Stories from the Amazon - Grit and Determination

Having a horse when you're the daughter of missionaries and when you live on the mission base requires a lot of creativity and determination. When I got my first horse, it was with the understanding that I would have to care for, feed, pay for feed, etc, all on my own. When I owned my first horse Nathaniel, we still lived on the mission base and I had plenty of areas to tether him to graze and I was able to babysit for all the younger kids that lived on the base since all the ones my age had gone off to boarding school. I was able to make a little extra money doing that to be able to buy him bags of horse feed whenever he needed it. However, when I was about 17 my parents decided to move to a house in town and God provided for us a house and also land. My dad always joked that we got a 10 star hotel because that's what it was before we purchased it, the 10 star meaning thats how many you could see through the roof. That wasn't really the case but it was a pretty simple and not very pretty tiny hotel with about a dozen tiny rooms that we turned into a decent sized house with 5 rooms and a big music office for my dad, plus the small kitchen, smaller living room and a few bathrooms. We were able to have several families live with us during different time frames when they needed a place to live. Around that time of my life we weren't living on the mission base anymore and I was running out of ways to make money to support my horses, which at that time I had one or two by the time I was 17. One day we had baked a banana bread. The owners of a large grocery store two blocks away who was also a leader in the church my dad was pastoring, came over for a visit. My mom served him the banana bread with fresh coffee that afternoon. He had never eaten banana bread before and was amazed at how wonderful it tasted. He looked at me and said "You should sell this in my grocery store!". At first I thought he was joking because he literally owned one of the biggest stores in our town. But he was very serious and told me to take some samples to his bakery department and arrange a weekly total to deliver there. So I went for it, grabbed the opportunity by the horns and mustered up my courage, baked some batches of the banana bread and took them in to his store. All the bakers loved it and we arranged the weekly delivery. Well that started the ball rolling on my entrepraneur spirit. I started making more breads and going around to other bakeries and grocery stores in our town and offering them samples. In a short matter of time I was able to purchase two semi commercial ovens and an overwhelming amount of baking pans and racks. Soon I was in full production, making thousands of banana breads each week. Mondays and Wednesdays were baking days, Tuesdays and Thursdays were delivery days and Fridays were shopping and collecion days. This went on for a long time. I enjoyed the challenges of running this small business. Weekends were for enjoying my horses and I spent many hours riding and recovering from the week, training my horses and growing in my knowledge of horses. After a while an opportunity came along for me to go back to the United States and work with the mission organization and I ended up offering the business for sale to a young woman friend of ours. Sadly she didn't have the drive and will power to keep a busy business alive and ended up giving up on it shortly. It made me super sad when I found that out but proud of my hard work to make it happen. That whole experience taught me that pretty much you can do anything you set your mind to do if you have perseverance and determination and don't give up!