A Life Devoted to Service

College community remembers longtime VESL partner the Rev. Walter Kasuboski

The Rev. Walter Kasuboski, OFM Cap., a longtime partner of the Villanova Engineering Service Learning (VESL) program who devoted his life to improving the living conditions for residents of rural Panama, died July 20, 2022. He was 75.

Villanova’s relationship with “Father Wally,” as he was affectionately known, began in 1991, when the Capuchin priest reached out to Campus Ministry requesting engineering help for his mission in the Alto Bayano region of Panama. Chris McCartin ’91 CE, newly graduated from the College of Engineering, answered the call. Having never met Father Wally, McCartin made his way to Panama for an 18-month stay, equipped with engineering textbooks, surveying equipment donated from John Barry Hall and about 20 words of Spanish.

“It was an absolutely life-changing experience for me,” recalls McCartin, now a managing director of design and construction at Tishman Speyer in New York. “I picked up enough language to get by, and within a month we were off on our own every day doing our own projects. We just synced up, hit it off on a personal level.”

The work with Father Wally centered on providing clean-water access to multiple communities in remote Panama—a mission that has since drawn hundreds of Villanova Engineering students through service-learning trips over a three-decade partnership. A few months after McCartin met Father Wally, the first group of Villanova volunteers arrived to assist with surveying watersheds, laying pipe and building water tanks.

The projects were not without their difficulties, McCartin says, but “Father Wally would go up against Goliath and just start chipping away at a problem until it was solved. He was very ambitious and very committed.”

Father Wally’s persistence led to the largest rural water system in Central America, bringing potable water to more than 15,000 people in 14 villages. With assistance from teams of Villanova students and faculty members, his mission also built churches, roads and schools in the region. In 2017, he received an honorary doctor of humane laws degree from Villanova for his humanitarian development projects.

The College paid tribute to Father Wally this spring with a memorial service on campus.

Jordan Ermilio, PhD, ’98 ME, ’06 MSWREE, director of the Center for Humanitarian Engineering and International Development, fondly recalls a piece of advice he received from his longtime friend: “When you get to the gates of Heaven,” Ermilio says, “the question is not going to be about how you felt, how you thought or what you said. It will be about what