Habitat for Humanity of Roswell continues to work to make Roswell a
Habitat community. Nationwide Habitat for Humanity International has over 1,300 affiliates
and is working in fifty-one foreign countries. In 1996, Habitat for Humanity International
built its 50,000th house and celebrated twenty years of working to eliminate poverty
housing and homelessness worldwide. Founder and President Millard Fuller received the
United States' highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, from President
Bill Clinton in a White House ceremony on September 9, 1996.
Habitat for Humanity is an international, volunteer based, non-profit
organization which assists low-income families by creating partnerships between people in
need of decent, affordable housing and volunteers who want to become actively involved in
eliminating poverty housing in their community. Future homeowners work with volunteers to
build houses and to improve their homes, their lives, and their neighborhoods. The
following article by a HFHI volunteer recently appeared in Habitat World magazine.
It is children who hook me into Habitat. It is the innocent who can
change nothing who touch my heart. It is the child who has never had a bed, nor space to
safely play who drives my Habitat work. I can't refuse to build their houses. I can't
refuse because I remember longing for a home myself.
I have never been hungry, and I have never been homeless, but growing up,
my family of eight was never more than two weeks away from hunger or homelessness.
During the Great Depression, my father went to California to look for
better-paying work leaving my mother with no money and six children to house, clothe, and
feed. We moved into an old house for $5 a month rent, then made a home of it by scrubbing
and patching. She fed us by raising a garden and trading her surplus produce for sugar and
flour. I went to work cleaning houses for $.75 a day, and slept on a mat in a 5' x 9'
closet.
I met my lifetime partner, Cal, when I was 14 and he was 16. He, too, was
a child of the Depression whose family lost everything: land, cattle, horses, and home,
never fully regaining their economic footing.
We married at 17 and 19. After World War II, our first jobs were
"following the fruit." We worked alongside families living in tents beside the
packing sheds, families with no water and no electricity. We saw children left alone all
day, and mothers picking fruit in the fields with an infant close by under a tree.
Our own experiences, combined with these scenes of homelessness and
hardship, reinforced our determination to get an education. Fruit season behind us, we
packed everything into the back seat of our only valuable possession, a 1937 Chevrolet,
and headed to the University of California/Berkeley, where tuition at the time was $37 per
semester.
In my sophomore year, I became a mother. One day, while feeding my new
baby, a Mexican woman I had never met came to my door begging for help. (Mexican
immigrants lived behind our student housing in old garages and little shacks.) Before I
could respond, she gave birth to her baby on my doorstep.
Later, Cal became a teacher and I cared for our children. With no income
in the summer, we lived with Cal's family in their tiny home with no running water.
This became our first building opportunity. We had a goal to make a more
livable home. Summer by summer, year by year, together we built a good house for Cal's
family - a family who somehow had managed to provide a higher education for all their
children.
Longing for a home of our own after 12 years of marriage and two
children, we cashed in our life insurance policy of $384 and put a down payment on a
house. With that, everything changed. What did it mean to our family to have space, a
yard, a sandbox, and a swing. In addition to those things, it meant our girls had their
own rooms: a place to read, to visit with friends, to listen to music, to study; a place
to discover their own identities. They became who they are largely because they had a
home.
When my youngest child went to school, I went to work. After graduating
from college at age 37, I became a counselor to adolescents of the tumultuous 1960's and
'70's. My office was filled with young people coming to talk, cry,, and ask for help. Some
came with big problems: pregnancy, abortion, drugs, running away, suicide. Their painful
stories confirmed for me that a home is the unshakable foundation of society. Young people
living in cramped trailers or other inadequate shelter were at great risk; and grades,
attendance, behavior, and general well-being suffered severely.
Today, nearly one-third of America's children live in poverty. At least
50,000 homeless children stay in shelters every night - perhaps as many as 200,000. Could
it be that the greatest single threat to our society is the lack of good shelter for the
next generation?
Hard statistics and my heart prove to me that simple, decent housing for
all is cheap insurance for the survival of this society. Habitat houses today create a
stable society tomorrow. Today's Habitat homeowner children will build their own houses
tomorrow.
My spirit knows that a house key unlocks more than the front door. It
unlocks a new life for families, for their children, and surely for their children's
children. At the same time, it unlocks a new room in me: space for my joy.
Judy Crabill, 70, and her husband, Cal, 72 have worked as volunteers with
Habitat for Humanity International for several years, helping to build over fifty Habitat
houses. They live in Lakeport, California, in a house they built with their own hands.
To continue to grow and build in Roswell, we need your assistance. We
need individuals who can work in construction and volunteers willing to serve on the Board
of Directors. We also need donations of building materials and tools. To become part of
Habitat for Humanity of Roswell, please call 624-2138. We are currently nearing completion
of our first house at 6002 S. Schneider. The building crew meets at the site every
Saturday morning at 8:00 am. If you wish to learn more about Habitat for Humanity of
Roswell, our next Board meeting is scheduled for Monday, February 10, 1997, at The Coffee
Bar at 305 N. Main. Please join us.