Delores

 “I was born in a land that God forgot,” said Delores, one of our traveling companions.  She was referring to the South American country in which she was born.  Her mother had been forced to drop out of school after the sixth grade in order to help support the family after Delores’s grandfather died.  Delores, who grew up in a house with a dirt floor, read stories in the Spanish-language editions of the Reader’s Digest about American families who lived in big houses and owned two cars, stories which motivated her to come to the United States.

At her English teacher’s suggestion, she corresponded with an American pen pal, who eventually invited her to visit her.  But Delores needed 45,000 pesos, a fortune to her, in order to obtain a visa.  Determined to earn the money, she did so by learning to type and working as a typist.  She had to wait until she was 21 before traveling to America.  She would have needed her father’s consent to leave at a younger age and he would have refused to give it.  

She stayed a short while with her pen pal, who had offered to help her, and then landed a job, all the while going to night school, first to obtain a high school equivalency certificate and then to continue her study of English.  She went to college at night while working as a typist at the school system of a large California town.  Slowly she worked her way up the ladder and eventually became the office manager for six elementary schools, the second in command when any principal was away.  She married and, while working, raised two children.  She loved her work but retired early to care for her mother, whom she had brought from Colombia.  "I'm grateful for every day," she told us.  "America is my country now."

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