LatinaLista —
Campaign: Tuition Mission Disabled2Counselor
Beatriz Macia has a dream. This Cuban-born Latina, known as Bett to her amigas, is on a mission to raise tuition so she can go from being disabled with Late Stage Lyme Disease to becoming a counselor to military men, women, and their families, including treating Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and others who also suffer from Lyme Disease.
Bett is passionate about becoming a great counselor. It is also a career she can do either part-time or full-time as her health allows. She has been accepted to an online master's degree program she can do, even when she becomes weak and needs to take a break and lie down.
She needs help in raising $9,600 before October 21, 2015, and $29,441.48 overall.
Bett has faced many challenges in her life: She left a Communist country when she was five and came to the U.S. She is a divorced mother with four children, who lost her second-oldest son to asthma, and she was ill for too long without understanding what the heck was going on.
She has spent months and years in bed, very weak and debilitated. Finally, her Lyme illness is doing better than it has in a long time, althought she is not cured.
Bett chalks up being organized and persevering in her strategy to succeed in earning her master’s degree.
Bett was JUST accepted into the Master of Arts degree program in psychology with specialization in military psychology at Adler University. Adler is the oldest university to have a program geared toward military psychology, it includes counseling for PTSD.
The problem is that the term starts October 28!
Bett has some scholarship money, but the deadlines for most scholarships have passed and she cannot get student loans.
Bett is the daughter of a U.S. Army veteran and has seen first-hand how devastating and incapacitating PTSD and related problems can be to active-duty, retired, and veteran military men and women and their families.
Bett believes her experiences in going through hard times and learning how to persevere can help others. She knows perseverance, she earned her bachelor’s degree the same year her oldest child graduated from high school.
Before being disabled, Bett was a volunteer at a telephone crisis hotline and worked on, or volunteered in, emergency management.
She worked all of the 2004-2005 Florida hurricanes as well as working in Mississippi for six weeks for hurricanes Katrina and Rita. She feels that seeing such devastation and loss really puts things in perspective.
Bett has created this GoFundMe campaign to help her raise the money needed for her tution. Her goal is to raise $29,500.
