The old lady at Chelsea

I was at Chelsea today, teaching seniors how to use the Internet, when I met her. She was an old woman from Philippines who had lived in China till age 45 and then migrated to the US of A after that. She had been here for 20 years. She was going back to China after 10 long years and was going to meet her grand-daughter for the first time. The kid used to talk about computers and the Internet so much that the lady wanted to learn about them. She did not want to look like a fool to the apple of her eyes, the apple she had not met before.

She wanted to know how to search for news and I took her to google (where else??) and asked her to type in what she wanted to search for. We then went to the cnn website and read through a few news articles and discussed them. Her insight and deep knowledge surprised me. She had an opinion (and a well-thought out one might I add), about almost everything under the sun. She believed that religion was not good, it should only be about compassion and tolerance. She wanted the Wall Street uncertainty to end before the common man was driven to poverty. She wanted everyone to save money. She spoke at length about the good old times, when liberty was not misconstrued to be a license leading to greed. She wanted regulation, sensible regulation in every walk of life.

The conversation I had with her was really interesting. Her perspective about most things left me amazed. So many people in the world, so many different opinions....