Alberta and her son, Thomas, moved into Milagro in 2002.  Thomas's godmother, Sara, encouraged them to join the community so that they could be closer together.

 

However, when all three of Alberta's daughters and their families ended up living in Anchorage,Alberta decided that she wanted to be near all her grandchildren and she and Thomas took off for Alaska for an undetermined amount of time.  Alberta and Thomas come back to the desert often to warm up and to visit their relatives and participate in their cultural activities in the Tohono O'odham nation as well as in Milagro community activities.  Alberta is on the Board of Directors of the Tohono O'odham Community College and is actively involved in the governance of Santa Rosa Ranch, her community in one of the Nation's districts.

 

Alberta is a retired educator from the Tucson Unified School District.  During her twenty-seven year career, she was the Director of Native American Studies, a teacher and a middle school administrator.  She is also the owner and manager of rental properties.

 

For fun, Alberta enjoys going to movies, camping, skiing, hiking, refurbishing things like furniture and houses and taking care of her grandchildren.  Also, Alberta has traveled extensively and still has places she wants to see.

 

While she is living in Alaska, Alberta is renting her house and casita.

Bob and Donna have been involved with Milagro since 1994. Donna was born in Bremerton, Washington. She is retired but works fulltime as Chair of Pima County Democratic Party. Bob was born and raised on a dairy farm in Michigan. He grew up without a community, even in the rural agricultural sense. Currently, he teaches mathematics at Marana High School.

 

In 1972 when Donna saw a dynamic leader facilitate an experiential training,  she  knew that work was her calling.  After  three  years of  low-

income survival as a single mom, a student loan and a Masters in Public Administration, she landed a position with training as the chief responsibility. She has enjoyed provoking people's minds and behaviors ever since.

 

In 1985, a growth experience helped Donna redefine what was important in her relationships: self-awareness and open-mindedness, integrity and joy of life. These were qualities which she found in Bob; the two were married in 1994. Living with Bob is living in a personal growth environment. Helping generate Milagro has also been a time for new awareness and a test of integrity. She looks forward to more such opportunities.

 

In 1993 Bob realized that it was possible to step out of life patterns that weren't working and began examining ways in which he interacted with others and how his life expressed, (or didn't express) the things that were really important to him. The primary result has been that he is intentionally creating a community where today and in later years he will be uncle and grandfather to children on a casual and daily basis.

 

Donna is a proud mother, step-grandmother, and grandmother. She enjoys hiking, skiing, personal growth, travel, sketching and discovering whatever with Bob. Bob has a son and is a grandfather. He enjoys hiking, skiing, personal growth and his work.

David and Jeannette spent nearly 30 years in Tanzania as wildlife researchers, educators, artists and safari guides. For most of that time they lived off-grid in remote areas. When they decided to move to USA they researched intentional communities and visited at least ten before choosing Milagro. Here too they are involved in a variety of educational, artistic and practical activities. They enjoy exploring the wilder places and learning about the wildlife of the Sonoran Desert.

Jackie writes: I was born in New York, the youngest of three.  We moved to Arizona when I was four.  I have lived in Arizona most of my life except for three years in Colorado when I was in high school and two years that I lived in Turkey while on assignment with the Peace Corps.  After returning from Turkey I met and married a wonderful man.  Terry and I adopted five children over the years.  He was a city planner and I was stay-at-home mom and later, a teacher. We learned about cohousing and became very excited about the prospect of living in cohousing.  Unfortunately, Terry died unexpectedly just before we were to move into Milagro.  I moved here from Tempe with our youngest who was a junior in high school at the time.  Currently, I am involved with the returned peace corps volunteers of southern Arizona group and have had the opportunity to travel quite a bit lately.  I love to hike, do yoga, read and visit with family, friends and neighbors.  Living in community has been a wonderful experience.

John and Sybil have been interested in intentional communities for most of their lives and, in fact, met on the Internet Cohousing Forum (cohousing-L) in 1995 and have been partners since then.  Before joining Milagro they worked with several other cohousing communities, two of which are now built.  John and Sybil see cohousing as a way to explore a kind of tribal living appropriate to contemporary life.

 

John  graduated  from  the  University  of  Nebraska  and  worked  as an

architect  in  Princeton,  Albuquerque,  San Francisco and  London.  In the 1970s he took a “sabbatical leave” which turned into a 10-year interlude spent living a pre-industrial life on a rock-scrabble acreage on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey. Returning to the U. S., he specialized in the design of passive solar houses in Phoenix for 17 years before retiring in Tucson.  In June 2000, John joined an Earthwatch expedition which documented 19th Century Ottoman houses in Turkey.

 

Both John and Sybil passed through the Far Eastern Studies graduate program ­at the University of Michigan. Before Sybil earned an MA in Chinese, she spent two years on the island of Borneo (Sabah, Malaysia) as a Peace Corps Volunteer teacher, teaching English, mathematics and science to 8 classes of 50 students each day. She has also traveled extensively through Southeast Asia, Turkey, England, and lived for times in Taiwan, Peru and an ashram in Canada. She has many stories about living in the "wilds" of Borneo or traveling in the Andes Mountains with a large Peruvian family.

 

Sybil, who studied under Feng Shui masters Johndennis Govert and Lin Yun, is continuing to develop her expertise in that art.  Sybil and John recently visited Sabah and unexpectedly met two of her former students.

 

Both share a love of the Sonoran desert, organic gardening, solar-cooked vegetarian meals, traveling, and music (classical, jazz and blues.) Their bookshelves reflect a love of Lao Tzu,  Henry David Thoreau, Daniel Quinn, Riane Eisler and many science fiction authors, especially Sheri Tepper. They practice yoga, hike and/or swim daily.

Ken and Melissa  - Finding and joining Milagro in 1999 was for them a dream fulfilled of living in an environmentally responsible community with a diverse group of like-minded people.

 

Melissa and Ken grew up in Connecticut.  They met while Ken was in medical school and were married just before his graduation. After completing his residency training, Ken signed on with the U.S. Public Health  Service,  thus beginning the family’s east  –  west perambulations.

First, to Zuni, New Mexico, living on the Zuni reservation just two short blocks from the Zuni Indian Hospital where Ken worked . . . next, to Webster, North Carolina, a small town not far from the Cherokee Indian Reservation . . . then, to Scottsdale, Arizona, bordering the Pima-Maricopa Indian Reservation . . . and finally, to Atlanta, Georgia, and two new U.S. Public Health Service Agencies—the Health Resources and Services Administration and the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention.

 

Melissa has an undergraduate degree in Plant Science and a graduate degree in elementary education. In addition to being a full-time mother for their two children, Melissa was an avid basket-weaver, quilter, and photographer in the early years of their marriage. Following their first move to Arizona, Melissa began taking art classes at a nearby community college.  After their move to Georgia, Melissa continued photographing nature, abstracts, and people. She also began exploring the world of digital photography; which to her surprise, as a self-proclaimed technophobe, was a lot of fun and has become a major interest. In Georgia, Melissa also began working with clay - hand-building pots, masks, and fanciful “critters” of uncertain ancestry. Before leaving Georgia she held a show in which she displayed some of her masks and critters alongside their digitally altered photographs.

 

Ken retired from the Public Health Service just before moving to Tucson. He now works part-time at the University of Arizona. Melissa has plugged into Tucson’s art community and is as busy as ever being creative. They’re both very happy to be back in Arizona and part of the Milagro community.