Casa Havilah

A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters. The name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold. ::. Genesis 2:10-12.

When I first heard about Casa Havilah I assumed Havilah was a Spanish word for something. But when I asked Mr. Buzbee (the mastermind behind this mission) he told me that Havilah was a section of land in the Garden of Eden. For those of you who bought, or just got a glimpse of the photo book I created to raise money to live here, I based my title on Ecclesiates 3, “There is a time for everything and a season for every activity under the sun…A time to plant and a time to uproot.” Now is my time to plant and what better place to plant than in the land of Havilah, where there is gold.

I have almost made my first week here at Casa Havilah and I have to admit, it’s been tougher than I expected. It’s not the bucket showers or the constant accumulation of dirt that mysteriously keeps developing under my finger nails…or even the mosquitos that, thanks to my mom, absolutely love my blood. What’s tough is planting myself in someone else’s home, a home that happens to belong to 13 “hard knock” girls. The girls here range from age 5-17 and they have one (very brave) house mom, who’s actually one year younger than I am. Most of them have experienced or have been at risk of experiencing some form of sexual abuse and therefor leaves them guarded and untrusting. I don’t yet know the psychology behind such traumas but I hope that as I do learn I will also begin to connect with each girl and eventually gain her trust. It’s actually the older girls who don’t trust. It’s taken the five days that I’ve been here to finally not feel the glare of evil eyes every time I walk into a room.

I can’t quite say that I love it here yet. But I think thats ok. There’s a lot of unstructured time here that I hope to start building, and when I’m joined by another American girl in a few days hopefully that construction of time will grow stronger and faster. I can say that my heart is melting more and more each and every day for these girls. They so desperately need love and attention and I so desperately want to give it all to them. But only one step at a time.

The next few posts I will be talking about each girl individually. Today I was at my computer with two girls and they were asking me to look up the meanings of each girls name in the house and it was really cool to see how the meanings really matched up with these girls’ personalities. So I’ll be including that too. My posts won’t be this long every time, don’t worry. There’s a lot of ground to cover with a first-ever blog post. I hope you’ll keep following, it’s going to be quite the adventure!