5 things overheard at the 2019 Carter Work Project

Before the individual acts of kindness and labors of love that populate each Habitat build officially commenced, two longtime Habitat champions welcomed the crowd to Music City using the city’s unofficial love language: country music. Nashville natives, country music stars and Habitat Humanitarians Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood serenaded the Ryman audience with a pair of love songs. “The greatest gift is a home,” Brooks shared during the set. “The only way you can get better than that is if it’s a home right here in Nashville.”

For Tara, having a safe, decent place to call her own is the first step in redefining what is possible for herself and her 9-year-old daughter, Kennedy. From her own upbringing, Tara understands the toll that constant moves and rising rents can have on independence, on peace of mind, on economic mobility. On stage at the opening ceremony, the youth engagement coordinator encouraged her fellow future Habitat homeowners to persevere — calling on them to recognize the future they’re building, not just for their immediate families, but for the generations yet to come. “You can’t stop. Because we have a whole lineage depending on us to break the mold. We have a whole community depending on us to share our story.”

From putting up steel-frame houses in South Africa to brick-veneer homes in Mongolia, making new lifelong friends in South Dakota to discovering ancestral roots in Hungary, octogenarians Steve and Barb Szemenyei have yet to have a dull moment over their 17-year history with the Carter Work Project. Nashville, they expect, will be no different. “I can’t believe the life we’ve had,” Steve says. “The people we’ve met, all the good that has happened – so much of it happened through Habitat.”

Undeterred by a fall at home in Plains earlier in the day, President Carter inspired the audience at the Ryman with his enduring commitment to ensuring families across the world have access to the strength and stability that homeownership provides. During his devotion the next morning, the Habitat Humanitarian shared his fervent hope that the future Habitat homeowners and hundreds of volunteers gathered would find the courage within themselves to use the gifts they’ve been given. “We have the freedom to take advantage of all the great blessings God has given us. Everyone,” he shared. He says that includes the freedom to decide the answer to the question, “What kind of person do I want to be?”

Dr. Sarah Theart first began volunteering in the first aid tent at the Carter Work Project in 2011. A medical student in St. Vincent and the Grenadines at the time, she traveled to Haiti, the country of her birth, to support volunteers and families as they sought to help the nation rebuild after the devastating earthquake. “It was amazing,” she says, thinking back of the full-circle moment. “It was wonderful to be able to be there, to help however I could and to see what Habitat does — the change it really does bring.” Since that trip, Theart has graduated, completed her residency and become an attending physician, while continuing to save vacation days to volunteer as a medic at the Carter Work Project each year. While it was the impact that initially impressed her, it is the bonds formed and strengthened year after year on the project — between fellow volunteers, homeowners and the local community — that keep her coming back. “As a Habitat homeowner once told me,” she shares, “‘You come here as strangers, but you leave like family.’”