Stairway from Hell

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. Each of them is recruited by The Sister of Mary School and like all the students there, they attend free. The children are picked by by the nuns who run the school, as much based on their level of poverty as for their intelligence. The school is unremarkable by most standards. The children learn math and history, and skills like sewing and construction so they can find a job after graduating. What is remarkable about this school is what else it teaches. For most of these children, the Sisters of Mary School is the first place in their lives where they will eat three meals a day, have their own bed, celebrate a birthday and receive medical care of any sort. The Sisters of Mary travel all over the Philippines to recruit children from remote, inaccessible areas as well as the city slums and different dump-sites to provide them with food, medical care and an education, all for free. Their only requirements are that the child has finished sixth grade and be from true abject poverty. They recruit children who are hopeless, miserable, abandoned and neglected and offer love, happiness and hope. To reach Remerose's house, a nun from the Sisters of Mary must travel for two days, including a eight hour walk up a mountain that is controlled by guerillas. There, she offers Remerose the opportunity to come to school and gain the possibility of a future away from debt and corrupt plantation owners. However, in taking this opportunity, she must leave her family with only the small chance to see them once a year. Remerose chooses to go with the nun. After spending her whole life in a small mountain village with no paved roads, electricity or running water she travels hundreds of miles to begin a new life. Past the English lessons and math classes that would challenge any 13-year-old, she also has to master how to use a shower, indoor toilet, and eating utensils. Like all the children in the school, she has gone from a life of never being alone, sleeping every night with all 7 of her siblings to a school where she knows no one. For Jenny, her fear was the world outside the Sisters of Mary. After living and studying there for four years she could not imagine any other life. For Jenny, the final test at the Sisters of Mary was leaving. With the skills learned at the school and with the help of the nuns, could she find a job, leave the sheltered world of the school and re-enter the outside world she fled from years ago? It had always been Jenny's dream to become a nurse. However, to be a nurse she needs to go to school for many years more, while her family needs her help now. So when she is offered a job as a computer programmer, Jenny leaves her dreams behind and chooses to do whatever it takes to help her family escape poverty. In order to achieve his dreams, Rola