scrimp

She meets and marries fellow student Jen Chao-Pe, and together they move into a dilapidated walk-up in Washington Heights, where Agnes learns to scrimp and save and paint her own walls.

For years, the Hillsborough families had had to scrimp, save, and fundraise to pay for lawyers.

"It can be really really hard when you're having to scrimp and save and spend so much time thinking and organising and figuring out where the food is going to come from," she says.

His parents scrimped and saved to pay for his tuition at Alliance, a boarding school run by British missionaries.

"It's literally scrimping and scraping to be able to manage to get one lesson a week," she says.