INTERVIEW

Operation Rice Bowl: families help the world

The Interview, a regular feature of The Catholic New World, is an in-depth conversation with a person whose words, actions or ideas affect today’s Catholic. It may be affirming of faith or confrontational. But it will always be stimulating.

This week, Catholic New World staff writer Michelle Martin talks with Louise Wilmot, deputy executive director of Catholic Relief Services.

Admiral Louise C. Wilmot was the highest-ranking woman serving the U.S. Navy when she retired and joined Catholic Relief Services as the agency’s deputy executive director six years ago. Now she coordinates fund raising, education, advertising, communications and relationships with U.S. Catholics for the agency, which operates in 80 developing countries and has an annual budget of more than $200 million.

Wilmot, 57, recently visited Chicago to promote Operation Rice Bowl, Catholic Relief Services' annual Lenten donation program. Operation Rice Bowl asks families to substitute one meal a week with a simple meal such as a family in a developing country might eat, and put the cost difference in a cardboard “rice bowl” to be donated to the agency. The program has raised more than $105 million since 1976. Of that, $88.7 million helped development projects in other countries; the rest of the money stayed in the dioceses where it was raised. Last year, more than $50,000 went to various anti-hunger programs in the Archdiocese of Chicago.

Catholic New World: How does Operation Rice Bowl fit within the mission of Catholic Relief Services?
Louise Wilmot: Funding from Operation Rice Bowl goes into development programs rather than emergency programs. And why we love it—and we do love it—you know, it’s people in parishes. We just came from a parish today. It’s a combined parish of Holy Cross and Immaculate Heart of Mary. Here is a parish made up of working people, struggling people.
Yet in this particular parish, in its fourth year now of Operation Rice Bowl, they have managed to donate a considerable amount of money to the rest of the world. It is just this continuous lesson that even though most of the people in this parish are immigrants themselves,
or are first-generation, they can and will think about people less fortunate than themselves, and they will make a donation of time and money in a Rice Bowl spiritual Lenten program for the betterment of others.
So many times people say, well of course, our situation is difficult, and times are difficult for us, and our own community needs funding, and Operation Rice Bowl says yes, we agree with you, and the world needs help.
With Operation Rice Bowl, you can keep 25 percent of the money in the diocese. And this particular parish that we went to visit has been able in 1999 to get a grant from the 25 percent [that stayed in the Archdiocese of Chicago]. They are using it to develop a database that they can use to keep track of their food pantry.

CNW: Is part of the goal of Operation Rice Bowl to make people aware of Catholic Relief Services?
LW: Yes, of course it is. To make them aware of what is going on in the parts of the world not in their community.
Rice Bowl is the only family Lenten observance that the church has. There are parish observances and school observances, but the bishops think and we think this is a wonderful way for families to come together. There are wonderful recipes, and believe me, I’ve tried a lot of them. Rice Bowl is usually the first time that a small child might learn what it means to put a quarter into a box.
I have a friend who has a large family, and they’re always ordering pizzas. Her family decided to give up pizza, and put the pizza money in the Rice Bowl box. She said at the end of Lent, they had a couple hundred dollars in there. She couldn’t believe that this was how much pizza all these kids were eating. But she said this was good thing for them to do. It’s a much better deal than just giving something up.

CNW: Tell me about some of the projects you’ve seen that are funded by Operation Rice Bowl.
LW: I saw a fascinating project in Ecuador. It was in a rural community, where there were lots of farms and a big market area. The farmers would bring their produce in to sell in the marketplace. It used to be that at the end of the day or the end of the week, the spoiled food would just be swept off the big tables and shoved outside and allowed to rot.
With Operation Rice Bowl money, some of the indigenous men actually started a fertilizer plant. They were able to get trucks. They cleaned up after the day’s work was finished in the marketplace. They brought all this fermenting, spoiled food to a place. They used the best available information about how to turn it into fertilizers. This food went in one end, and it finally got put in this large vacuum kind of container and got shot out as pellets, which they bagged and sold as fertilizer to poor farmers in a co-op.
This was a win-win situation for all of them. You gave work to people, the marketplace was cleaned up and the product went back to the farmers. These men were employing the best practices of environmental safety. The neighborhood was happy to have it, and it respected the dignity of the men who were actually doing it. Professors came from the local college to watch the men doing what they were doing, and then wrote a manual on how to do it.

CNW: Why did you retire from the Navy and join Catholic Relief Services in 1994?
LW: I had spent 30 years in the Navy and I was the commander of the Navy base in Philadelphia. I knew I was going to retire within a year. Our current executive director, Ken Hackett, had asked people to give him a short list of people they would recommend for the job.
One of the people he called was Sister of Charity Hildegarde Mahoney, who was past president of St. Elizabeth’s College in Convent Station, N.J. Sister Hildegarde called me at my office in Philadelphia and said, “I’ve asked the alumni office to come up with a list, and I’ve written a list, and you’re number one on both our lists.”
And she said, “You’ve had 30 years in the Navy, and let’s face it, if you haven’t done it by now, you're not going to do it. You’ve done everything you could possibly do in the Navy. ... You ought to think about what else you want to do in your life. You’ve had 30 years of service to your country, and I believe that service to others is very much a part of you. Catholic Relief Services gives you a chance to serve the world.”
Then I called Bishop [John M.] Mort Smith [Wilmot’s bishop when she was stationed in Pensacola] and told him about the conversation I just had. There was absolute quiet at the other end. Then he said, “Well, I’ve just been elected to the [Catholic Relief Services] board of directors. Of course I think you should do this.”
So I hung up the phone and called my husband, and I said, “You know, I just think the Holy Spirit’s after me.”

CNW: What do you want to do at Catholic Relief Services?
LW: The board of directors wanted us to have a plan to help Catholics and other faith-based organizations know about Catholic Relief Services.
Our board of directors and our executive director knew that since we were established in 1943, all our work had been done overseas, and that very little had been done to publicize us within the United States. They had come to an understanding that you can be very well-known in Haiti or Guatemala, but if you’re not known in Chicago, how can you expect Catholics in Chicago to support you?
And more importantly, how can you expect to bring those lessons of life overseas to Catholics in the United States if you’re not known? We are the [U.S. Conference of Catholic] Bishops’ one organization empowered to do this work overseas.
In order to discuss both the beautiful that we see overseas, as well as what is needed overseas, people have to think that we’re a very credible organization. If they know very little about us, they won't have confidence in us.

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