By Jami Badershall,Staff Writer

FARMINGTON – By her neighbors’ standards, Abigail is wealthy.

She has a black-and-white television powered by a crude electrical system. She has an indoor toilet, though her bathroom has no roof and the sewer line runs through her dirt-floored house. She even has a few rabbits and three chickens.

By American standards, Abigail is poor in material possessions, but rich of heart, said Farmington Rotarian Al Feather, who met her on his trip to Colombia this month.

Feather visited Abigail and others outside the city of Cucuta in an area called La Divina Pastora. The Farmington Rotary World Service Project, along with the Waterville Rotary and Cucuta Rotary, provided seven sewing machines for the women there to learn to sew and make a living to support their children.

A skilled seamstress, Abigail was hired by Sister Davida, who runs the local Good Shepherd Project chapter. The compound in La Davina Pastora teaches women to sew. About 50 have taken the classes in the last year and are now able to find a job in a clothing factory until they can make enough money to buy their own sewing machines and work for themselves.

Abigail was so appreciative of the Rotary’s donation and the gifts of fabric that Feather’s sisters sent with him, and children’s books from his wife, that she offered him one of her chickens, he said.

“It was one of the most touching things anyone has ever offered me,” he said, adding that he told her he would be unable to take the live chicken on the plane back to the United States. So Abigail made him a running suit instead.

The Farmington Rotary’s connection with Cucuta started last summer at a Rotary International convention in Chicago. Feather and two other Farmington Rotarians were participating in a Polio Plus walkathon when Alonso Oliveros, a Rotarian from Cucuta, asked if he could join them. He was the incoming president of his group, and because Feather is Farmington’s World Service chairman, the two began to discuss La Divina Pastora as a possible project for the Farmington Rotary.

Cucuta is home to 700,000 people, Feather said. To escape the poverty, drugs and guerrilla activity, people migrate from the rural areas to the urban cities.

“A lot of them are single mothers with children who lost their husbands to drugs or guerrilla activity,” Feather said. “They basically become squatters outside government property.”

Feather and Oliveros struck up a friendship through the project, and Oliveros invited him to come stay with him and see what a difference the sewing machines had made in the peoples’ lives.

Sister Davida’s compound is surrounded by a 10-foot wall, houses the church, school and the sewing machine work area.

“I was treated like an ambassador,” Feather said.

He took pictures with his digital camera and presented one of a mother, her daughter and baby in their home to them in a frame.

“You would have thought I had given them the most expensive gift,” he said.

He soon earned the nickname “Santa” from the Cucuta Rotarians because of his white hair, jolly expression and gift giving.

Several of the people in La Divina Pastora made an impression on Feather, including a mother who made $1,200 a year working on a road crew to take care of her husband wounded by a bullet in the liver and their children.

“You realize how fortunate you are when you travel to a country or area like this, and they don’t even have social services,” Feather said.

The Farmington Rotary has raised $1,000 to purchase two more industrial-size sewing machines for the women of La Divina Pastora.