William Palomino

Santos Wilfredo (William) Palomino Ponce was born in Peru June 5th of 1953. He leaves behind his wife Anastiasia of 25 years this February, his children Catherine, Isabel, William, Andrea, Alisa and Oscar, and his grandchildren Annabella, Sebastian, Carla and Mason. He is the son of Jose Santos and Isabel who reunite with him in heaven. He is the 5th of 12 siblings. He was a Chemical Engineer by trade and by passion a political critic and prolific writer. His life in his own words, from a post dated May 23 2014:

MORE THAN WORDS

This is a beautiful celebration, the graduation of Lucy Palomino, the last of my sisters, beautiful and kind, has obtained the maximum degree of higher education, a PhD from Stony Brook University. I am enormously happy because the triumph is also mine. I am the 5th of 12 siblings and the first to have managed to graduate from a university from my family. I returned to my hometown of Abancay Peru with my engineering diploma at the age of 22, returning to my overjoyed parents and siblings. We were so close that my achievement was also theirs. They were right and I dedicated a large part of my life to them. The most effective instrument of our academic improvement from the beginning to those days was my mother. She was a woman of courage, of revolutionary ideas who supported educating her children in what were very difficult times. My mom barely had three years of formal education by she was the strategist of our lives, the one who suggested what we should do after each step, the one who worked day and night to bring food to the table, the one who believed frantically in the vale of educating children to raise the family out of poverty. “Son, we are no longer alone, you must leave the countryside as fast as you can and take your sisters and get them to be professionals”. I looked for work for several months in Lima, Chimbote and La Oroya, I only found labor work in Argentina to support myself. The times were hard and newspapers of the time were bleak, they reported doctors and engineers took local jobs as taxi drivers. I spent a few months in Lima. One of those days my mother called me from Abancay and at first I didn't believe what she told me “travel to La Oroya tomorrow, look for an engineer named Hugo Paz Ballon, son of my mother in law Aurora”I thought Hugo was a countryman like any other from Abancay, some mine employee who I could get a small recommendation from. I was wrong. Upon arriving at the main building in Oroya I asked about him. He was nothing less than the operations manager of 8 mines there, and was pleasantly also a simple and humble man. He was a graduate of a US university. He took me to lunch and told me that I could begin working for him a week after my medical exams. I trained at work, learning from my colleagues. The pay wasn’t much, and I sent most of it back home to Abancay, and at that rate leaving my country for Canada or the United States became a difficult dream. While there I met contractors from Bolivia who told me of better pay, so I left to work there for another year. From Bolivia in 1979 I went to McGill University in Montreal and from there in 1982 a Masters Degree in Chemical Engineering at City College the New York School of Engineering (while studying and working full time), finishing my studies in 1984 at New York University, my alma mater, at the Applied Sciences Department where I obtained my Doctorate after a long academic life (7 years). I was a teacher of High School Math while I continued my studies, and for more than 25 years I have been a Chemical/Environmental Engineer for the US Environmental Protection Agency and a University Professor. My biggest achievement was supporting my siblings. The first one I helped emigrate was my brother Walter, who graduated as a mathematician at Hunter College in New York. My sister Nancy obtained her Masters Degree in Education at New York University, my sister Sara obtained her PhD. at Pace University in New York and now my sister Lucy earned her PhD at the State University of New York in Stony Brook. With her ends the most outstanding generation of my family, the most united and with whom I feel proud to have fulfilled the wishes of my parents, especially of my dear mother who clearly sees that her plans and dreams for her children came true.

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Your memory will be eternal daddy, and your life lived leaves us all with many lessons. May you rest in peace and rejoin your parents in eternal light, Papa Santos, Mama Isabel and your “amiga de alma” Anna. With love always.