By TRACY MEZA
Student Writer
After the passing of her high school sweetheart, who was the father of her five children, Eva Welch said she was left wondering what her God had planned for her life next.
Eva’s family moved to Alva when she was just 15-years-old and then she married her husband as soon as she graduated high school. Together, they moved around the country searching for work, but they were determined to make it home to Alva. Therefore, at their first possible opportunity, they did. Eva and her husband had five children together, three boys and two girls, so for the first part of the marriage she was at home raising the children.
In 1973, with her children in school, Eva found her job of 29 years at the Alva Police department as a 911 operator. She left the police department when her husband fell ill, and shortly after, in May of 2002, he passed away. A few months after the funeral, Eva decided to take a cross-country road trip in order to find herself. Eva had always been somebody’s wife or mother and she said she needed to find out who she was.
Eva knew her final destination was going to be Portland, Oregon, where her youngest son Kelly lived, but how she was going to get there and how long it took her was all in her hands. “I didn’t have time to miss him, basically because everything I did was things he wouldn’t have liked,” Eva said. When she made it to Oregon and looked at the Pacific Ocean, it was so beautiful she said all she could see was God.
Eva stayed in Oregon for over three months, and in that time she and her son visited several coffee shops. Every time she went into one she said that she instantly thought that this would work well in Alva. She talked with her children about opening a coffee shop out of their father’s old shop in Alva, and they all thought it was a great idea. However, it took a little while for the idea to take off. “For a while, it was just an idea, and it was, just an idea,” Eva said.
Then, suddenly in 2004, she said that she felt this sudden push from God to get the coffee shop ready. She knew what she wanted it to look like and she had to do a lot of clearing out of the shop to get it to look that way. Nevertheless, she knew the coffee shop dream was meant to be and was a sign from God when she found a book and video online titled, “How to Put in Your Coffee Shop.” The guide taught her everything she needed to know about how to run a successful coffee shop business. After a trial period of a few months with the equipment and waiting on all the operational permits to come back from the city, Eva’s coffee shop was up and running.
After two years of the coffee shop being open, it started paying for itself, she said. “It’s like a hobby in a way I don’t know what I would be doing. What would I be doing for 11 years?” Eva said “So for 11 years, I’ve just been doing what God wanted me to do, and I feel really good about that.”