By Suzy Taggy Coelho Caldas Nelsen


My mother told me to work hard in school because it was the one thing that could overcome poverty.

My mother grew up knowing nothing but abandonment, starvation, and poverty. She didn't receive much formal schooling, but she knew the value of education and its power to change lives. In sewing together scrap pieces of paper to make me a notebook for school, my mother made one thing clear: education could help me escape a life of poverty.