Kent Donaldson has built houses for Kentuckians and Koreans. He has sided homes in Hungary and Georgia. He has worked in post-apartheid South Africa and in the heat of the Philippines.
But at none of the eight Jimmy Carter Work Projects he has participated in has he been quite as hot – or quite as well fed – as here in Alabama.
“This is some of the best food I’ve had on any project,” said Donaldson, 49, squinting as sweat dripped into the blue bandana knotted around his neck. A stubby pencil was tucked behind his ear, beneath a New York Yankees cap. “There’s something about Southern hospitality that can’t be beat.”
In his job as a contractor in Harrisburg, Pa., Donaldson builds houses for pay. For nearly a decade, he has spent his vacations building houses for free.
Back in 1994, he said, a building trade journal was looking for people to help with the work project at the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation in Eagle Butte, S.D.
He signed up, and “was hooked” on Habitat, he said. “Now I can’t let it go.”
This time, he roped eight other people into the project, too. He brought his sister-in-law, Penny Donaldson, 51, from Tennessee, her sister, Nancy Billing, 49, from North Dakota, his father, 81, who was a classmate of Jimmy Carter’s at the U.S. Naval Academy, a nephew and four friends.
“Suckers,” Donaldson said, laughing.
Billing said she was having fun, but working hard.
“I’m kind of an indoors person, so this stuff is a little tough,” she said.
Of Alabama, she observed, “People move a lot slower than in North Dakota. Up there, in the cold weather, you have to move fast or you’ll freeze.”
Donaldson keeps coming back because Habitat gives him a way to share his knowledge, and give others “a hand up and not a hand-out,” he said.
“You help them get a foot-hold so they can build up from that,” he said. “It helps break that cycle of poverty.”
His favorite project is “kind of a toss-up,” he said, crossing his arms, dark brown from dirt and sunshine. “I think the first is the most memorable one, if it is a good experience. The most special.”
In South Dakota, Donaldson was assigned to the same house as Carter.
“I got to work with him all week long,” he said He also worked with news anchor Tom Brokaw, and Henry Cisneros, former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
“Last year in South Africa was really special also, because we spent the week before and the week after touring parts of the country,” he said. Knowing about apartheid and then building houses with Zulu people was extraordinary, he said.
And at each house, the volunteers try to leave special touches behind for the homeowner.
“We try to personalize a little bit more for her,” he said.
At one house in Hungary, the volunteers carved a fleur-de-lis, or stylized lily flower, above the porch.
“Flower of life,” he said.
Here at House No. 11, destined for LaKeitha Jones and her daughters, they have created a wooden sunburst for the porch. Its particular symbolism has not yet been thought out.
“A new horizon?” Donaldson suggested. “A new beginning. The dawn of a new age.”
