During the summer of 1957, Melissa got a temporary job substituting the secretary of the Bolivian ambassador to the United States, Victor Andrade, thanks to her fluent Spanish. Just as she was about to leave her job and go study under Professor Herskovits, the creditors of the Bolivian government start attaching (i.e., freezing) the debtors’ “accounts in the United States. “Ambassador Andrade,” she said “immediately, on his own, took over all of the accounts of the Bolivian Central Bank and the government-owned mining corporation, called Corporacion Minera, and put them under the name of the embassy, giving them diplomatic immunity. We had them at Riggs bank, we had them at National Bank of Washington, then and all this money is coming in. He said, “You can’t leave me now. You have to sort this out. If we pay for your graduate studies at Georgetown University in Latin America area studies, will you stay?” I decided to stay. And I gave it up, the Herskovits thing. And I would have been one of the first graduate students out of that program. I finished my Latin American area studies. (…) So, I go to school at night, at the graduate school at Georgetown in Latin America, and they pay my tuition. So, one of the poorest countries in Latin America funded the graduate studies by this ambassador. And I have lovely letters of thanks from the Banco Central, from the Corporacion Minera.”
Victor Andrade and his wife Blanca became good friends and were the godparents of her first child, Christopher, baptized at Trinity Church in Georgetown in 1961. Melissa also kept a friendship with their daughter Lupita.