The Sancho Gallegos family--seven children, nearly 40 grandchildren (including Anita's four children, Laly, Pepe, Amparo and Pablo) and nearly 100 great-grandchildren--developed a strong reputation for honesty, business-acumen and intellectual prowess through the efforts of Anita's mother and father. Her mother started the first flower-arranging business in Riobamba and had long lines of people waiting for their flowers every holiday. Because of the success of this business, she was able to purchase large tracts of land, which even provided plots for the grandchildren after she passed away. Anita's father, Luis Humberto Sancho, was a teacher, a school administrator and, after his retirement, had an illustrious career as a journalist who was not afraid to take on the government. In the 1960s, when the military dictatorship was rounding up and jailing communists and socialists, soldiers stopped by the Sancho Gallegos home looking for Prof. Sancho--when he arrived home later and found out, he went straight to the jail and insisted on being arrested.
After getting married to Jose Elias Monge Merino, Anita helped her mother with the flower business for some time, but because she was not paid anything for her labor she started selling Italian ices-style ice cream to produce extra income. Anita continued her mother's business, Jardines Sancho, after her mother's death and her work covered the expense of building a new home for her and her family.
Anita was always industrious and ever vigilant over the wellbeing of her home and her children. When her first child, Laly, was going to have her own first child--Robert Bryan Scott, in 1981)--Anita traveled to Wichita, Kansas, to help prepare for the birth and care for mother and child. The birth of her first grandchild encouraged her to invite the small Scott family down to Riobamba to live closer to the Monge Sancho relatives. This offer was always repeated out of a sincere desire to see, live with and care for her grandchildren as well as to be close to her daughter. Whenever the young Scott family visited in Ecuador, it was for weeks, months and sometimes even years. Stephanie Faith Scott, born in 1983, celebrated her first birthday in Riobamba. Heather Giselle Scott was born in Quito, on Ecuador's Independence Day in 1989.
Eventually, their children started lives of their own and Pepe and Anita found themselves alone--except for long visits from children and grandchildren--in the home that represented their combined efforts and their lives together. Anita's hands and wrists suffered from her long years of flower-arranging and she tried to delegate the work as much as possible. Pepe's long years of cigarette-smoking made every morning and evening an ordeal of fitful coughing. And the many years of rejection from the Sancho Gallegos family also had taken their toll on Pepe, and on the marriage. Anita moved to Quito, the capital, where most of her brothers and her sister now lived, and for a time Pepe stayed on in the Riobamba home, accompanied by Papacito, his father-in-law.
In 1991, Jose Monge Merino and Ana Lucia Sancho Gallegos divorced, and Anita traveled to Japan to stay with her daughter Laly and her Scott grandchildren for a five-month transition period. The Riobamba home was sold and Jose Monge set up a small apartment for himself while Papacito moved to Quito to live with his daughter Laura and her family. Today, Anita lives in Quito and sees good friends and her brothers and sister nearly every day. Pepe lives in Riobamba and sees old family friends as well as their son Pablo, now married and a father, who works as an engineer in Riobamba. Anita and Pepe have seven grandchildren so far and both of them have given much of themselves and their love to those young people.