I grew up in a tiny bamboo hut where I slept on the floor and used a communal shower... now I live in luxury
Maeurn Smiles, 25, hails from the island of Cebu, a province of the Philippines, where her family struggled to make ends meet.
She resided in a small shack that consisted of just one large room and had no kitchen or bathroom and rarely had electricity.
She often 'went hungry' and was forced to look after her younger siblings when she was only eight years old while her parents worked long hours.
After years of struggling and longing for a better life, she began selling saucy photos of herself at age 21 and now rakes in thousands a month through the endeavor - but she's using her earnings to help stop other kids from going through something similar.
While speaking exclusively with the Daily Mail about it, she said of her childhood: 'We had no money.
'All of us would sleep together, packed like sardines. There were no rooms at all. It was just one open space where we all slept side by side.'
She said her mom worked as a maid, cleaning houses for wealthy families in the village, while her dad was a construction driver.
She explained that they rarely had electricity - it depended on whether or not they could afford it - and there were 'no proper beds.'
'We slept on thin mattresses on the floor, but we made it work,' she continued.
They cooked on an open fire outside and showered in a communal washing area 'with their clothes on.'
There was also no toilet in the house which meant they had to use public bathrooms.
'We cooked using an open fire outside. We didn't have a stove or oven, so everything was very traditional and manual,' shared Maeurn.
'We showered outside with our clothes on - Filipino style. As for toilets, we didn't have one inside the house.'
They lived off noodles and rice, but 'if they were lucky' they'd sometimes get 'fish, chicken, or sardines from a can.' However some days, they 'went hungry.'
She dished, 'Corned beef was a treat. For breakfast, we'd have rice with Milo, it felt fancy to me as a kid.
'But there were times when we didn't even have rice. We were very poor, and most of our money went straight to food. If there wasn't enough, we simply went without.'
She spent her days watching over her younger siblings before she got her first job when she was only a teen teaching ESL lessons.
But Maeurn insisted that she was not unhappy during her childhood despite the harsh living conditions.
'It brought us closer. It turned out to be a lot of fun,' she reflected.
Maeurn now rakes in thousands a month through OnlyFans, and her new lifestyle is a far cry from her childhood struggles.
She is now building her own school in the Philippines so that other kids won't be in the same situation she was.
'I promised myself that any success I found online would flow back to kids who feel stuck where I once was,' Maeurn, who has 3.7 million followers on Instagram, said.
'A supercar depreciates, but a student's mind compounds. If I'd had this opportunity growing up, I probably would have pursued medicine or engineering.
'I loved science, but our rural school only had one broken microscope and no lab sessions.'
Despite facing backlash by some for her online career, Maeurn says she's proud to be proving that the creator economy can drive real-world change.
In response to those who may judge her for selling sultry images, she clapped back: 'Some people will never respect how I earn my money, but I don't care what they think.
'They shouldn't care how I get the money – just how I use it. I know I'm using my platform for good, and that's all that matters.
'Education saved me and gave me new prospects, and that's exactly what I want to do for other young people.'
Construction on the school - called Edmundo Tolentino Memorial National High School, after her late father - is already underway.
The first phase includes three classrooms, a library, and a science and cooking center – a unique feature, Maeurn said, that will help kids gain practical life skills alongside academics.
She said of her journey: 'At 18, I was teaching English to Chinese students with no degree, just determination.
'I came from a poor family, but through OnlyFans and my other platforms, I was able to build something for myself.'
Maeurn hopes the school will eventually serve over 300 students, many of whom currently walk miles every day just to attend classes.
She has bigger plans too – including a dormitory for girls who live too far away and a scholarship fund to help the brightest pupils go on to study STEM subjects at top universities.
But her ultimate goal is to build a whole network of creator-backed institutions across Southeast Asia.
'If the result is children studying under proper lights instead of by candlelight, then all the challenges are worth it,' she added.
'Every classroom we finish and every student who walks through those doors brings real change – not just for them, but for the whole community.
'This school isn't just a building; it's an investment in education that will make a difference for years to come.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Times
8 hours ago
- Times
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remembered in seven books
N o weapons are more extreme than nuclear bombs, and they encourage writers to go to extremes of their own, in description, polemic and invective. Eighty years on, much of the most effective writing on Hiroshima and Nagasaki approaches the subject with an outward detachment, and at an oblique angle, not ignoring horror, but conveying it indirectly, as a shadow or chill cast over a calm present day. The story of the United States' development of the bomb and the decision to drop it on Japan in August 1945 — first on Hiroshima on August 6 and then Nagasaki on August 9 — has generated a library of its own. The books on this list, all of them translated into English, describe something else: death and survival as they were experienced in Japan. John Hersey's short masterpiece, originally published as a long article in The New Yorker, remains one of the finest works of non-fiction reportage on any subject. In calm prose, he tells the story of the first atomic bombing and the year that followed through the interwoven accounts of six survivors, including a war widow, a young female clerk and a German missionary. Tamiki Hara scribbled parts of his novella in a notebook as he staggered through the ruins of Hiroshima in the hours after the bombing. In its unselfconscious attention to detail, it is as close to eyewitness documentary as a work of literature can come. It begins with the narrator laying flowers on the grave of his young wife, recently dead from tuberculosis. In the third paragraph, he is saved from death by being in the lavatory at the moment the bomb explodes. But Hara's death was delayed, not avoided: four years later, in despair at reports that the United States was contemplating the use of atomic bombs in the Korean War, he killed himself by lying in front of an oncoming train. • The nation's favourite 20th century novels: 50 modern classics Takashi Nagai, a brilliant Roman Catholic doctor, was a few hundred yards from the atomic bomb that exploded over Nagasaki on August 9, 1945; six years later, he died of leukaemia at the age of 43. His bestselling book, which made him internationally famous even as he lay dying, describes with intimate horror the bombing and its aftermath, and the heroic relief efforts carried out by Nagai and a team of injured and dying medical workers. It ends with an extraordinary, jolting and unforgettable religious meditation, deeply controversial ever since, that pictures Nagasaki as 'a victim, a pure lamb, to be slaughtered and burned on the altar of sacrifice to expiate the sins committed by humanity in the Second World War'. The crew of the bomber Enola Gay in 1945 ALAMY This great and neglected novel begins deceptively, as a story about that timeless subject of literature: a family's anxious efforts to find a husband for an unmarried young woman. Despite living far from Hiroshima, Yasuko's prospects are blighted by rumours that she was exposed to the sinister 'black rain' that fell and irradiated areas outside the city. In an effort to refute these, her uncle Shigematsu writes an account of the family's experience of the bombing five years earlier. His account, interleaved with accounts of peaceful village life, conveys the terrible events and the cruel prejudice that its victims faced for decades afterwards. Inside illustrations from Barefoot Gen © KEIJI NAKAZAWA. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER LAST GASP Originally published in a weekly magazine, rendered in the exaggerated style of popular manga, Keiji Nakazawa's comic book has little of the artfulness and refinement of the modern graphic novel. But the power, simplicity and anger of the storytelling, based on the author's experience, are indelible, especially in the early volumes of the long series. After seeing his family die in the bomb, young Gen escapes with his pregnant mother to scrabble for a living in the ashes of the city and the broken ruins of postwar Japanese society. • Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what's top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List The atomic bombing goes almost unmentioned in the Nobel prizewinner's first novel, but it lingers in its pages like a faint but ineradicable smell. Etsuko, a Japanese widow and mother living in Britain, recollects her life as a young woman in postwar Nagasaki where everyone is straining to look cheerily to the future. The psychological cost of all this emerges, with beautiful subtlety, in the narrator's relationship with a mysterious friend, Sachiko, who is not what she seems. The novel's central theme is the tremendous act of repression that survivors frequently exert to make the unbearable facts tolerable. The recent film is good, and makes the shadow of the bomb more pronounced, but the novel is even better. Maximilian Kolbe in 1936 ALAMY Naoko Abe, a Japanese journalist resident in Britain, takes as her subject the influence on Japanese lives of the Polish saint Maximilian Kolbe, who founded a friary in prewar Nagasaki and was later canonised after taking the place of a condemned prisoner in Auschwitz. Most compelling is the story of Tomei Ozaki, who became a friar after being orphaned by the bomb as a teenage boy. Abe's understated style serves her well in recounting the appalling details of the bombing's aftermath: the living people with their skin burnt off; the boiling, raging sky; a child helplessly scrabbling to pull his mother out of a burning house. Richard Lloyd Parry has written a foreword to a new edition of The Bells of Nagasaki by Takashi Nagai (Vintage Classics £16.99)
BBC News
12 hours ago
- BBC News
Cost of living sees working families unable to afford toiletries
Some families in Oxfordshire are not able to afford basic toiletries despite working full-time jobs, a charity leader has organisation Jungle, based in Oxford, gives monthly provisions of hygiene essentials like toilet paper and sanitary towels to people struggling with includes three families working full-time at a school. The project was recently funded to the end of 2025 with a £1,000 donation from Templars Square shopping centre, where the charity is based. "One of our team members works part time at a local school and that is where this began, because she ran into a lot of families who needed help," said Jungle supervisor Beverly Visser."In fact three of the bags go to employees of the school. Even though they have a full-time job they still struggle to make ends meet."Jungle provides the hygiene bundles, nicknamed jungle boxes, to around 25 individuals and families who have been include victims of modern slavery and patients from a local health boxes include sanitary towels, nappies, toilet paper, deodorant and washing up liquid and cost around £25 each."I can tell that the people who come are so grateful and I can tell that they're struggling," Beverly said."They come regularly and I know that they need it." You can follow BBC Oxfordshire on Facebook, X (Twitter), or Instagram.
BBC News
13 hours ago
- BBC News
Coventry school uniform bank expected to help 3,000 children
A charity which supports people in clothing poverty is expecting to provide free school uniforms to around 3,000 children this Coventry runs an annual pop-up uniform bank to help families who struggle to afford buying uniform from new, ahead of the upcoming school year, with items either donated and bought using to government statistics, families are forking out between £300 and £450 on average for school uniform each Spicer, the charity's school uniform co-ordinator, said, according to Save the Children, nine pupils in every classroom were currently living in poverty. She said more and more people were struggling with the cost of school uniform amid a cost of living crisis."And 16% of secondary school pupils have actually missed time of school as they didn't have anything suitable to wear to school," she added."It's not just people who are on benefits, it's not just people that are struggling, the cost of living is hitting everybody hard." Ms Spicer added that lots of schools now expected branded uniform with logos."A lot of the schools now do expect logo'd jumpers, the blazer which is logo'd, and you can only get that from certain shops," she explained."A lot of the schools now are going down the logo'd skirt route and then you've got the full PE kit as well, that's all branded items."Families can get free school uniforms from Clothing Coventry's Uniform Bank from Tuesday to Friday from the 12 until 29 charity provided school uniform for about 2,000 children in Coventry last year and said they were expecting this year "to be bigger"."It has grown every year substantially, we're looking between 2,500 to 3,000 children perhaps," Ms Spicer said,"We are taking all of the stock from the warehouse that's school uniform over to a venue that we're hiring at Queen's Road Baptist Church and we'll be there for three weeks." Follow BBC Coventry & Warwickshire on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.
