I met Nelly Leano in the copy room at St. Mary’s Catholic Church. She was wearing a matching blue outfit and making lots of copies with the help of Noemi, the Chilean receptionist and general go-to woman. I was making one copy, and eavesdropping, trying to follow their rapid Spanish.

“Noemi is very wonderful,” Nelly said to me at last. “She help everybody.”

I agreed. “Noemi is the most important person in this office.” Anything you ask her to do, she says, “pero no problem,” and it’s done.

“Nelly is very good woman too,” Noemi demurred. “She help Hispanic people, teach English and other classes.”

“Oh neat,” I said. I told her how I’d started tutoring English conversation at the community college.

“Oh you help me!” Nelly cried, grabbing my arm. “You help me teach English. Come tonight.”

This appeal was somehow very persuasive. The sheer coincidence of it attracted me. I was looking at a pretty empty month before things got busy at the farm. I was ripe for a project. I’m interested in the Latino population of Corvallis, a sort of underground community, and in teaching English in general. Or maybe it was how Nelly is missing three teeth between her lower canines, how she smiles and calls me a beautiful angel, how she asked for help so openly. Either way — I went.

It took me a while to find the elementary school where class meets, and when I got to the front office she wasn’t there. She arrived 20 minutes late, in green, smiling, with a skinny blond kid in a high school choir sweatshirt carrying a file box. Carlos, he was introduced, the computer teacher. It was Carlos who told me they hadn’t had any students for months.
Carlos and Nelly and I went to the computer lab, after tracking down the cleaning woman to open it up for us. Nelly showed me the tests in the box, explained that students could continue online, and said she dreamed of building a school for Latinos in America.

A woman with three daughters aged two to 12 arrived for a computer lesson. Carlos taught, Nelly described her dream, and the girls entertained themselves loudly. The youngest wanted to play in the water fountain, and her big sister baited her by pulling her away every few minutes. After half an hour of this, Mamá gave up, telling us the little one has a water obsession.

“So why did you go back a second time?” my wise housemates asked the next week after class. I’d spent one and a half hours coaching Nelly in an online typing program (between her eyesight and her arthritis: hopeless) and then googling “how to write a grant proposal” and “Hispanic adult education grant.” I could see a long strange path headed out in front of me for as long as I chose to passively follow along. I wasn’t sure how to leave the fantasy-land. Carlos seemed a fellow transplant from reality, but he was also a bit under Nelly’s spell.

I went back a third time, determined to tell Nelly that if she didn’t have any students I wasn’t going to come—but that she could maybe call me if anybody showed up. I couldn’t totally ditch her, but I really wanted to at least make it clear that I was not the right person to write a grant proposal for her. I had enough projects, I’d decided. I do want to learn to write a grant but this organization is going nowhere and doesn’t even have anything to spend grant money on, since there are no students!

Lesson number three: I arrived before Nelly by a few minutes. Carlos, two students and their children and I greeted her when she stepped out of the Dial-A-Bus van with her filebox. She greeted us with handshakes, kisses on the cheek, hello my precious, and that toothless smile. We took the box for her, walked in and helped her sign in to the building. Carlos took one woman to the computer lab and Nelly and I set up a new man with some kind of test—middle school I think. Tell other people about this, Nelly told him. Do me this little favor.

This little phrase, from Nelly, is powerful. Just a little favor, she asks. Help me teach, help me make copies, come over when you’ve got a little time and help me set up my Internet connection. Could you please read the last called number on my phone, my eyes are bad. Could you please go to the carnival at the elementary school and advertise these classes for me? I’m tired after my dialysis. Why are you pushing to build a school, Nelly, before you’re really ready, before there’s any demand? Because, I’m sick, I’m old, I don’t have much time. Carry this box for me please? Then go home and take a rest, you’re tired, angel.

I quit at the end of May, and I’ve been feeling guilty about it for weeks. I wonder how the few ladies I’d started to teach, who were really dedicated and bright, are doing. Nelly’s English is okay, but her idea of teaching is handing out a vocab sheet and then gossiping in Spanish. I’ve been starting to think, maybe I could handle just one night a week. And it’s like she read my mind when she called me back at my church office asking if maybe I’d be interested after all this month? Just a little favor for her, though she knows I am a very busy person, and so smart and so beautiful? Apparently I respond well to base flattery because I signed up for Wednesdays this July. I almost backed out again, but then I heard that Nelly’s having heart trouble. Last time I called her she was in the hospital. And there’s this very bright woman, Maria, who gives herself homework, and whose children are actually very well-behaved, and I wonder how she’s doing…

Back in number three, as we walked into the computer lab I did my best to tell her that I could not write a grant for her. I don’t have time, I said clearly, and besides I didn’t know how. “But you’re smart,” she said. “You have those guidelines” that we’d printed off the Internet. “No, Nelly, I can’t—”

A high-pitched beep started in the lab, an incessant, piercing, eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. It went on and on and on and we checked out various air conditioning machines and smoke alarms with no luck. The harassed cleaning lady, talking on her cell phone, came down the hall to check it out but had no idea what the problem might be. Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. There was no way to study with the noise– we all left early. On the sidewalk outside I gave Nelly my cell phone number and she kissed me on the cheek. Bring on July.