First donors

When I returned from the States, I received a visit from a friend from Oregon who visits Oaxaca every year with her husband.  She had already been in Oaxaca a month, but because of the visit with my granddaughter and my visit to the States we had missed each other.  Leean was about to fly back to Oregon in 2 days time.

While we drank tea and caught up with our lives, I told her about Fran and her situation.  Leean expressed sympathy, and then we went on to talk about other things.

That evening, Leean sent me an email saying that she and her husband Steve wanted to help.  They wanted to meet Fran, and invited us to meet with them the evening before their departure in their hotel room.  After a series of frantic text messages trying to organize the meeting with Fran, we showed up at 7:30.

Fran tried to explain her situation in Spanish, but even though Leean and I are intermediate speakers, we felt we were missing too much.  So Leean had the brilliant idea of opening her computer and using the Bing Translator to talk back and forth with Fran.  The translator is not great, but it was good enough to allow Fran to answer Leean's many questions. 

Then we used Google maps to find Fran's remote pueblo, and were amazed that we could actually see the main square of her village, the church, and the street where she lived.  Leean provided this information about how to find her village on the map:

To see her Pueblo . . .1. search the following
"Santa Maria Papalo, Mexico"
@ http://maps.google.com/
2. San Pedro Cuyaltepec is
about 1 mile SE . . .
3. there is a basket ball court & school
4. her family house is N of the school

At the end of the evening, Leean and Steve gave Fran a donation towards her education which has been safely tucked away.  Fran said that she was sure she could get off work in time to attend an evening class in computer maintenance.  

Meanwhile Fran and I would start planning how she could start attending the university in September, and Leean and I both agreed to look for more donors to keep her going toward her goal.  The good news is that she needs comparatively little. 

WE ARE NOW LOOKING FOR DONATIONS FOR THE 2013-2014 SCHOOL YEAR FROM BETWEEN $10 and $100.  IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO MAKE A DONATION, DROP ME A LINE AT: lcassady@gmail.com.