Refugee 'Little A' wins Good Morning America contest, for inspiration

In the thousands of submissions to the "Good Morning America" Breakfast in Bed Contest With Emeril Lagasse, one story stood out like a shining bright light: an e-mail from the nurses of St. Vincent Health Center in Erie, Pennsylvania. At a place where many lives begin, maternity ward housekeeper Almaz Gebremedhin's story of motherhood touches people there every day. There, the nurses call her "Little A."

"She'll open up the door and she'll go, 'Hi, girls. It's Little A," said Janice Huling, a nurse. "And then we go, 'Oh, good.'"

"She is everything," said Lou Ann, another nurse. "I would give anything to be Almaz."

"When you talk to Almaz," said David Coccarelli, Gebremedhin's supervisor, "you don't realize what she's been through."

"She's very upbeat," he said.

An Ethiopian refugee, she spent her childhood in Sudan. By the age of 15, she was in an arranged marriage and soon had five children. Then in 1993, Gebremedhin came to Pennsylvania with her husband, children and a young nephew. It was there that her husband left her -- in a new country with six children to care for all alone.

"Once he left us, she was determined to succeed and not fail," said Gebremedhin's son Hayolom Tadesse.

Gebremedhin stopped collecting public assistance and took three cleaning jobs, working more than 16 hours a day. SOURCE: ABC News