They say it takes a village to raise a child, but when the village needs help, it takes a Neumann alum to rise to the occasion.

A year after graduating from Neumann in 1982, Eileen (O’Day) Sosa joined the Peace Corps Rural Nursing Program and was stationed in San Joaquin, Paraguay. Forty-three years later, she is still helping the small town.

Sosa now lives with her husband Milner, a native of San Joaquin, in Lancaster County. She is a family nurse practitioner with PENN Medicine, and he is a Spanish teacher at York Catholic Middle School and High School. Almost every year, however, they return to Paraguay to help the people in the town. And they don’t come empty-handed.

Outreach PARAGUAY, a nonprofit organization that Sosa founded in 2012, supports more than a dozen schools, a mobile health clinic, and a community kitchen in the resource-poor areas of Caazapa and Caaguazu. The needs of the community are critical and widespread.

Sosa funnels as much funding as possible through the local economy. To support schools, she works with a nearby book distributor and reading specialist to promote early childhood literacy programs and expand school libraries in isolated rural areas. Additional donations of less than $1,000 provided 36 full, one-year scholarships to a local agricultural school.

The mobile health clinic is a specially equipped bus that travels on rough terrain to remote areas and often needs body work, batteries, and tires. Outreach PARAGUAY has also provided equipment and supplies for the clinic, including an EKG machine and anesthesia for patients who are treated in two functioning dental chairs.

The community kitchen located in San Juaquin services 75-90 people daily. They come to the kitchen with a container and bring food back to their own family table. Donations of only $200 allow the kitchen to provide food staples for a full month.

“We ship close to a ton of materials every year,” Sosa estimates. “It goes by boat and takes two to three months, depending on the water level in the Paraguayan rivers. Our garage is always filled with donations – gently used clothing, school supplies, wheelchairs, walkers, crutches, and soccer gear.”

The motivation for Sosa stems from the relationships she has built with the people of the region.

“They are the most generous people you will ever meet, and they exude joy,” she smiles. “Every time I talk about the country, I get emotional because I see the faces of those I left behind. Without a doubt they taught me more than I could ever give them.”

She often quotes Dr. Paul Farmer, co-founder of the humanitarian organization Partners in Health, who captured Sosa’s philosophy perfectly: “The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.”

“That belief pushes me forward,” she says. “Why don’t the children in Paraguay have the same rights, the same opportunities that my children and grandchildren have? I know them, and they deserve the same.”

The challenge, Sosa explains, is that most people have never heard of Paraguay, a country tucked between Argentina, Brazil, and Bolivia in central South America.

“We scramble all the time to keep money coming in,” Sosa admits, but she has no plans to take her foot off the gas anytime soon. “Right now, there’s a need to fix the only ambulance in town, and that’s a large expense.”

For her relentless commitment to service, education, and underserved communities, Sosa received the Alumni Association’s John Neumann Award in 1986 and the President's Distinguished Alumni Award in 2012.