Oroville resident Pamela Saraga started writing after retiring from working 37 years for the US Postal Service. For a year she wrote for the column "North State Voices" in the Oroville Mercury Register. Her novel Amazon Diet is about a group of overweight women who decide to take an adventure vacation in Suriname to have fun and lose some weight.
In part two of an interview with Alexa Benson-Valavanis, she tells how she left Asia where she had taught kindergarten in Shanghai, and gone on a meditation retreat in Vietnam, to go to work in Guatemala. She was inspired by a physician from Nigeria working there to find what she had to offer. She returned to Chico and became president and CEO of a philanthropic foundation, North Valley Community Foundation. During her nine years with the foundation, it has raised more than $40 million for local, national, and international charitable causes.
