It’s okay to be irrelevant.
At least that’s what freshman Breckin Horton believes after spending this summer working as an intern for The Pearl House in Ghana, Africa.
The group home seeks to help several young, impoverished women discover their identity and purpose in Christ by providing them an open and safe environment to do so.
“It changed my whole entire theology and the way that I look at what happens to us in life and what God wants with us,” Horton said. “Going out of high school, when you’re the big dog, and then going somewhere where people know nothing about you, and they don’t care about your accomplishments, learning to be cool with that and embracing it and finding your value in who God says you are and the names He has for you is incredibly humbling.”
The Pearl House is a well-funded, 3,000 square-foot home for young women ages 13-21 who have been brought to the house due to unsafe or unlivable circumstances.
Courtney Garland, an alumna of Lipscomb circa 2000, moved to Ghana three years ago to be the live-in house mom for the 20 girls staying at The Pearl House.
“She was a youth minister at White Station Church of Christ in Memphis, and three years ago she got connected with a couple who was starting a nonprofit orphanage,” Horton said. “Everything just fell together. It was very clear that’s where God wanted her to be, and she always felt called to do African missions after having done many trips to Ghana before.”
Three years later, The Pearl House serves as a safe and empowering place for 20 girls who would likely have to resort to prostitution and instinctive survival on the streets or be stuck in their impoverished villages.
“Some of the girls were brought to The Pearl House because their guardians couldn’t afford to take care of them anymore,” Horton said. “All but one of the girls has been orphaned by one or both of their parents.”
For the girls that still have a living relative, more often than not, that parent either works in another country or left their child with family members that couldn’t take care of them.
Additionally, several of the girls were living with grandparents who were near death.
“The Pearl House provides not only education expenses, but also spiritual development,” Horton said. “So in the mornings we have a devotional from 5:00 a.m. to 5:30, and we sing, we do prayers and we also do a Bible study in the morning. The girls are either at school during the day or learning necessary life skills to be successful after their school graduation.
“And then at night from 6:00 p.m. to 6:30 to 7 p.m., we do a family meeting-type devo which also has prayers and singing instead of a Bible study. We discuss any issues or problems that need to be discussed.”
Horton hopped on a plane bound for Ghana on May 17, roughly three days after she graduated high school. Her day-to-day schedule depended on whether or not there was a group visiting and ministering in the area.
If there were groups visiting The Pearl House, Horton would work with them, sometimes by planting grass around the building or putting together furniture; other times by decorating the house with artwork or visiting with and evangelizing to the surrounding villages.
If no groups were visiting the house, Horton’s day to day resembled the mundane: handling payment vouchers and working with Garland to handle paperwork and accomplish seemingly menial tasks that make life easier in the long run.
“When you’re signing up for this three-month long mission trip, you don’t think about the little things that have to go on on a daily basis, but they’re super important and vital to making the place run and just making life easier for the long term missionary that you’re there for,” Horton said.
While living in the house and ministering in the villages, Horton was surrounded by the same poverty, violence and intense scenes that each Pearl experiences in her childhood.
Some days, Horton and Garland travel to the populous capital city of Accra, located roughly 45 miles from The Pearl House in Winneba. Though geographically close, Accra, home to extravagant malls, make-up and Apple stores, contrasts the poverty in the city surrounding The Pearl House.
“We would go from village VBS one day, which was a one classroom dirt floor building and had 100 kids in that one classroom to wandering through one of the malls in Accra the next day,” Horton said. “It’s a weird thing when you’re trying not to judge a culture for ignoring their own poverty and trying to remind yourself it happens here too, and you do it all the time.”
Even so, Horton considers her time spent at The Pearl House to be one of the most challenging and fulfilling seasons of her life so far.
“The hardest part, or something that I learned, is how to take sorrow and sadness and see it as joy and find reasons to be thankful for the things that go against what we thought they would be,” she said. “I think it just changed the way I look at everything.
“I guess, in a way. I don’t see sorrow and sadness as awful things anymore.”
Short-term missions with long-term results
Prior to The Pearl House, Horton spent time doing short-term mission work across the country and internationally, including periodic trips to Honduras, Puerto Rico, Guatemala and Bulgaria.
Horton said that the difference between a physically demanding, one-week trip versus an evangelical trip is that personal relationships don’t always grant immediate gratification.
“I think when you’re in Honduras for a week, it’s like a spiritual high the whole time, and you’re always doing something that you see the good results of that day, whereas if you’re doing an evangelical trip, you’re not seeing daily results,” Horton said.
Having completed several domestic and international mission trips before traveling to Ghana, Horton wasn’t expecting to give as much of herself as she did without any expectations.
“When you’re working on a daily basis with teen girls, you forget the fact that teen girls are so moody, and they couldn’t care less about your presence,” she said. “They’re not impressed by you. To go from one to the other was so much harder than I was expecting it to be, and to recognize it, because The Pearl House has interns all year long, you’re not cool. You’re not new.
“You sometimes have to love them even when you don’t feel like they love you back. I just wasn’t expecting not to get love back sometimes.”
Lipscomb Missions sends groups across the globe annually for evangelical, physical and medical trips alike. Horton said that the most important thing these groups can do is to be intentional with their planning and actions.
“I saw a lot of groups come and really drain myself and Courtney,” Horton said. “There was just a dynamic within the group that wasn’t helpful to what we were trying to accomplish and to what they wanted to get out of the trip.
“But we also had groups come that were so life-giving and ready to jump in and love on the girls with their whole hearts. I think a level of preparedness and building a mindset within your group that isn’t founded on expectations for yourself is something all of us can do when we’re planning for a short-term mission trip of any kind.”
Photos courtesy of Breckin Horton