Author - Prudence Ingerman

Prudence grew up in a quiet but very musical Quaker home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.  Her father was a philologist and hand-loom weaver; her mother had danced on Broadway with Martha Graham’s Modern Dance troupe. Prudence was in the first Peace Corps group to Bolivia and was working in a leper colony there the day President Kennedy was shot.  

Thirty years later she served again as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador where she lived in a village of 50 houses and five bars.  She stitched up many drunks with no anesthesia and delivered two babies on her kitchen floor.  She also formed a children’s chorus, raised chickens, and painted murals in the health center.   

When she returned north, Prudence worked for six years as a teacher on a commune in upper New York State, then she married a Canadian, adopted four children, and raised them on a farm in Ontario while working as a home visiting nurse.  Several of her own songs were aired on CBC radio and resulted in over 200 letters from appreciative listeners.  

Since retirement from sixteen years teaching ESL to international students at Juniata College in central Pennsylvania, Prudence has written and illustrated 23 useful books, delighting in making complex topics clear, such as sex education and cataract surgery.   She has knit and donated over 500 small peacepals to sad lonely people who need a companion.  She has also given workshops for teachers in Guatemala.  Prudence currently lives in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania.