The Happiest Place on Earth

The below post is my first for some time, as I have just returned from my travels. It is my account of one of the places I visited. It is pretty long but please do try to get to the end! And if you want to watch a photo video, then just press on the youtube screen here...








Johann and Johani are brother and sister. They both have beautiful wide eyes, brown circles swimming in pools of white. Their mother is a drug addict, a former ´street kid´ of Brazil who at some point in the last eight to ten years crossed into Bolivia illegally. No one knows who or where their father is. No one, including themselves, knows their last name, nor how old they are. They do not even know how their first names are correctly spelt. Johann, at some age between eight and ten and the eldest of the two, weighs 25 kilograms, just two times the weight of the average American two year old.

Luis is seven years old. Six months ago, he was a runaway street kid causing trouble in Guyara, a small town split in half by the Amazon, one side in Brazil and one side in Bolivia. Each time the Bolivian authorities put him into a home, he ran away. Each time they put him in a school, he ran away. Although he had relatives in Guyara, they did not look after him well. He doesn´t know where his parents are.

Nathaniel, aged 13, and his sisters Llueda, 11, and Rosita, 6, come from a large family in a town in the mountains close to La Paz, the capital of Bolivia. A year and a half ago their mother died giving birth to their youngest sister. Their father, a farmer aged 70, could not look after them so sent them to live with their aunt in the south of the country. Before this, Nathaniel, Llueda, and Rosita were all sexually abused by the workers on the farm.

Three true stories stained with tragedy and sadly stories that are all too familiar throughout the towns and cities of Bolivia, a developing country of 10 million people, a 60% poverty level and a history of economic and political instability. But the children at the centre of these stories are different to thousands of others with similar biographies. Miraculously, despite the horrors that their young lives have already experienced, they spend every day, almost every minute, with broad smiles across their faces. For these are the lucky ones. These are the children of Casa Segura.


* * *



Gifted with a far higher prize in the lottery of life, Michael “Mik” Henzell is a slightly framed, warm, gregarious and humble forty something Australian, born and raised on Moreton Island, off the Sunshine Coast. Up to the age of 32, Mik lived an unremarkable life, similar to many of his peers: a number of jobs as a chef both in Australia, America and Europe, a slightly over-healthy appetite for alcohol and marijuana, and in his early thirties a lack of clarity about his life’s direction. The years since then are the reason for the smiles on the faces of Johann and Johani, Luis, Nathaniel, Llueda and Rosita.

Living back on Moreton Island working “eight hours a week managing a few holiday homes, making enough money to live on”, Mik was staying with a friend on the Gold Coast “partying until late at night”. One night he “started seeing weird stuff, mainly black mists floating around”. This continued for more than 24 hours. Scared and concerned, Mik left, bound for home, but the black mist followed him to the point where he saw it in the eyes of people on the train. “Whatever it was, it was evil. It felt like demons and I thought that if there were demons, then there had to be a god, and something inside me snapped. I felt that if there is a god, then I am living my life wrong”. At that point, Mik immediately stopped drinking, taking drugs, even left his girlfriend of seven years. With a compulsion to read the bible, two weeks later and for the first time since childhood Mik attended a church he found through an acquaintance. “My friends and family thought I was crazy, seeing these things, but this person said ´Don´t worry, it happens all the time, come with me to church´”. From this starting point, Mik enrolled in Ministry college, studying for three years. During this time, he saw a documentary about the street children of Bolivia and knew he could make a difference to their lives.

A few months later, Mik arrived in La Paz, speaking very little Spanish and knowing no one. After an initial few days spent hiding in his hotel room and fighting the urge to return to Australia, whilst out exploring the streets of the highest capital in the world Mik heard some music and, realizing it was emanating from a church, stepped inside. It was through people in the church that he met a similarly minded man with an effusive personality, beaming smile and a name that suggests he should be a character in a UK Sunday night detective show – Pastor Louis Antonio Diamond.



A Jewish-Christian native of Bolivia, Louis Antonio was working with the street children of La Paz and people in the outlying river villages. When they first met, Mik spoke no Spanish and Louis Antonio no English, but something clicked and they immediately became great friends. It was a friendship that would endure. Mik spent his early time in La Paz making soup and taking it out on to the streets. He progressed to helping those street children with crippling drug addictions, trying to encourage them to stop injecting. At one point, realizing that to have any chance of fighting the addiction he had to take them out of their environment, he asked the 10 most addicted boys if they wanted an adventure. All of them agreed and he took them six hours by bus into the jungle and trekked four hours up a mountain to an abandoned village, where they lived together for three months whilst the kids went through drug withdrawals and ¨learnt how to survive without living off handouts or crime¨. Each Saturday, Louis Antonio took the 12 hour round-trip to drop off supplies at the bottom of the mountain before returning to his young family in La Paz. But helping the street children of La Paz was not enough – they wanted to do more.

In 2005, after two years in La Paz, and feeling that there were a lot of people helping the street children there, Mik decided that it would be better to work in the area of prevention rather than cure. He had an ambition to start an orphanage - to get to abandoned or orphaned children before drugs or another form of destruction got to them. Sharing the ambition with Louis Antonio, they decided to move to Riberalta, a tatty but burgeoning jungle town in the North East corner of the country, an hour from the Amazon and the border with Brazil. Riberalta ´boasts´ more abandoned and orphaned children than in most other areas of Bolivia due to the harsh habitat of the jungle, lack of facilities and clean water, and high amounts of malaria. It seemed as good as place as any to work towards the ambition.


* * *


In May 2010, I arrived in Bolivia in the midst of a ´career break´, looking for a bit of food for the soul and with my own lack of clarity about the next stage of my life. Two months previously, I had left Dubai, a city where I had lived and worked for five years. With plans to move to London in August, this was a few months off that seven years of hard work since graduating from University had bought me, and I was spending it with enthusiasm: firstly snowboarding with my girlfriend in Switzerland and now travelling alone around Bolivia and Central America. A friend had spent February volunteering in the region and having heard about her experiences, I felt that some time here would be a good way of fulfilling an ambition to visit the Amazon that I had held since a childhood geography project about the rainforest. One of the attractions was that this would be the complete antithesis to Dubai: I would be exchanging kilometre high towers for wooden huts with grass roofs; all-you-can-eat buffets and cocktails for rice and water purified with chlorine tablets; the humid Arabian Gulf-lapped beach for the sweltering insect-ridden Amazon; one of the world´s fastest growing cities where the pursuit of fortune gleams from everyone´s eyes for a small project whose goal is purely to give a few unfortunate impoverished children a safe home. After five years of chasing the pot of gold at the end of the oil slicken rainbow, after half a decade of excess, I could not wait.

From the dizzying altitude of La Paz, it takes two short plane rides riding low across the altiplano and then the vast luscious canopy of the rainforest to get to Riberalta. After the cold temperatures of the highest capital city in the world, the pilots do their best to warn you of the contrast to come, the lack of air conditioning turning your clothes to wet rags within minutes of being onboard. I was met off the plane at Riberalta´s “airport” (a grass and concrete field with a small shack that serves as a departures terminal and a tin covered area of benches and tables that welcomes arrivals) by Mik: I wasn´t hard to pick out, being the only white face amongst the 20 arrivals, and towering over all of them by at least five inches. From here it was a half hour journey in Mik´s blue and rust Nissan truck along the Roman-straight brown dirt road that, in a rare display of cooperation between South American governments, is currently under construction to link Brazil to Peru via Bolivia. Passing single floor houses of wood and corrugated iron separated from the road by an open sewage trench, the ribs of dogs showing through their taut stretch of skin as they ran in between the scores of motorbikes hooting repeatedly as they carried three people at a time together with a range of objects from bags to tables, scaffolding to logs, this was a stark enough contrast to the urban bustle of La Paz, let alone Dubai. I instantly felt sweatier, stickier, dirtier, the dust from the road covering the motorcyclists in a brown cloud as we passed them. The dense rainforest began at the edges of the road and from there it stretched on endlessly, the lungs of the world just a few metres away from me. And then, ahead on the right, a kilometre after passing a Bolivian army base, I saw a large clearing dotted with smart rectangular wooden cabins, a football pitch, volleyball court and a hill that sloped down to a creek. “Get ready to be attacked by screaming children”, Mik grinned. “This is home”.



Home is Casa Segura. Spanish for ´Safe House´, Casa Segura is ostensibly an orphanage, but there are no Dickensian bleak dormitories here, no lice infested children pleading for “more”, no dark shadows looming over the inhabitants. This is the living, breathing, and constantly evolving result of the vision Mik had back in the year 2000, the ambition he developed in La Paz, and everything he has done since. Currently home to Mik, his fellow Antipodean friend and staff member Kay, and (at the time of writing) 23 children including Johann and Johani, Luis, and Nathaniel, Llueda and Rosita, Casa Segura is a breathtaking example of what one man´s vision, stamina, persistence and passion, aided by the kindness and efforts of a small number of friends and strangers who buy into the vision, can achieve.


Back in 2005, upon moving to Riberalta, Louis Antonio opened up a church and radio station and helped Mik to find a 35 hectare piece of land on the outskirts of the town. Mik had had a vivid dream, “one of those ones which when you wake up you think it was real. I was flying over a rainforest and saw a clearing, it was all green, had grass hut cabins, loads of kids running around and ladies making bread…that dream pretty much gave me the design for Casa Segura”. The first three years were incredibly tough, a combination of fighting bureaucracy, hard physical labour, and severe illness. The first stage was getting the relevant permissions from the authorities, clearing the jungle and constructing the first buildings. Mik spent much of this with just one helper, a local man called Ruddy who still works at the project. The second stage was made easier by the arrival of Kay and involved much building work, whilst the third stage was spent preparing for the arrival of the first children with the construction of ´luxuries´ such as toilets. In that time, Mik contracted malaria twice, typhoid, and a number of bouts of food poisoning. “I nearly gave up several times but as soon as the first kids arrived, it felt amazing. It was all worth it”.


* * *




Stepping down from the truck, I spotted the first two or three children running towards us. Bursting with energy they rapidly braked a few feet short of Mik and I, a little shy of this pale gringo towering above them. Mik laughed telling the children to say hello. I knelt down and they each came forward, holding out their hands as Mik introduced them. Each one looked a picture of health (if very thin), their clothes smattered with mud from the game they had just been playing, their big eyes sparkling, following us as I was given an initial tour of the project. At each stage more children ran out and the procession grew. At the entrance to the project stands the church, the first building that was completed, a simple but well constructed 15mx8m rectangle of wood chopped from the forest, with a roof of grass and leaves also taken from the forest, and a brick floor. The other buildings follow the same design give or take a few tweaks: an office, a dining room/living area, two school buildings, a clinic, a toilet and shower block, and four sleeping cabins for the children, with the frames for six more already in place. A building housing a family who work as cooks, cleaners and builders on the project is on one side of the project, Mik´s cabin is secluded down a 20 metre path through the forest on another side, and Kay´s living quarters are on the third side. A short walk further into the forest from Kay´s is the blue canvas cabin which I called home for the time I spent volunteering at Casa Segura. Add to this lemon, orange, mango and avocado trees, two parrots, two dogs, chickens, a pig, a planned cow field, a football pitch, a volleyball court, and acres of playing space including a creek the size of a municipal swimming pool to swim in, not to mention the surrounding rainforest to explore, this is a world away from the broken homes the children grew up in. For them, this is paradise.



The physical description alone does not do Casa Segura justice. The atmosphere is almost impossible to describe: the whole place has an infectious air of life affirming positivity. The ghosts of memories that the children carry around with them are locked away, the darkness eclipsed by a sea of laughter, games and love. In the 23 days that I spent there, only a few times did I see sadness in the eyes of two children (Luis and Llueda), as the spectre of past grievances flickered through their minds, and the only tears were in short lived moments following the usual harmless scraps between children. I found it incredible that the scars of their history were not etched across their faces, eradicated as they are by the home they now enjoy.




On weekdays the children wake at 6.45, shower and change into their football kit-like uniforms, and breakfast in the dining area. After breakfast it´s four hours of school (most children in Bolivia only go to school for four hours a day) where they are joined by 20 other children who come from small communities in the jungle. Then it´s lunch and an afternoon of leisure, before dinner, homework and bed. Meals are meat and rice. Lots of rice. Including for breakfast. The reason is twofold – firstly, the amount of insects makes growing vegetables in the jungle almost impossible and buying them in town is prohibitively expensive and, secondly, Bolivian people just love meat and rice. For Mik and Kay, the mundaneity and blandness of their meals is one of the many small sacrifices that they have made.



Mik tries as hard as possible to avoid the rules, regulations and timetables of an institution. “I had a brilliant childhood, going to school, doing chores and homework and spending the rest of the time playing. This is what childhood should be about so we try to give it to the kids here” he explained to me one day as we watched the kids playing football. “Some people criticize us, saying we should be more formal, that we should organize more activities, but kids create their own activities, they make their own fun. Why should these ones be any different?” In addition to schooling, the children will learn a trade – either cooking, carpentry or farming, ensuring that they leave Casa Segura with an education and a skill. It strikes me that for some of the children, those like brothers Nacho and Winky whose mother died and whose father lives in Riberalta but can´t look after them, this is like a fun and liberal boarding school. “Those with families can see them any time they like and we encourage them to. It is really important that they do that and maintain the connection”. In the time that I was there, some of the children´s families joined us for Sunday lunch, others spent the weekends at their brothers’, mothers’ or fathers’ houses, and on the Bolivian Mother´s Day, three travelled by bus to visit their aunt at her home one hour away. The sense of family is strong, with all but two of the 23 children having brothers, sisters or cousins also living at the project, but more than that, each of the 23 are like brothers and sisters to each and every other one, with Mik and Kay as the surrogate parents. The whole ´family´ sit down together for three meals a day, the children sleep in cabins of up to six, and on a Sunday everyone piles on to the truck and head to church. The children go to school together, play together, and do homework together. Dinner times are full of talk and laughter, the cheeky grins looking up at you with wide-eyed innocence as they hide your fork or tickle you. One day, as I watched the kids run around the football pitch, play a game with bottle tops, and then throw themselves off the wooden platform that juts out over the creek, the sound of shrieks and giggles in the air, it struck me that theirs was the childhood of Enid Blyton stories; the rose-tinted reminiscences of our parents who grew up in the 1950´s and were ´happy playing with a stick and a ball´. There are no health and safety concerns here, no worries about playing outside alone, no societal views from on high about how children should spend their time. There is, as per Mik´s childhood, school, homework, chores and play. Plenty of play, plenty of smiles and plenty of laughter. A community comprised mainly of children with tragic pasts, this could very well be the happiest place on earth.


* * *




There are great plans for the project, with the ultimate aim being to house 60 children. I wonder if the spirit of the place, which is reflective of and relies on Mik´s personality and on each child receiving lots of attention from him and Kay, would be diminished by having this many children. “It is a concern”, Mik confides. “All of these kids need love and attention, which is one of the reasons we appreciate having volunteers. If we get more kids, then the amount of love and attention we can give each one will go down”. In the past three months, eight children have been taken in, growing the project by 30%. I suggest to him that perhaps it is better to give a smaller number of children more love than to spread himself and his limited resources too thinly. He seems to agree but then admits that he finds it hard, if not impossible, to say no. Two days later, and one of the children´s mothers asks him if he can take in one of her other sons – he agrees immediately. An Australian woman is due to arrive towards the end of the year to live and work at the project for at least one year, which will relieve some of the pressure, but I wonder how many children will arrive in the meantime, stretching Mik and Kay further. The two used to take annual trips home to Australia for a much needed break and to see their own families but, with so many children, this is now impossible.



The project relies on fundraising by Mik and Kay´s church in Australia which now acts as an administrator, four other churches in Brisbane and Sydney, a small amount of governmental support, private donations, and on sponsors of the children (many of whom are past volunteers). Mik and Kay draw a meager salary, and end up spending much of this on gifts (and sometimes essentials) for the children. They don´t seem concerned by financial planning for their own future. Like most families, there are constant financial concerns – but most families are not 25 people strong. Currently, the monthly payments made by sponsors do not cover the US$ 1200 monthly food bill, with eight of the children without sponsors. In the time that I was there, the expected monthly donated payment did not arrive and Mik´s mood noticeably darkened, obviously with deep concerns about the mounting bills. Add to this Bolivia´s notoriously volatile political situation, regular teacher strikes, and a shortage of petrol and diesel in Riberalta (needed not just for the trips into town but also for the trips into the jungle to chop wood for cooking), and the stresses on one man´s shoulders must be huge. But Mik remains remarkably optimistic. “Whenever we have had times like this, where things have seemed a bit bleak, something always happens to help us. There have been too many instances where we have needed something and it has arrived for me not to believe that God helps us and will do so again. Like when we needed to build a clinic and we received an email from two nurses asking if they could volunteer. They came and set up the clinic, bringing the medical supplies with them. I have faith that He will help us”.

For someone like me who wavers between atheism and agnosticism, this is a difficult confidence to understand. Mik´s strong faith is at the centre of the development of Casa Segura – without it the project would not exist and the children would not enjoy the lives that they do. To talk to him about his Christianity was immensely enjoyable. I found his liberal attitude to ´non-believers´ or ‘doubters’ like myself combined with his own deep-rooted belief, knowledge of the bible and absolute conviction that God has helped him along the way, a fascinating conversation. It showed me the power that faith can have and made me question my previous cynicism towards so called ´born-again Christians´. As an (at the very most) Agnostic, I still don´t understand how he can believe the words of the bible in a literal sense – how he can believe the Genesis story and not believe in evolution, how he can absolutely believe the stories of Noah and his ark, the parting of the Red Sea, and the Virgin Birth – this is beyond the paradigm through which I view the world. But I wholeheartedly respect and envy his belief and faith and found myself for the first time ever not ignorantly mocking someone with such views, greatly appreciating that it is this which has resulted in the creation of Casa Segura, the closest to the Garden of Eden that the children here could have ever imagined experiencing.


* * *

As you can probably tell from what I have written so far, it is hard if not impossible to be less than overly effusive about both Casa Segura and Mik Henzell. Mik would no doubt be embarrassed to read some of the praise given here – whilst he admits that his work has done wonders for the lives of the children, he seems devoid of arrogance about what he has achieved. He may be humble, but he is a force of nature too – if that is not a contradiction in terms. In creating Casa Segura he has been planner, architect and builder, plumber, father and doctor. Despite having no formal medical training he is adept at both diagnosis and treatment: I saw him treat malaria, ear infection and fever, and on one occasion give Johann stitches on his chin whilst reading how to do it from a Spanish medical book. In addition to the direction given to him from his belief, he has had a lot of help along the way without which Casa Segura would not exist. Kay has been and continues to be a huge contributor, giving up her life in Australia to live and work at the project, a rock on which Mik can rely. Then there is Louis Antonio and his family, the church in Australia, a number of large donors, and the various volunteers who have contributed much: the Australian nurses who helped establish the clinic; the British Engineering students who helped create the wells that supply the project with fresh water; the Australian electrician who wired up the project; and the numerous other volunteers who have each made their own contribution.



I wholeheartedly encourage anybody to volunteer at Casa Segura and think that those that do will take from it much more than if they pay $1000 for the privilege of volunteering at one of the thousands of projects advertised online, where I suspect the experience is slightly manufactured. There are negatives – the bites from insects larger than I have seen on any nature documentary, the sticky heat, the constant feeling of dirtiness, the risk of illness, and the occasional hours or boredom without the usual distractions of television, radio, computer or books. But these are far outweighed by the wide range of positives - it sounds like a poetic cliché but one smile or hug from the kids makes you forget any of the above. Nevertheless, it hasn´t always met every volunteer´s expectations. I asked Mik whether any volunteers had been counter-productive and he admitted that a very small minority had. “Everyone who has come has made a positive difference, but there have been a couple who have been a little difficult due to the expectations they arrived with. They came believing they could make a huge difference, with grand ideas of achieving something big whilst they were here, but people need to fit into the rhythms and demands of the project. For example, if there is no building work to be done, then volunteers aren´t going to leave here having built something. And that has annoyed a couple of people in the past who wanted to leave some form of physical legacy”. But even if as a volunteer you do not leave behind something tangible, everyone who has come to help, whether for one week or three months, has made some form of difference. “The most important thing is the children – they love having the attention that a volunteer gives them. And they talk about volunteers for months after they have left. It makes a real difference to them”. As with the volunteers mentioned above, prior to arriving at Casa Segura I had preconceived notions that my time would be spent doing physical labour and that I would leave with the knowledge that I had contributed to the creation of something that would be in the project for years to come. But this was a period of relative quiet at the project and the only physical work I did was a day up to my neck in water pulling weeds out of the creek to enlarge the swimming area. The only other ´work´ I did was helping in the daily washing of clothes, serving meals, and running errands in town with Mik. My main role was playing with the children – exhausting but hardly a tough job. I did leave something tangible behind though - in my first week, walking through Riberalta´s Sunday market, I stumbled upon a shop selling electric pianos and keyboards. Remembering that as a child, having always had a piano in the house I found it odd when friends’ houses didn´t have them, I bought one for the project. From then on, my alarm clock was the sound of the demo tunes drifting across the project to my cabin and the days were punctured by the discordant sounds of the children attacking the keyboard.


* * *



For Mik and Kay, I sense it is a lonely life. They each have a couple of friends in the town but I get the feeling that one of the big advantages of hosting volunteers is that they provide some much needed company. Over the course of my weeks there, I became very friendly with Mik and I realized how lonely I would be if I didn´t have my girlfriend or group of friends as constant presences in my life. On a Friday evening, Mik heads into town for his ´boys night´ with Louis Antonio, which they spend chatting over a meal. Louis Antonio is a great support and friend to Mik, and they enthuse over their joint plans for the project. On the land next to Casa Segura, Louis Antonio has began building a shelter for abused women, funding it with donations from his small church in town and the selling of small almond sweets which his family make in the kitchen of his home. Eventually, whilst remaining separate entities, the two projects will share the church at Casa Segura and the women in Louis Antonio´s project will act as big sisters for the children. Past this, long term plans for the project are unclear: when I ask Mik how long he sees himself being here, he simply answers: “For a long time yet. I want to see this generation grow up. How can I leave them? Their mothers and fathers left them, it would be too much for them if I did too”. He has hopes that one day, Mariano, at 13 years old the eldest child both in years and in time at the project, will take over, and is already showing him the ropes. The children will be welcome to live at Casa Segura for as long as they want – into their adulthood if they wish. Most of the boys will likely become laborers or farmers, and Mik and Kay will do their best to not let the girls fall into the trap that many of their peers do: becoming pregnant at the age of 14 due to a combination of a lack of education and the ingrained tenets of Catholicism that the Spanish invaders brought with them centuries ago. Hopefully a couple of the children will go on to greater things, such as Nathaniel who is exceptionally bright for his age. Over one meal Mik posed him a puzzle using matches – he had solved it within 3 minutes and within 5 minutes had made up his own which took Mik and I much longer to solve. The project pays US $10 per month to send Nathaniel to a school in town and it reaps rewards – he excels in most subjects, already knows basic English phrases, and within a few days of me buying the keyboard he had learnt a number of simple tunes and was eager for me to teach him more.



Every child arrives at Casa Segura with a tragic history but within a couple of days they are living firmly in the present, and enjoying every minute. It was touching to see the way Nathaniel watches over his two sisters, for example buying them ice creams in town on a Sunday with the odd Boliviano he earns through his chores and going without himself. Likewise, Llueda acts as a mother to Rosita, making sure she cleans her teeth, washing her hair, scolding her when she is naughty.

When Luis arrived at the project, he came with warnings about his behavior from the authorities who had taken him from the streets and placed him at Casa Segura but he has undergone a massive transformation, Mik saying that he often wonders if he is the same child. “It´s all to do with getting love and affection. If a child gets none, he goes looking for it, and maybe Luis found it from kids on the street”. Although he was the one whose eyes most showed the sadness of his life, I found Luis an incredibly sweet child, whose former time on the streets now manifests itself in a mischievously playful spirit, creeping up to jump on my back, wanting a hug.

Johann and Johani arrived at the project only one week before I did, but I couldn’t have guessed from the way they were already part of the family. Mik and I spent a day in Guyara where like Luis they had been found by the authorities, trying to find out their last name but their paperwork had been lost so this and their ages remain a mystery. Johann makes bangles and wears them on his wrist, saying that they are for his mother. However she is waiting to go into a drug rehabilitation centre and until she has done so, they will not see her. As yet, they haven´t asked Mik or Kay about her but if they do they will be told a softened version of the truth. ¨They need the hope to one day go back to her”. Malnourished, his skin as taut as the dogs I saw when I first arrived in Riberalta, Johann is one of the first to put his hands up for seconds at dinner time but also one of the first to break into a grin.


* * *



At a time in my life when I am trying to decide what my next step should be: when my desire to attempt to make a living from being a writer contrasts with the concern that this would be following a whim and wasting the steps I have taken to date on the career ladder; when my love of expensive toys, clothes and holidays that a well paid job provides conflicts with the knowledge of the fulfillment I would get from a job that contributes to society, it has been an enlightening experience to see what a difference people like Mik, Kay and Louis Antonio are making to people´s lives through sacrifices they have made in theirs. As I wrote above, an infectious air of live affirming positivity swirls around Casa Segura and for three weeks it was a privilege to breathe it in. Further, the slow rhythm of life was an antidote to the hectic pace of Dubai and without work, without television, cinema, radio or books, I had the time to just sit and think, reflect and contemplate - a luxury which our non-stop western lives have all but eradicated. It would be disingenuous to say that three or four weeks at Casa Segura ´changed me´ - I am not going to pretend that I am going to swap the life I enjoy for a life of sacrifice for the good of others - but I have no doubt that it was an overwhelmingly positive experience and one which I am sure I will reflect on in the future and use as an inspiration in many facets of my life.



To give up a comfortable life, to move to a developing country and give yourself over for the good of children like Nathaniel, Llueda and Rosita, takes a special type of person and yes, maybe it does take a deep faith, a life-changing vision. Whatever it was that propelled Mik Henzell along this path, it has resulted in the creation of something truly wonderful that has changed the lives of at least 23 children and forever turned a river of tears into a sea of smiles.


* * * * *




Message from Charlie (the writer):

I hope that this story has done justice to Mik Henzall & Casa Segura, that it has demonstrated what one man can achieve, and portrayed the air of happiness that swells around the project. It is an uplifting true story and I hope that came through. However, one man can only do so much on his own – as I wrote above, Casa Segura rely on donations and whilst I was there the anticipated monthly batch of donations did not come through. I know that we have all become a bit antipathetic to requests for charity – I admit to hiding from the guys dressed in red holding a clipboard on the streets – but please do consider donating to Casa Segura, either as a one time donation or by sponsoring one of the kids. They could really do with your help. And if you are tempted to take some time out of your life (even just a week) and have an amazing adventure in north-east Bolivia, I completely recommend it. The details are below. Thanks.


TO HELP OUT:

Either:
1) go to www.casa-segura.org and click on the donations link
2) Email Mik at casasegura@hotmail.com
3) Email me at taylor_charlie@hotmail.com and I can help you send the funds