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UC Faculty Communicating Across Borders Hersonissos, Crete -- A Greek woman yells "Maria!" and reaches out to give the American woman a two-armed hug.
The recipient of this enthusiastic Cretan hello is Maria Kreppel, University of Cincinnati professor of communication. She
is remembered by this female resident of the village of Avdou, near Hersonissos, for a visit last year when she stood up in front
of a group of village women and sang popular American songs.
With her daughter Maria translating for her, Fani Gialitaki explains her joy at seeing Kreppel in Crete once again this year.
"Maria is very friendly. She is very outgoing. She has character."
Another female villager, sitting nearby in the Strouveli Taverna, pipes up: "Maria is a very, very good woman."
The one-to-one connection that Kreppel has been so successful in making plays an important role in the work she is doing with the
University of Cincinnati's research on mass tourism in Crete this
summer. She and public relations consultant Judith Bogart and former UC administrator Mary Allen Ashley form a team that is
examining the issue of citizen participation in the newly formed municipality of Hersonissos.
Co-worker Bogart has a theory about Kreppel's popularity. "She is mistaken for Greek, so she is one of them."" Kreppel has a
Sicilian heritage and agrees her facial features can pass for Greek.
The challenge for the Mayor of Hersonissos is that his municipal region was expanded a little more than one year ago to include
multiple villages in the area near the port of Hersonissos. "Crete has a tradition of strong isolated communities with strong
citizen participation in them," says Kreppel, as she eats Cretan appetizers of Greek salad, dolmades (stuffed grape leaves) and
more with Fani and her husband George sitting at the other end of the table. "Participation like you see tonight here at the
taverna." It seems like the whole town has turned out for Saturday night dinner and discussion.
"The difficulty is getting these villages to speak to one another now that they are part of a newly formed municipality,"
Kreppel adds. "It's kind of like getting people from Westwood to talk to people from the East Side of Cincinnati."
Another characteristic of Crete that makes the communication experts' job here more interesting is that the island never has
experienced industrialization. "They've gone from the 18th century straight to the middle of the 20th century," Kreppel says.
She, Ashley and Bogart are developing recommendations for establishing a public information program, human resource
development, citizen leadership development and information technology development throughout the municipal region. Students
assisting them include Carrie Knose, a mechanical engineering technology major; William Colgan, an engineering technology major;
and Pamela McMillan, an urban planning and design major.
"In many ways what we are doing is the hardest sell, because we have no flashy models, drawings or graphics," Kreppel explains.
"But it is a day-to-day investment that is essential to getting this new and diverse community working together."
Kreppel found that being in Crete with last summer's UC Sustainable Development Group evoked feelings of homesickness for
her family's own homeland, which she only first visited in 1995. She hopes to someday use her expertise in a similar research
project in Sicily.
For more stories on UC's research in Crete, go to http://www.uc.edu/crete/credef.htm.
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