“The indispensable first step to getting the things you want out of life is this; decide what you want.”

– Ben Stein

Long ago in a distant province there lived a poor little girl and her family. Due to poverty, they barely had enough money to buy food and they sometimes ate just rice and bagoong (shrimp paste) or salt for dinner. While her mother and father were barely able to send her three brothers, they wouldn’t pay her tuition.  Everyone thought that she should just find work as a labandera (a local laundry girl) in their village to earn extra money, get married, and live there for the rest of her life.

The little girl hated that idea.

She didn’t want to live in poverty, she didn’t want her life to amount to nothing more than washing laundry for a few piddling coins, and more importantly, she didn’t want her future children to experience the same hardships that she did.
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