Lisbeydy was born on August 20^th, 1991 in a small, rural town in the Puebla, Mexico area as the second of four children. Living with her mother and elder brother in a miserable hut, there was not a lot hope for a balanced diet, health care or even higher education.

Since 1994 we took care about the basic needs of Lisbeydy and her family and it worked out well. Corresponding with the family gave us a deeper insight into the major differences of “their” and “our” problems and we started to rethink our own values. We learned about not enough rain, too much rain, crop loss, dreams, hopes, fears and simply growing up in a poor neighborhood without gameboys, television and cell phones.

While she wrote us early in 1999 “The creek carries very little water, many fish are dying and the corn fields are dry. We hope that it will soon rain,” a letter in Summer 1999 stated “It is raining very hard here now, there is much water in the streams and the river near our town. Persons go to fish and catch shrimps, everybody is happy.”

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Unfortunately the next letter was shocking “She was very scared, because it rained very strong some days ago. This caused that the river which is near our town rose a lot and carried away some houses and animals. We lost our crop. Now our piece of land has many rocks. We are going to rebuilt our house, since it is a little damaged. This disaster happened October 4, 1999.”
Our inquiry resulted in even worse news “Water leaked from everywhere in our house, it will soon fall down. We will have to built it now with wood as we do not have the money to buy bricks to build it with them”. These are the moments where we in Germany said “Don't talk so much - just do it.” 
And we did! We paid in five monthly installments the building material for a brick-and-stone house and where so happy when we finally received a picture of Lisbeydy leaning against the wall of her new home.

More than once we understood Lisbeydy’s desire to meet us in Mexico, but in 2005 - when we were already preparing our own move from Germany to Rochester, New York – she invited us to attend her Quinceañera Celebrations. Through a fortunate coincidence her 15^th birthday would be eight weeks after our move to the US but still within the school breaks. Believe it or not, we purchased 6 tickets for my family from Rochester to Mexico City before we purchased the tickets from Frankfurt (Germany) to Detroit (USA)!

The best moments of our life? Meeting Lisbeydy and her family on August 20^th, 2006.