“Whenever I think of any sort of hardship I am going through I really do think about my mother.”
“My mother inspires me. She grew up in the Philippines, born and raised there with nine other siblings. They grew up very very poor. She used to sneak behind her house to peer into her neighbors window in order to watch TV because that was the only source of television that she could watch. My mother used to take magazines to cut out watches, images of watches, and paste them around her arm, to pretend owning a watch. She moved here when she was 30 years old, didn’t know a lick of English and started fresh. She sent money over to the Philippines to support her entire family there. She has completely flourish here in the United States and got two of her sisters to come over here and both have raised families.
My mom’s determination and drive literally to do something to help her family, something that she didn’t want to do, to come here to the United States and be all alone, away from her family, inspires me. But she realized what great effect it would have on her family and now her family is doing fantastic. They are out of poverty in the Philippines. And whenever I think of any sort of hardship I am going through I really do think about my mother because I am not in a completely different country, no friends, no family, trying to start a life.
My mother did that and she is such an inspiration to me.”