Hello, Friends:

In our last letter, we had photos of Archi which documented his progress from a young EE athlete to a UCLA triathlon team racer. Last weekend Archi successfully concluded another chapter in his life’s progression, as the photo below documents:

Archi is now a UCLA graduate from the College of Letters and Science where he studied in the Interdepartmental Program for Neuroscience. He has opened the door of opportunity for himself and he’s in the process of determining his next step.

As we congratulate Archi, we thank all of you for the role you play in the success of Archi and his EE team mates.

And speaking of Archi’s EE team mates, they were plenty impressed when we showed them pictures of his graduation. They get inspiration from the older kids and it’s working.

The younger kids are developing pretty impressive educational resumes already. Here are the Mayorga boys -- Arian (12), Ahris (9) and Aramiz (7) – and Karen (12).

Many of you have watched Marlene grow from a tiny kid, to a college graduate (UCSD ’16), to a wife and now a mother. At the same time her husband, Hilario, graduated with his Master’s Degree, their daughter, Eliana Maria Ramirez, was born. Marlene and Hilario are very busy, happy parents. Marlene plans to continue her education with a post-graduate degree in the near future.

Over the past few years, you’ve heard me brag about the amazing racing of some of our younger kids. They run with top racers who are much older and have learned to bike quite well. But swimming has always been an issue for these kids and some of that is lack of confidence.

Some very kind and generous folks who own JUSTWETSUITS donated very tiny wetsuits for these kids.

We’ve had two sessions so far – one on dry land learning how to get them on (quite a task) and one in the water where they saw their lives change. Suddenly, they stopped fighting the water and could swim!

We thank our JUSTWETSUITS friends and our volunteer Race Angels who I’ll call upon to swim along with the kids at the next Desert Tri.

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We currently have ten EE kids in college, following in the footsteps of our four college graduates. In 2019, we’ll add another six and, with your help, the process will go on and on.

EE kids like Archi (UCLA 2018), Marlene (UCSD 2016), Nik (UCSD 2013) and Louisa (UC Berkeley 2016) remind us every day that this is a worthwhile effort. Giving these kids just a little help can be life-changing for them. And when they succeed, we all win. Thank you, as always, for the huge role you play in this.

-Cherie