Dear Friends: I’m sending this letter early this year as we leave next week for six months in Cañar. Hurrah! This is an earlier departure than usual for two reasons: Michael wants to avoid the holiday season (Bah! Humbug!), and I want to be back in Portland by May for the garden season. I’ve always enjoyed playing around in the garden – mostly digging and pulling weeds – but now I’m beginning to take it seriously. You cannot plant tomatoes and peppers in July!
Here we are in May 2023 after our first full scholarship meeting in three years. One of the present group in the photo has graduated, and three others are on the brink of 2025.
During the past twenty years, I’ve watched a cultural shift in the women in our program. Early on, when most were the first in their family or even their village to go to university, the tendency was to aim for marriage by graduation. This meant lots of babies, delays in graduating, and a few dramas. Today, the young women seem to whip through from start to finish – sometimes in three years – and launch right into their first jobs. Babies and husbands can wait! I can’t resist including a photo of an early group, circa 2008. Of the women pictured, all are now professionals working in Cañar; three have master’s degrees or the equivalent. And the two little girls in the front row? Tamía and Saiwa have just started university, at the University of Cuenca, studying medicine and architecture.
Projecting to 2024-25-26 we have accepted three new scholars, Lucia (education); Lourdes, (education) and Andrea (languages). Keeping the group size to twelve allows us to easily manage the program and follow each woman as she collects her monthly stipend ($160) or prepares for graduation ($500 thesis/ exams). Education and languages are new focus areas for our scholars and it’s good to see their interests branching out – not quite the humanities yet – but beyond the more common choices of nursing, accounting, business, and nutrition. And as always, we offer our graduates financial help for advanced degrees.
Speaking of… here is recent news from our post-grad women:
Juana Chuma (2015) is finishing her doctorate in veterinary medicine at UNAM in Mexico. Her dissertation, based on research carried out in Chile, is in review by her committee and she expects to do her defense early in 2025. Meanwhile, our first PhD is in Cañar on her family farm.
Paiwa Acero (2021), a Fulbright scholar at the University of Illinois in Chicago, is in her second year of a master’s in civil engineering. She reports she loves getting to know the city but does not like the winter. She’s become something of a Fulbright ambassador as an indigenous woman in the sciences. (Poster: Indigenous Women STEM Camp) Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
Physician Luisa Duchi (2016) recently completed a specialty course in “aesthetic” dermatology and opened her own consultorio. I understand her office is near my house, so I may soon visit her for some skin care consultation (high altitude sun, dry air, aging skin). Previously, Luisa was the director of a small rural clinic where Kichwa was the predominant language of her clients – a language she speaks fluently.
As for news of other graduates, Mariana Solano (2006 agronomy, MS 2018) is president of her community of San Rafael, a recent first-place winner in a competition for “good practices in the management of potable water systems.” (That’s the mayor of Cañar Segundo Yungsi standing next to Mariana.)
Two graduates work for the Municipality of Cañar: Mari Chimbo (2011, accounting) and Veronica Paucar (MBA 2016). Two other graduates in eco-tourism, Maria Teresa Chimborazo (2020) and Aracely Quispi (2021) manage the Sisíd Añejo Community Hostal, where the Lewis and Clark College students from Portland spend a weekend each year. I could go on, but you get the idea. As far as I know, not one of our graduates has left Ecuador, and nearly all are at jobs in their fields, contributing to their communities, local businesses, organizations and municipal and village governments.
Our committee in Cañar manages the program so efficiently that they can do it very well without me, except for one critical piece: the letter you are reading.
While we have done well over the years managing our excess funds – with high interest rates for fixed deposits hovering close to 9% in 2023 – our continuity depends on my yearly letter. At present, we have enough interest income to support one woman a year (@ $1500), but we need to create a larger endowment.
In 2025 CWEF will mark twenty years, and I invite any who might want to celebrate that achievement by making a more significant contribution – perhaps to endow one scholar’s university education (typically four years = $6000). We could create a matrix to connect you with that woman throughout her studies so you would get to know her, her family, her community, and future plans. (However, the question of who will write this yearly letter in the future remains open. Any volunteers?)
CWEF is an official 501(c) 3 nonprofit, which means your contributions are tax deductible and every dollar goes directly to the women. Please make checks to CWEF and send to Charlotte Rubin, 2147 NW Irving St., Portland, OR 97210 (some of you will receive this letter by snail mail with return envelopes), or you can contribute through PayPal with the secure “DONATE” button below. Please stay in touch, and know that your support of our program means so much to our scholarship women, their families, and their communities. Thank you, Judy B
Judy, so impressive, as always! What a contribution to the community, and so wonderful to think of those terrific women taking control of their lives and being examples to all the little girls around them. I’m reaching for my checkbook next!
Maya