Habitat for Humanity plans to have 36 homes completed by week’s end, and Carter will tell you that no other meeting is more important to him today than the one he must attend Friday when he personally delivers the front-door key to the new homeowner.Monday’s work proved just how serious he and the 2,000-plus volunteers around him take their task, as all of the homes had outside walls standing by the end of Day 1.
But how did Carter become such a giver?
***It goes back to that day in time when he realized not everyone is as blessed.
“I grew up in an area of Georgia during the Depression years,” he said. It was a small community known as Archery, where he lived from age 4 until he joined the Navy.
“All of my neighbors were black. I didn’t have any white neighbors. I grew up playing with, wrestling with, and fist-fighting with, and working the fields with, and fishing with, black children,” he said.
“Although my Daddy owned a farm, I was deeply and intimately involved, every day, with the laborers’ children, and also the sharecroppers’ children. So, it was my life, my whole life. And I could obviously see the differences in our lives, but it was never a matter that came between me and them.”
Until, that day.
After the experience with his two friends and the gate in a rural Georgia pasture, Carter began his journey as a thinking man. It seems that gate opened his life to understanding the many needs of his brethren.
He recalls witnessing the influence of someone else close to him.
“The other factor in my early life was my mother, who was a registered nurse,” he said, crossing his legs in the shade of a colorful umbrella under the hot Dixie sun as hammers pounded along with the drumbeat of memories.
“She worked 12 hours a day in a hospital, for $4, or she worked 20 hours a day in a private home, where she just lived in a home with sick people, for $6 a day,” he said. “So, in our remote community of Archery, Mother was basically their doctor, because those black neighbors didn’t have enough money to go to a hospital and see a doctor for a medical service. And they didn’t have a way to get to the hospital except to walk.
“So Mother took care of them.
“Although we lived in a completely segregated community – throughout the South then, it was that way – Mother paid no attention to racial segregation.
“And she was kind of impervious to criticism because everybody knew she was a nurse. She was supposed to treat black people the same way she would treat white people,” he said, pausing, then concluding:
“That’s really the foundation of my concern about people who are different from me.”
***Fast forward to an interview with an editor from The Anniston Star in lawn chairs near a grove of oak trees, and the anxious Carter peers down at the house he is helping to build, signaling that his break in the shade can’t last much longer.
Too much work still to do.
But then comes the question, “You’re 78 years old and still going 90-to-nothing…how?”
He laughs, comments about a good health plan, and he talks of life.
“Well, my health is good,” he said. Referring to his wife Rosalynn, he talked of days not spent holding a hammer or keeping world peace.
“We don’t spend full time working. We have a good time, as well,” he said. “Rose and I are avid fly-fishers, and we’re bird-watchers. I’m an artist; I paint. I enjoy painting. I build furniture.”
What will become of Habitat in the post-Jimmy Carter and post-founder Millard Fuller days?
“My guess is that it will continue. They have a very strong international board of directors…probably some of them out here working today,” he said.
“The basic principle of Habitat is local participation,” he said, adding that the principals in place now regarding Habitat and its mission are in place for a long time to come, “So that when Millard and I are no longer here, the image of Habitat will continue.”
He seems to place great faith in his belief that the many volunteers around him are proof that Habitat is no longer any single person, but a mission. A mission borne by others who also realize that not everyone is as blessed.
***His biggest smile came with the answer to perhaps the most difficult question.
What is his greatest accomplishment?
“You mean, other than having grandchildren?”
Yes, he is a family man, with 11 grandchildren. But he also is a man who values other people’s children, and therein lies his greatest contributions to humanity.
“I think being able to establish some principals in the government…of our country being a powerful nation, but committed to peace and human rights,” he said.
He recalled the years of war, the establishing of diplomatic relations with China, being on the verge of war in South America over the Panama Canal, and other global conflicts leading up to his term in office, from 1977 to 1981.
“We went four years when I was president, and we worked and brought solutions to all those problems I just described to you. We never fired a gun, we never dropped a bomb. We never lost a loved one,” he said, referring to success of avoiding all-out war. “But we protected the integrity of our country, and the safety of it.
“The animosity and jealousy that existed in the world toward the United States dissipated to practically nothing because people around the world knew that we were their friends, and not trying to kick them around,” he concluded. “So, I’m proud of the peace and human rights.”
When he became president, he was determined to make human rights the centerpiece and foundation for America’s foreign policy.
Standing, shaking hands, and strapping on his tools as he strolled back into the fray of saws, hammers and sweat, it was fairly obvious that a gate once opened to Jimmy Carter in a Georgia pasture is still open.
Only now, it is Jimmy Carter who is the one inviting others to go first.
