Sumner native, 93, has spent most of her life and money helping people in Mexico. She’s still at it.

For 93-year-old Vera Faulk, it all started with a Greyhound bus ride to Mexico.

The year was 1957, as Faulk remembers it. She was 32 at the time, a wife and mother with a decade under her belt working for the Pacific Northwest Bell telephone company.

With a friend and a cousin, Faulk headed south. It was supposed to be a vacation of sorts.

For Faulk, it quickly turned into more. Toward the end of the trip, on a whim, the three women took a 15-hour bus ride from Guadalajara to Puerto Vallarta.

Faulk said what she encountered once they arrived changed everything.

“When I was there, you know, I could see things. I saw things that they needed so badly,” Faulk said from a back room of her sister-in-law’s house in Sumner recently, a stack of photos by her side. “They needed clothes, food, roofs on their house, cement floors.

“And I thought, golly, I could do something about that.”

Golly, has she.

Eighteen years later, when Faulk turned 50 and retired early from the telephone company, she sold nearly everything she owned and started spending most of the year in a house on a hillside in Puerto Vallarta — far from the place she’d called home in Sumner, on Thompson Street, and the house where she was born in 1924, on Cherry Avenue.

Most of Faulk’s retirement income, and the money she brought in from what she calls “a small investment,” started going to the families and children on the outskirts of town — people she encountered scrounging at the dump, sifting through the waste for things to get by.

Faulk has lived this way, she says, for the last four decades. She now makes one or two trips back to Sumner each year — including every August for her annual high school reunion, the class of 1943, which now has seven living alums — but dedicates nearly all of her time, and all of her money, to helping people in her adopted home.

“I’m 93 and, hey, I can’t take it with me, so I might as well do it,” Faulk said of her generosity.

Faulk’s story is one that would be difficult to believe if it wasn’t coming from the mouth of a 93-year-old woman with photos to prove it and friends to back it up.

It started small, she recalled, but quickly picked up steam.

On that first trip to Mexico, Faulk and her travel companions were compelled to leave all their extra clothes and their English/Spanish dictionaries in Puerto Vallarta — a far different place back then — for people who needed them more.

Next, Faulk and a growing ensemble of interested friends started visiting Mexico — and other places in South America, including Guatemala and Honduras — “at least twice a year,” she said, taking suitcases filled with donated items with them to distribute.

Finally, Faulk packed up and moved. Her son was grown, she said, and her husband had left her.

The choice was easy.

“I didn’t even tell them. Because it wasn’t their problem,” Faulk recalled of the decision and what she told friends. “I think there are a lot of people who think I’m a fool, but that doesn’t bother me. It is my money.”

Asked to estimate how many people she’s helped over the years, Faulk initially demurred before putting the number in the thousands. She’s currently paying for uniforms, school supplies and exam costs for 21 students, she said, and still visits the dump outside of Puerto Vallarta every Tuesday and Thursday to distribute supplies and smiles.

Sometimes she makes extra trips when a child she knows has a birthday, she told me, and takes particular pride in an annual Christmas event she has organized — where she distributes 600 roasted chickens.

She fondly recalls students she’s helped that have gone on to become doctors, lawyers, dentists and veterinarians.

Susan Bogner, who lives on South Hill, first heard about Faulk through a friend. Like many people who encounter the story, Bogner, 72, said she was amazed – and moved to help.

In May, Bogner and two friends visited Faulk in Puerto Vallarta for the first time.

Faulk quickly put them to work.

One of Bogner’s friends had packed a suitcase full of baby clothes, she recalled, so Faulk ushered them to a hospital to distribute the goods to new mothers.

Bogner called the experience “very eye-opening.”

“I’ve never met anybody that has literally given what they have to the poor,” Bogner said of Faulk. “We could all learn about giving from Vera. She has a true heart for what she’s doing. She isn’t broadcasting for help. She’s just one woman that has made a huge difference in a lot of lives. I just admire here humility.”

Back in Sumner, Faulk was preparing to depart — once again. In her sister-in-law’s garage, she showed me a suitcase packed with supplies — jeans, t-shirts, shoes and towels.

By the time this column publishes, Faulk will be well on her way.

“I’m not a big deal,” Faulk insisted, zipping up the bag. “I’m a Christian, and I believe in sharing. I really did feel I was led by the Lord to do what I could do.

“Golly, if you went down there, you’d probably feel like that, too.”