Contributions in reporter’s memory help Habitat for Humanity

Laura Myers seldom carried a lot of cash, even when she was on a 2001 Habitat for Humanity trip to build yurts in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.

She didn’t have $100 on her to buy the necessary documents Chinese officials insisted upon, and they didn’t want a credit card. So what’s a woman to do?

She didn’t have money, but she had charm; so an American man who hadn’t purchased his necessary document in advance either loaned her the money so she could spend her vacation building yurts. She paid him back, of course.

This journalist and humanitarian was no deadbeat, and it was a debt of honor.

Myers, who died Friday in Las Vegas at age 53, often used her vacations and weekends during the 1990s and 2000s to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity, a nonprofit program started in 1976 that has built or repaired more than 1 million homes.

Her first overseas trip for Habitat for Humanity Global Village was a trip to Masindi, Uganda, in 1997. Her second was Mongolia. A third was canceled for safety reasons.

When she lived in New York during her 17-year, off-and-on reporting/editing career with The Associated Press, she would volunteer on weekends to build homes in New York City.

So her family is suggesting that anyone looking to make a donation in her memory consider Habitat for Humanity.

Your tax-deductible contributions can be made on the Habitat for Humanity webpage at http://www.habitat.org

Look for Gifts from the Heart.

If people want her family to know they donated, they must ask Habitat to email her sister, Kathy Wiechers, at wiechers77@charter.net

Or checks can be mailed to:

Habitat for Humanity

121 Habitat Street

Americus, GA 31709-3498 USA

1-800-HABITAT or 1-229-924-6935

Again, provide Wiechers’ email if you want the family to know.

There’s a certain symmetry about Myers’ life in Las Vegas. Her first and last five years were spent in Las Vegas.

She was born in Las Vegas and lived here five years before moving to Kentucky, then returning to Northern Nevada. Then she spent the last five years in Las Vegas as the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s political reporter.

But for many years, she was a citizen of the world, both for The Associated Press and for multiple humanitarian organizations, including Food for All in Washington, D.C., American Refugee Committee in the Congo, the Peace Corps in Togo. And Habitat.

She had a fellowship in China in 1998 and in Lebanon and Syria in 2004.

Her friends ask if there will be a memorial service. No, there will not. Myers was an intensely private person who didn’t want people to know she was sick.

Her brother, Bill Myers, said she would like the recent news coverage, which went national, but would probably say, “Enough already.”

She is being cremated, and her ashes will be shared with family and friends and scattered in favorite places — her favorite hiking spots in Southern and Northern Nevada. The Pacific Ocean.

Co-workers Jenny and Jeff Scheid will take some to Spain when they go to participate in a portion of a pilgrimage walk called “The Way of St. James,” or Camino de Santiago. This was a trip Laura wanted to make with them, a trip described in a movie called “The Way.”

Myers’ diagnosis with stage 4 cancer was made in March 2013, yet even as late as a few weeks ago, she was talking about getting into an experimental drug trial, though she had been rejected for two.

She was also telling her only sister that she would get better and they would go to Paris together. Myers had already been but wanted Wiechers to see Paris for the first time. Myers believed she would be well enough to go this July.

She was a woman with the ultimate positive attitude, a fighter who was sure she could beat cancer.

Some would say she was unrealistic.

I agree with Wiechers, who said, “She always clung to hope.”

Not such a bad thing.

Jane Ann Morrison’s column appears Thursdays. Email her at jmorrison@reviewjournal.com or leave a message at 702-383-0275. Find her on Twitter: @janeannmorrison