbus, and the Holy Name Society. They’d truck it to Brooklyn, New York. And when it came in, you’d send it out to these areas that the missionaries were providing assistance from. And in a place like Korea—where you had winter—boy, those overcoats and jackets … they were lifesaving.

Nikki Gamer: Can you talk to us a little about the most vulnerable groups?

Frank Carlin: I mean, you had hundreds of thousands of orphans in these countries. Not a thousand, not 10,000—100,000. Nobody to care for them. The only option was an institutional program.And the people that were running the institutional programs were the Christian organizations.There are hundreds of thousands of people today that are alive, and have their own children and grandchildren, because their lives were saved by those orphanages.

We provided assistance to leper communities—Hansen’s disease is the way we referred to it. We provided to the handicapped, the disabled, unwed mothers. These were the institutions where you had the most vulnerable, the most at risk—and the Church did a lot to provide for them.

Nikki Gamer: Can you tell us about some of the other programming? I understand we provided health assistance for mothers and children, and microcredit.

Frank Carlin: We operated sophisticated nutritional programs for the severely malnourished. We provided school feeding programs. So we used the food that was now coming in greater quantities from the American government. We were the ones who got the American government to agree to use food-for-work, and it’s in the lexicon of USAID today. But it started with Catholic Relief Services.

Nikki Gamer: Wow—that is such a legacy. I did not realize that we played a part in that.

Frank Carlin: The effect was significant because with food-for-work we were able to build farm-to-market roads. We did land reclamation projects. We did irrigation projects, we did well-digging projects—all with food-for-work.

As we started to get into the late ’50s, CRS began—through these missionaries—to promote the establishment of the credit union movement. You train people, you position them, you salary them—and then you get them to go out to communities. And, basically, you’re starting a community bank.

Catholic Relief Services is credited today by the international cooperative movement and the international credit union movement as being the founder of the credit union and cooperative movement in many of the countries in Asia. And that’s quite an accomplishment.

Nikki Gamer: So, in all of this groundbreaking work, how important was partnership?

Frank Carlin: Partnerships. CRS could never have done all that it has done, and continues to do, without strong partnerships. The people have to trust you.

There are many organizations that go out there, but they don’t have what we have. We can plug into an indigenous structure, or we can plug into a faith-based structure. We respect one another because of that which motivates us: faith, a biblical mandate, a love of God.

Nikki Gamer: Let me ask you this: On the occasion of our 75 anniversary, what is your hope for the future?

Frank Carlin: What I want to hope for is an agency that, in the next 25 years, it’s as flexible and as adaptable as it has been for the past 75. I hope that we’ll continue to have a staff that will be not just committed and dedicated, but faith-filled—with a fire in the belly that’s apparent, visible—and really work zealously to transform the world that they find themselves in.

We’ve had a formula for success from our inception, working ourselves out of a job, and that will continue to be the way in which we will find success. So, that would be my hope.

Nikki Gamer: Frank Carlin, thank you so much for joining us.

Frank Carlin: You’re more than welcome.

Nikki Gamer: Next month, in honor of Mother’s Day, we’ll be taking a look back at the women who inspire us. It might not surprise you to know that Mother Teresa is one of them. But until then, thanks for listening. And, if you want to find out more, check us out online at 75.crs.org. And don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast!

Notre Dame Victory March audio clip published with permission of MPL Music Publishing Inc.

Sugartime audio clip published with permission of Tency music.

To Tell the Truth audio clip published with permission of Fremantle Media International LTD.

 

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