Featured Testimonial About Creighton University
This summer in the D.R. was a full-circle moment in my and Jose’s story of meeting on the summer program, falling in love, getting married, raising our children and instilling in them the importance of faith and service to others.
By Cindy Murphy McMahon
Who doesn’t love a family summer trip, maybe visiting relatives or even experiencing another culture? But when Julie Rothlisberger-Castillo, MD, BS’95, and her husband, three daughters and two sons traveled from Omaha to the Dominican Republic in July, it was more than a vacation.
“It was a full-circle moment for our family,” says Rothlisberger-Castillo, an internal medicine and pediatric physician serving an immigrant population at a CHI Health clinic in South Omaha.
That’s because her first trip to the D.R. as a Creighton student majoring in biology and Spanish greatly altered the trajectory of her life.
In 1993 a campus flyer for a summer health immersion program presented an opportunity to work on her Spanish. “I didn’t even know where the D.R. was,” she laughs today. “I thought it was in South America.”
She left her Midwest comfort zone for the Caribbean and the Institute for Latin American Concern (ILAC) Center, an eight-building campus near Santiago. The ILAC Center is international, Catholic and Ignatian-inspired, providing health services and pastoral care to Dominicans. Creighton has been a primary partner for more than five decades, bringing thousands of students over the years.
The ILAC Summer Health Program, then and now, teams Creighton students and healthcare professionals to provide health services and build relationships with Dominicans in rural communities or campos. Undergraduates serve as helpers or ayudantes.
Across the street from the ILAC Center was a seminary. “I spent a lot of time with the seminary students to try to improve my Spanish,” Rothlisberger-Castillo says. One of the seminarians, Jose Castillo, was assigned to accompany her team, and the two became friends.
The team’s campo, Rancho Pedro, was two and a half hours away, close to the Haitian border. “The community was extremely poor, living in homes with dirt floors,” she says. “Donkeys brought our supplies up to the campo.”
She says the Dominicans “were so warm and welcoming. They invited us into their homes with tremendous hospitality, stopping whatever they were doing to visit and connect with us.”
After her life-changing trip, Rothlisberger-Castillo returned to Creighton for her junior year, her sights set on medical school.
When applying, however, she sought a one-year deferment to serve again in the D.R. After graduation, she taught English in Santa Domingo and volunteered at a public pediatric hospital and a women’s clinic.
“It was a level of poverty that you can’t imagine,” she says.
Meanwhile, Jose had graduated, was no longer a seminarian and was teaching high school. They renewed their friendship and their relationship deepened over the year; eventually they knew they wanted to marry.
Rothlisberger-Castillo says her parents back in Omaha worried the couple’s plans would derail medical school. But Jose and Julie were determined to make it all work. They had a simple wedding on March 30, 1996, and she returned to Omaha in May to petition to bring her new husband to the U.S. and prepare for medical school at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC).
Normally the immigration process would have taken 18 months, but they happily discovered Julie’s Dominican visa meant Jose could arrive in August, just as she was starting medical school. In 1997, he became a medical Spanish interpreter, a position he has held ever since.
They began their family in her third year of medical school. “Jose was amazing and so unselfish as the main caregiver,” she says. “We had three kids by the time I completed residency.” Her four-year internal medicine-pediatric residency was a joint Creighton-UNMC program.
This summer’s trip was special not only because of her mother-in-law’s 90th birthday, but for the first time, Rothlisberger-Castillo and three of her children volunteered together in the D.R. All of their children are bilingual and several have Creighton ties as well.
Daughter Corina, BS’26, currently in a master’s degree program in education at Creighton, volunteered at an orphanage near ILAC. Bianca, BS’23, a Creighton pharmacy student; Juliana, a medical ICU nurse at CHI Health Creighton University Medical Center – Bergan Mercy in Omaha; and their mother served on a multidisciplinary (nursing, medicine, dentistry, pharmacy) healthcare team in a campo.
“I was there to supervise and guide the team, but really the students were amazing in their abilities to care for the patients,” Rothlisberger-Castillo says. “It was a super smart and compassionate group of students.”
The team found, just as in 1993, remarkable hospitality. “The community embraced us and wanted to share their homes and culture with us. We sang and danced and played a lot of dominoes. Even though we were there to care for them, they gave back more to us.”
Their family intends to do the ILAC Summer Health Program again, adding son Luis Javier, a Creighton sophomore with plans to attend medical school, as an ayudante.
“This summer in the D.R. was a full-circle moment in my and Jose’s story of meeting on the summer program, falling in love, getting married, raising our children and instilling in them the importance of faith and service to others.
“Creighton’s social justice programs were transformational for me, and we feel so fortunate that Creighton played a role in having our paths cross 33 years ago,” Rothlisberger-Castillo says. “We thank God for blessing us with our children and giving us the ability to give back to others through our professions and faith.”
