An article that made me cried today.

I cried. Tears of joy and overflowing gratitude to the place I called my home.

I am always proud to say that I came from the Sisters of Mary School, I was nurtured and loved for four years on that four walls by the nuns who loved me as if their own. I will never be where I am now if not because of that saintly priest Father Al, who founded that institution in 1985 for the poorest of the poor, whom I would forever hold dear in my grateful heart.

I am in tears as of writing. But you can’t blame me. As ecstatic as I was reading this very touching article of the school where I came from, it brought me back to those four years I called the Sisters of Mary School my HOME.

I am proud to say – I was one of those girls!

The day they sang ‘God Bless America’
By Chelo Banal-Formoso
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 21:05:00 07/05/2009

FROM the where the guests have been invited to stand, one can see the perfect lines formed by the girls, perhaps over 3,000 of them. Only discipline can make lines like these.

And then – their voices strong, their hand movements synchronized, looking like they are lit from within – they sing. God bless America, land that I love. Stand beside her and guide her, through the night with the light from above. From the mountains to the prairies, to the ocean white with foam, God bless America, my home sweet home.

A choreography of emotions and amazing grace, the rendition moves Kristie Anne Kenney to tears. Even the non-Americans among the guests are misty-eyed.

The girls are all in uniforms of blue and white. Marian colors. In this live-in high school founded in 1985 by Msgr. Aloysius Schwartz, reading is highly valued, but so is moral and spiritual formation. The girls are taught to live a life of simplicity, charity, gratitude and joy. Marian virtues.

None of these kids is holding an iPod or a Sony Ericsson phone or any such cool gadget for teens these days. That’s because these girls, and their fellow scholars at SOM Boystown (not to be confused with the facility for juvenile delinquents), come from dirt-poor families of Luzon and Palawan (Visayas and Mindanao are served by the SOM schools in Cebu).

At Girlstown and Boystown, they are given free education, room and board, medical and dental services, not to mention heaps of hope.

Read the whole article here