24

While having lunch with one of my students, Ed, I asked him about his family.  His mother, he told me, was the only sister to six brothers.  This is interesting enough, but then he told me she's actually one of twenty-four.  Yes, 24.  Her father's first marriage yielded seventeen kids.  After his wife died he remarried and had seven more children, my student's mother being the youngest.  Thus, 24.  The whole tribe moved from Trinidad to the United States, to Philadelphia.

Ed told me his grandmother, who cared for most of those 24 and raised the last of them by herself after her husband died, is still living.  She wakes up every morning about four.  And she starts every day by reading her Bible and then praying for every one by name in the family.