Letter to Allie

hey girl! How’re you?? thinking about you makes me miss our lunches at La Val’s… good greasy cheap pizza and our talks about boys and life and all of the crazy things that you take on. How was your run, if it’s happened already? And how’s your semester going? You’re still going to italy next semester, right?

My roommate is in chi O too, but from UCSD. she’s crazy/spunky/spiritual and great to live with ..although it’s still hilarious to hear her describe greek life to Ghanaians, who are for the most part pretty socially conservative and don’t really drink.

Anyway, I wanted to write to you because I met this woman last week who reminded me a lot of something you mentioned awhile back. I’ll call her Mrs. P, she’s a professor of nursing at my university. I’m doing this project with community health nurses in an urban slum, and so she took a whole morning off to drive me there and introduce me to everyone I had to know. Along the way I read her most recent research, on AIDS and stigma and income production in women (which was really really hard to read… it’s one thing to know that these things happen to people, but to actually read their own voices describing how they’ve been shunned and abused and prevented from making money… it’s tough when it’s not abstract.) She told me about her career – 30 years as a nurse in rural regions of Ghana, and in poor communities in the capital. Then we started talking about her travels (Canada, South Africa, and the US).

I asked her where in the US she’d been, and that’s when she told me that she had gone to Wisconsin in 1994 to visit Martha Higgins, the woman who had sponsored her as a child and paid for her schooling all the way through nursing school.

“Without her, I couldn’t have gone to school. We were really poor.”
“How did she find you? Did she know you or meet you or every come to Africa?”
“No, 1994 was the first time we met. We wrote letters to each other through an organization that worked in my village. All of her kids had grown up, so she began to sponsor me. All of the work that I do now, serving others, I do because of her.”

Isn’t that amazing? I’ve always been vaguely aware of these “sponsor a kid in Africa” programs, but just like the AIDS stories, they were always abstract in my mind and didn’t affect real people. Or else I wrote them off as scams. Which many of them might still be. But the fact that this powerhouse of a woman was driving me through Accra, telling me about the NGO she’s started and the research she’s doing to get her PhD, is proof that sometimes they really can make a huge difference, a difference which ripples out to affect everyone that person touches.

I remember you saying that you and Brian were going to sponsor a kid – I don’t know if you ever ended up doing it, but either way I wanted to share this story with you.

I miss you and would love to hear about your summer and semester and all of the incredible things that I know you’ve been up to.

With love,