The strong, 34-year-old black man with a short beard and a leopard print cowboy hat came from a place where people are thirsty and houses are dirt. He is working construction this week beside his good friend, a short, 79-year-old white man with a red bandana around his neck who used to live in the White House.Together, under the punishing sun, they will help raise a house for a low-income family they hardly know. It will be a modest house by Anniston standards, on a nice hillside lot. But in the part of South Africa where the younger man lives, it would be a palace.
"There is a lot of money in America," said Mambo Mhkize, a Zulu pastor who got here on Friday. He does not mind that the house he is building is twice the size of his own. "I don’t want to live the life of the consumer all the time. My God is a contributor."
Last year Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, stacked the blocks on Mhkize’s new home, a 500 square foot place in Durban, South Africa. Since then, Mhkize has been hoping to come to Anniston to work at this year’s Jimmy Carter Work Project, where 2,800 volunteers will build 36 houses by Friday.
He saved his money, but it was hardly enough for a plane ticket. About a month ago, the Habitat for Humanity affiliate in Durban told him that someone had paid for him to come here.
"I felt like I was flying," said Mhkize. He still doesn’t know who his benefactor is.
Last year’s event, he explained, changed him. He was denied basic freedoms for the first 25 years of his life because of his dark skin. Then, for a week, he rubbed shoulders with a man who had been the leader of the free world.
He watched Carter stoop to slop cement. He watched him paint. He watched him pause under the African sun, take a sip of water, and go back to work.
He learned then that the problem’s that face his people need less debate and more humility. Carter did not spend the week in the offices of the South African elite. He sweated.
"It is very challenging to work with him (Carter)," Mhkize said.
On the work site in Wellborn Manor, he never is far from the former president. At night, both men sleep in the same dormitory hall at Jacksonville State University.
"I have to stay next to him," said Mhkize, who whistles when he gets excited. "He is my mentor."
A year ago he was raising two boys under a roof that couldn’t stop the rain. He lived next to his church, which was robbed of its pews more than once. It was a neighborhood where people killed with machetes for something to eat.
The Habitat neighborhood that he moved to is named Ethembeni, which means "place of hope." When Carter handed him his house key, "I was very crazy, I cannot tell you," he said. "I prayed and I gave some good wishes to him and I was full of joy."
The house he is working on will be the home of Rinique Simmons, a single mother with two boys. He and Carter and the other 30 or so people who are building it had raised the walls by 8:30 Monday morning. On Friday it will be finished.
When Mhkize leaves for home on Saturday, he will have come to America and seen no major tourist attraction – only the Atlanta airport, Habitat’s headquarters in Americus, Ga., and the blunt end of a few thousand nails.
"I’m very happy," he said.
At home he will tell his wife the things that have impressed him. He lists them.
Carter is alive and well.
The house has been built.
The new homeowner is happy.
That white people and black people work together.
"When I think about the past of our countries, where the whites and the blacks were enemies, this is something I am going to tell," he said, pausing for an interview while Carter continued to labor.
Mhkize was getting tired of talking:
"Can I go back to work now?"
