Seeds Worth Sowing
This morning, whilst remembering the girls at Hadassah’s House, the incredible story of George Washington Carver came back to my mind.
Carver was born into slavery on a Missouri farm in 1864. Before he could even walk, he was carried off in a raid and only found months later — his mother never was. The couple who then raised him as their own watched him spend his childhood out in the fields, so taken with rocks and flowers that the neighbours nicknamed him “the Plant Doctor.”
Getting an education took him years — moving from town to town, working to fund a schooling nobody made easy for a poor orphan farm boy. He was well into his twenties before he reached college in Iowa, first as a student and later, once he’d earned his degrees, as a member of the faculty.
In 1897 he moved to Tuskegee. What he did there changed the American South. Generations of growing nothing but cotton had stripped the soil bare and trapped farmers in poverty. Carver taught them to rotate in peanuts, soybeans, sweet potatoes, and pecans to restore what cotton had ruined, then invented hundreds of practical uses for those crops so the restored soil actually had a market — everything from ink to axle grease. He built a travelling classroom on wheels to reach farmers who could never have come to him, and gave nearly all of it away, patenting almost nothing.
It wasn’t his training alone, or his faith alone, that turned a handful of ordinary crops into hundreds of inventions; it was the two together — a mind sharpened by hard‑won education and a spirit tuned to hear from God.
“No books ever go into my laboratory. The thing I am to do and the way are revealed to me the moment I am inspired to create something new. Without God to draw aside the curtain, I would be helpless. Only alone can I draw close enough to God to discover His secrets.” — George Washington Carver
Through his faith and generosity, this once‑poor, orphaned farm boy — who learned to judge a life by what it gave rather than what it accumulated — became the reason an entire region rose out of poverty.
I think about that story when I think about the five young women at House of Hadassah. None of them chose their start either. They finished high school in Nakuru with real ability and real character, but little opportunity to fund what comes next. What they lack isn’t potential — our friends in Kenya hand‑picked each of them precisely because they saw it — it’s the sustained support it takes to actually finish their education.
We named the project House of Hadassah after Queen Esther’s Hebrew name, which means myrtle — a tree Scripture uses again and again as a picture of restoration: something unlikely to flourish, planted somewhere unpromising, that thrives once it’s given the right conditions. That’s what we believe about these five — that, just as Carver’s one life reshaped a region, these young women, being raised up as the leaders we already see in them, will go on to lift the families and communities around them for years after we’ve stopped counting.
That’s the ask. College tuition and transport aren’t covered by what it already costs to keep the house running. We’ve updated the House of Hadassah project page with the details of what’s needed and how you can sponsor a place, so do take a look and see whether this is something you want to be part of — every little helps.
Carver never had much time for fortune or fame. He had time for being useful. I can’t think of a better way to spend some of ours than helping five hand‑picked young women step into the futures they were made for.
