Dear readers!

It is my honour to present esthergarvi.com’s very first Guest Blogger! Four years my elder and offering a unique perspective on the childhood that we shared, Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome my very own sister Miriam Garvi!

* A LEGACY OF MEANING * by Miriam Garvi

I consider my upbringing to be a most privileged one. But my privileges did not come with birth, nor did they have anything to do with a family fortune or a favored position in society.

Bettan & Miriam Garvi, Germany 1977

My privileged upbringing comes from having lived the pledge that my parents made in their youth as a small pioneering team joined together at heart by their hunger for something worthwhile.

As the eldest of their children, I still remember the impatient eagerness for adventure I felt when my dad announced to me one night as he was tucking me into bed that we would be going abroad. I also remember the portraits in our bedroom of four children living in Africa - Carolylin, Wainana and two names I have now sadly forgotten - who were included daily in our evening prayers. At the time, my greatest longing was to attend school and perhaps this is why our supporting their schooling made a lasting impression. In any case, I remember thinking about them, looking at their pictures and wondering what life was like in their part of the world.

But for mom and dad, sending money to our “adopted” children wasn’t enough to satisfy their hunger for meaning.

Smögen, on the West Coast of Sweden

It did not take long before the plans of building a house on my mother’s home island of Smögen were abandoned. My siblings and I quickly traded the dream of our own rooms in pink and light blue for the cosy togetherness of the backseat of an old Volkswagen bus which offered endless adventure.

Ready to go - Esther, (Josef) & Miriam Garvi (1982)

A lot of people deemed us crazy, and many voiced their opinions and concern. There were health issues, schooling issues, not to mention the nothingness that we might have to live off. Many saw our young parents’ choice of life through the lens of a society where a family’s economic wealth and security are believed to equate its happiness.

Yet my parents carried on the journey that they had commenced, because their hearts were set on something else.

Pioneering the desert with fruit-bearing trees - twenty-five years of hard work, but a vision worth fighting for!

My parents never gave us economic wealth, and when it was time for me to venture out of the nest, there was no other option than to provide for myself. And so there were many things I could not take for granted. I was not equipped financially for a life in our world, but I was prepared in a different sense. As I struggled to find my own will and way in life, I came to realize that my mom and dad had left me with the very same hunger for meaning, for life to be about more than simply enjoying the privileges available to many in the Western world. It is a hunger that has never left me since.

Bettan and her three children in Norway (1982)

My mom bore three children who survived. Each birth was a struggle, putting the lives of both mother and child at risk. Had my parents heeded the advice of the doctors, neither my brother nor my sister would have been alive today. So they knew better than most that health and children is not something one can take for granted. When people later asked my mother about the decision to move to Niger, one of the least developed countries in the world, she always mentioned the children:

We had been given three healthy children of our own. In Africa, so many children do not even reach the age of five. And so we wanted to do something for them, to help them.

/Bettan Garvi

A legacy to remember: the smiles of happy, healthy Eden children now growing up in the least developed corner of the world (Copyright Eden Foundation 2009)

When my mom met my dad, a pioneering spirit embraced its vision. Together they took a leap and acted out their hunger for a meaning-full life, leaving the world as they knew it behind to set up the Eden Foundation in West Africa. And for twenty-five years since, their work has been giving farming families in the Sahel the opportunity to lead dignified, self-supporting lives in what has long been one of the poorest areas of the world. So what I have inherited is truly a precious legacy, because I know what such a hunger in the heart of quite ordinary people can accomplish, when they take on a trek that makes every cost and sacrifice along the way seem worthwhile.

Bettan & Arne Garvi (2007)

Today, my mother is not with us, as she passed away last year after an intense battle with cancer. But by breaking new ground, she has left a foundation for others - including myself - to build on.

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Miriam Garvi blogs at The Vision Pioneers Blog. She has a PhD in Venture Capital and is currently working on a book project.

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For other life stories around the world, visit MyWorld!