CRS official serves vulnerable communities, hopes efforts will help leave a better world

A commitment to helping others has led Carla Fajardo to work with Catholic Relief Services — the international relief and development agency of the U.S. Catholic Church — in more than six countries over the years.

After nearly two decades of leading humanitarian aid projects with the organization, primarily in countries in Africa, she is now working in Guatemala, where she will advance this Catholic organization’s work, which impacts thousands around the world.

“We all want to live at peace, we all want to leave a better world for our children, we all have that desire to live with dignity,” she told OSV News of her reason to dedicate her life to service.

Her goal, she said, is for people “to have access to resources, to have equity and to be able to exercise their rights and participate in making decisions about their lives.”

Fajardo was born in Ayacucho, Peru, and studied sociology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Because of the internal armed conflict that raged in her country in the 1980s, she felt the need to help in some way, following in the footsteps of her father, who worked in humanitarian aid.

After completing her master’s degree in conflict resolution in the U.S., she returned to Peru in 2002 and headed the reparations unit of the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She later moved with her husband to Uganda. “When I arrived, I realized that one can contribute from different angles,” said Fajardo. “That’s where my career in international cooperation starts.”

Fajardo says that when she arrived in Uganda in 2005, there was a northern conflict with the Lord’s Resistance Army. “It was complicated because it recruited children and was also very violent,” she said.

She began working as a consultant with one of CRS’ projects during the conflict in northern Uganda to reintegrate young people who had been part of this rebel group back into society.

She learned more about the culture because to reincorporate people who have gone through such a difficult trauma, “you have to go through the social and cultural part.”

With that new knowledge, Fajardo went to Burundi to work on reconciliation and social cohesion issues. “In Burundi, there started to be peace agreements, there was a whole process of transitional justice that was taking shape, and that was still very interesting to me because of my experience in Peru,” she said.

By the end of 2007, Fajardo went to work with another organization in Nepal, where she focused on missing-persons commissions and reparations for victims of the conflict, she said. In 2009, her husband began working with CRS in Chad and she returned to the agency to do humanitarian work with the refugee population from Sudan.

From 2012 to 2015, Fajardo and her family were in Haiti. There, she worked on education issues and negotiations between the government and the different political parties. “From there, an opportunity arose because CRS had a leadership program that was preparing people who had potential (to apply) for the position of country director,” she explained.

That’s how Fajardo became the country representative to Senegal, Gambia, Guinea Bissau and Mauritania, from 2015 to 2019. In August 2019, she took over as country director in Madagascar.

“It is a beautiful country with flora and fauna that you won’t find anywhere else in the world, but it is also a country that is very vulnerable to natural disasters,” explained Fajardo, who, upon her arrival, experienced firsthand the severe drought that had lasted for many years and generated, as she explained, what was almost a famine in the south of the island.

The COVID pandemic piled on to the already complex panorama of this population, which prompted her team into action. “We began to see how we could creatively avoid leaving more than a million people without the ability to put something in their mouths,” said Fajardo, who spoke of the importance of working as a team to help those in need of support.

In Madagascar, Fajardo and her team — which by June of this year numbered 830 people — worked on water and sanitation projects, public health, reforestation and better agricultural practices to counteract the effects of climate change since, as Fajardo explained, the frequency of cyclones has increased to such an extent that in two months about six cyclones hit the region last year.

In August, Fajardo took over as regional director of CRS Latin America and the Caribbean, where she will continue living her commitment to serving others through this Catholic organization.

“Returning to Latin America makes me very happy because I want to give back all that I have learned and work more with my people,” Carla said. “Latin America has many challenges but also great local capacity. We have the possibility of doing great things because we have people who are very capable and prepared.”

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Marietha Góngora V. writes for OSV News from Bogotá, Colombia.