A lamb named Waylon helped save this Houston teacher's life. Now, she inspires future generations.
FacebookTwitterEmail
At first, Waylon didn’t look like much.
He was one of about a dozen Suffolk lambs purchased by a Bellaire High School agriculture teacher in 1995 and was randomly assigned to Andra Collins-Johnson when she was a restless junior. A career in animal husbandry or otherwise working in agriculture had never crossed her mind, and it seemed like a foreign concept for her in Third Ward.
Raising Waylon and spending long hours at Bellaire’s barn, however, awoke something in the now 40-year-old.
“The thing that stood out most to me is that I felt peace,” Collins-Johnson said. “There was a lot of space and pasture at the barn, even though there were freeways around it. I would stand out there and just look — I would look and think about what to do with the rest of my life. It gave me structure and made me feel safe.”