Lucy Attride-Stirling has never been afraid to speak her mind. Amnesty International Bermuda was a perfect fit for the 78-year-old. She worked with the charity for 26 years, writing thousands of letters to governments in protest of human rights abuses.

“It was very important to me to work for human rights for people who didn’t have a voice,” she said.

Alfredo Stroessner was one of her targets. Between 1954 and 1989, the Paraguayan dictator’s government “disappeared”, killed and jailed hundreds of people who opposed his rule.

“I sent him so many letters in the 1980s I might have given him nightmares,” Ms Attride-Stirling laughed. When he was finally deposed she felt like she’d been a part of it, in some small way.

She received death threats and had her tyres slashed when Amnesty campaigned to end the death penalty in Bermuda in the 1980s.

“It would not stop me then and would not stop me today,” she said, adding that she was thrilled when it was taken off the books in December 1999.

She stepped down from the charity in 2010 but still writes on behalf of Amnesty International UK and Australia.

“My mother was beginning to need constant care,” said Ms Attride-Stirling, who was born in Veracruz, Mexico. “I was flying back and forth a lot to Mexico and staying for several months at a time so I didn’t have as much time to devote to Amnesty, and I just wasn’t here much of the time. In 2015, I came across some people that I’d known from Amnesty and they said it was no more. The people who had been running it had left the island and there was nobody left to take care of it.”

She moved to Bermuda in 1961 age 20, as the wife of Bermudian Herbert “Jack” Attride-Stirling. He was a student in her home town, Xalapa, and they met when he moved into an apartment near hers.

She arrived here knowing four words of English.

“I love to talk and it was hard for me to be in a group of people and not put my two cents in,” she said.

Her mother-in-law, Lucilla Attride-Stirling, would make her repeat the words until she got them right. “She was a lovely, lovely woman whom I loved dearly. She helped me get used to the culture.”

She took formal English lessons and then got her general education diploma.

In Mexico, her father, Juan Juarez, was a judge; her mother, Catalina, looked after their six children. As the eldest daughter, Ms Attride-Stirling was drafted to help after she finished primary school.

“It was expected and you didn’t question it,” she said. “My father was very old-fashioned. He said women didn’t need to go to school, that men needed to support a family and women needed to know everything about taking care of the house. Fortunately for my sisters, my father changed his mind after me. They all have master’s and PhDs.”

She came here proud that she already knew how to take care of a home, but quickly found that cooking in Bermuda and Mexico were very different.

“When I came here, I couldn’t find the things I needed to cook [to make Mexican dishes],” she said. “It was an entirely different way of cooking. I had to learn all over again, and I learnt from my mother-in-law. She was originally from Jamaica, so I learnt to cook Jamaican style. It was very nice.”

She and her husband had four children: Jackie, Jeffrey, Rod and Jennifer. They started Continental Motors, the Church Street car dealer, in 1972. They separated soon afterward and Ms Attride-Stirling took the children to Mexico, wanting them to know the language and culture.

They returned to the island in 1981 — she wanted her children to continue their schooling in English in the country they had been born in — and she found a job at Bermuda Computer Services as a technical administrator.

“I worked for them for 20 years,” she said. “I was the first person to retire from the company in 1995.”

It was only two years ago that she received Bermuda status, up until then she was here on a work permit.

She could have applied when she first moved to the island, as wives of Bermudians were then automatically entitled.

“I didn’t know that, and you had to fill out the paperwork,” she said. “I never did that, and then I couldn’t get it when we divorced. It was stressful never knowing if a Bermudian would apply for my job.”

She said her Spanish language skills came in handy.

“We dealt a lot with Latin America and that helped me keep my job because there aren’t many people here who speak Spanish,” she said.

Ms Attride-Stirling has also been involved with a number of charities other than Amnesty. For the last 30 years, she has manned the front desk at Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art. She is also involved with the Bermuda Society for the Blind and Action on Alzheimer’s and Dementia.

She’s happy to help where she can, as long as she doesn’t have to organise anything.

“I don’t have the same energy level I had when I was 50,” she said.

•Lifestyle profiles the island’s senior citizens every Tuesday. Contact Jessie Moniz Hardy on 278-0150 or jmhardy@royalgazette.com with their full name, contact details and the reason you are suggesting them