It sounds like a private developer’s nightmare: Building an entire subdivision to spec in less than a week. But for some residents in our community now living in substandard housing, the construction of 36 homes in five days will seem more like a dream come true.Today in a few blocks of northwest Anniston, around 2,500 volunteers, including an 80-year-old former U.S. president, will take up their hammers and swing them for a worthy cause — the Habitat for Humanity’s Jimmy Carter Work Project.
By the time it ends Friday, laborers on the project will be stiff and sore and sweaty. They’ll also have a sense of satisfaction that comes only from having done just a small bit to help better the lives of their fellow man.
“It’s about the homeowners,” local Habitat executive director Dana van Ekris told The Star last week. “I don’t care about having to work 18 hours a day. It’s worth it.”
Though the Anniston area is no stranger to the good work that Habitat does, it has never before taken on a challenge of this magnitude. Indeed, a lot of long hours of preparation put in by van Ekris, construction chief Lynn Parris and a small army of volunteers — many from out of town — have gone into making the work that starts today possible.
The idea of a week-long project targeting specific communities with national resources and manpower started back in 1984 and has focused on areas as diverse as New York City and Durban, South Africa. Anniston and two Georgia towns, Valdosta and La Grange, make up this year’s Carter Work Project. Planning for the Anniston project began in November of 2001.
Last year the focus was on Durban, a city of 10 million that sits on the edge of the Indian Ocean. Now it’s on Anniston, a town of less than 25,000 on the opposite side of the world.
The work, however, and the noble purpose of enriching lives, is the same. Our community should be proud to host this annual humanitarian event, a project that before it’s over will no doubt gain Anniston more good will and favorable publicity than a million dollars of paid advertising.
More than that, though, is the message that gets lost too often these days, the message that it’s better to give than to receive, that it’s more gracious to love than to be loved. After all, as those volunteering and those who have already contributed money and muscle would have us realize, the project, when all is said and done, is not about the houses, but about the people who will live in them.
