Working side by side

There was always a special connection between the Carters and the homeowners who live in the houses they helped build.

For many of those homeowners, it may be one of the first housing experiences of their lives in which they feel not simply like a social security number or the latest in a long line of struggling renters, but a person with a name and a future. For Carter, getting to know the homeowners was a cherished part of his own personal growth.

“I think every human being has within himself or herself a desire to reach out to others and to share some of our blessings with those who are in need,” Carter once said. “But it’s one of the most difficult things to do.

“What’s opened up that avenue for me and my wife and hundreds and thousands of others is Habitat for Humanity. It makes it easy for us to reach out and work side by side with the homeowner who’s never had a decent house, perhaps,” he continued, adding, “I haven’t been on a Habitat project that I wasn’t thrilled and inspired, and wept.”

The homeowners so often shared in those emotions. During the 1999 Carter Work Project in the Philippines, as Carter built concrete-block walls in the tropical heat, homeowner Leonisa noticed that drops of his sweat were falling into the mortar. This sight — in light of the years she and her family endured in a bamboo shack — overwhelmed her, and she cried. “Too much blessing from the Lord,” she said.

During the 2002 build, Mambo worked with Carter on his house in Durban, South Africa. The next year, he traveled to Anniston, Alabama, to work with Carter again, this time building a house for someone else. Though the surroundings were different, Carter was the same “humble and down-to-earth” volunteer Mkhize had met previously. “I never expected him to come and help me in South Africa,” he says. “What I knew about big people like him — we are here to serve them, not them to serve us.”

In 2005, Carter made a statement at the project in Michigan that seemed to encapsulate much of his perspective toward the homeowners he had built with through decades of involvement with Habitat.

“In every home in which we worked for Habitat, no matter where it is, we have found the homeowner families are just as intelligent and just as hard-working and just as ambitious, and their family values are just as good as mine,” Carter said. “I hope during the week that we work side by side with them, that they learned to respect us as equals. Not as superiors, but as equals.”