Stairway from Hell

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Most of us will never know true poverty. The poverty of watching our children die because we cannot afford a hospital. The poverty of trying to make enough money picking through garbage to hopefully eat that night. The poverty of having to choose who in a family won't eat because there is simply not enough. Living in such conditions, there is no room for hope, the only focus is survival and making it to the next day. Remerose, Rolando and Jenny are three children from the Philippines who live in such poverty. Remerose started cutting sugarcane eight hours a day when she was seven years old. She lied about her age so she could work and earns half of what an adult does, about 25 U.S. cents a day. Jenny's family lives in a one room cinder block hut. It is brand new, having been rebuilt twice in the last two years, after a typhoon and volcano destroyed it two separate times. Because of these disasters, her parents have neither a job, nor the means to leave to go somewhere else to find one. Rolando hasn't seen his mother in three years. She left the family to find work in Manila so they would have enough to eat. They can barely afford food, much less the money for her to come home to visit. As we follow each of these children on their journeys, their future takes shape, not through sharing the math or reading lessons they've learned at the school, but through sharing the hope the Sisters of Mary gave them. The one characteristic that a life of poverty had never afforded them-hope.