Our Volunteer of the Month for this month is Donna Dudley, who is a Teaching Assistant with the SeniorComp classes.  Donna herself took all the SeniorComp classes and benefited greatly from them, so she is an enthusiastic promoter of the classes, and a willing volunteer as a Teaching Assistant.

This lady is the most traveled person I’ve ever personally met.  Some of the traveling was while her husband was in the military, and some has been as a favorite activity since retirement. She often taught elementary school when they were abroad.  She gave me a list of the countries she and her husband have visited, and it added up to over 30 countries! That includes commonly visited countries like Italy, Israel, the Philippines, France, and Belgium.  But look at this list of uncommonly visited countries: Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Thailand, India, communist Hungary, communist Germany, and Guatemala.

She also talked about living in Okinawa and in Korea. She hinted at 2 stories from Korea that I would like to know more about but didn’t have the  time or the space for the details.   One was about teaching English to Koreans  - all ages and types - including one who was searching for a husband for her daughter while Donna’s daughter met and got engaged to a young man.  The contrast in cultures during the engagement and marriage process must have been interesting.

The other interesting story also occurred while Donna was in Korea. She and her husband and another man transported 9 babies from Korea to Belgium to be adopted.  Now that would be an interesting story to hear.  My gosh, they make movies out of stories like that!

Donna got her first computer in December of 1988 – a second-hand computer with DOS.  Since she wasn’t a DOS fiend, the computer was of limited use to her.  But she later acquired one with Windows 3.1, then one with Windows 95 and now has a machine with Windows 98.    She spends most of her computer time doing e-mail, word processing, and games, plus a little work with genealogy. She finds that she now has a lot more contact with her children (by e-mail) than she ever  had before.  She now gets to hear about a lot of the little events in their lives that she used to never hear about.

An interesting sidelight in all this is that people tell her she should teach her husband how to use her computer.  She says she’s no dummy: if she did that she would have to share the computer!  As it is now, she just tells him what she has written, or shows him the e-mails from their kids. And that’s fine with him.

Donna first found out about Alamo PC and SeniorComp when a friend told her about the SeniorComp classes.  She investigated, took all the classes (some of them twice), and eventually become a Teaching Assistant. In the SeniorComp classes, we try to have 2 to 4 assistants in every class so that we can help any individual that’s having a problem. It’s a very effective method, as Donna herself will testify.