Anticipation builds

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/07/2017 (2982 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

At the Habitat for Humanity build site, just off the broad vein of Portage Avenue, Tuesday’s grey skies arrived as a blessing. Volunteers had laboured all day in Monday’s broiling heat, so this new cool breeze came as a relief. 

Yet it was not so wet on this, the second day of building, that it dampened their enthusiasm. For most of the day, the only thing that rained on the St. James site was the clomp of workboots and the tackety-tack of pounding hammers. 

In a way, this is the calm before the storm. There was only one Secret Service agent in Winnipeg on Tuesday, and in khaki pants and a cap she blended discreetly with the throng of 500 volunteers; but soon, there will be many more. 

It is no small thing to raise 25 houses in a week. It is an even bigger thing, when a former president is on board. 

That is the prize of the week. That is where all of this is heading. The glare of the spotlight, the blitz of construction, it is all building to this: on Thursday, Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, will begin two days of building at the site. 

For Habitat organizers in Winnipeg, the visit is precious. This is the 34th annual build for the Carter Work Project — Winnipeg is a rare city to earn a return visit — and Carter is 92 years old. It’s hard to say if there will be many more. 

So what a chance, to host him now. “The opportunity to work with the Carters is the highest profile piece this organization has,” says Habitat Manitoba CEO Sandy Hopkins. “It literally put Habitat on the map here in 1993.” 

When Hopkins joined Habitat 11 years ago, he canvassed his friends about what they knew about the non-profit. The responses he got back zeroed in on two things: that Habitat builds houses, and that Carter had visited here in 1993. 

So Hopkins was elated when, at Habitat’s national conference in May 2015, he learned the Carters were interested in returning to Winnipeg. One caveat: the news had to stay secret until after the Carters’ 2016 build in Memphis, Tenn. 

But in August 2015, Carter revealed that he was battling cancer which had spread to his brain. Local Habitat staff, still sworn to secrecy about the planned Winnipeg visit, began to accept the possibility that it might never come to pass. 

Yet just months later, in December 2015, Carter surprised the world by announcing that he was cancer-free. Soon, the local Habitat chapter began furiously planning the logistics of the build: the size, the site, the special protocols. 

It’s not like regular Habitat builds. Usually, organizers are only wary about thieves; now, they must coordinate with the Secret Service, Winnipeg police and RCMP. Oh, and the site must be designed to allow a motorcade to pass through.  

“What we’re thinking about is what are the pieces we have to get right,” Hopkins says, of the focus that consumed his office for months. “The last thing we want to have happen is for the Carters come to town, and we blow it.” 

Because it’s not only about Carter, but everything that comes with him: the visitors, the media, the international attention. A reporter from the New York Times was calling Winnipeg on Tuesday, looking for quotes. 

Meanwhile, in one of the site’s trailer offices, staffers from Habitat’s Georgia head office sipped Slurpees and chatted about their sightseeing plans in the city: the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, they beamed, looked beautiful. 

They aren’t the only visitors. Since 1984, the Carter Work Project has amassed a small army of loyal volunteers, many of whom come back almost every year: almost 70 of the daily participants here in Winnipeg are American.  

“You just keep going and doing these things, no matter what,” says Jean Cravens, on a break from the build. 

Cravens’ story is a classic of the genre. Now almost 80, she joined her first Habitat build around 25 years ago, in her hometown of Lexington, Ky. One of the families at her church was getting a house, so she signed up to help. 

Soon, Cravens and her husband Gene caught what regulars jokingly call “Habititis.” It’s a hard habit to break, once it’s started: Cravens is now on her eighth Carter build, a journey that’s taken her to India, Thailand and Hungary.  

“People at home say ‘Oh, you’re giving up so much to go on these things,’” Cravens says, and her voice rolls with a gentle Southern lilt. “No, we have a great time. We have so much fun with the people that we’re working with.”

Like many of the travelling regulars, Cravens speaks glowingly of the Carters. She’s hammered nails next to the former president, and painted a bathroom with Rosalynn Carter. They’re so warm, she says, and so focused. 

“We need more President Carters in the world today,” she says, wistfully. “He could have sat in Plains, Georgia and not done anything except write books and whatever. But he’s chosen to help people, and he’s inspired so many.” 

In this travelling corps, there are some first-timers. On one of the rising Habitat homes, 18-year-old Kiran Kumar swings a hammer alongside her parents. Being here, she says with a grin, is her high school graduation present. 

To be honest, Kumar adds, all of her friends got cars for their grad gifts. That’s normal in her hometown of Princeton, N.J., a sparkling Ivy League enclave a stone’s throw from New York City. She wanted to come here instead. 

“I don’t have any friends that do this kind of stuff,” she says. “I think it’s cool that I’m like the only one doing it.” 

See, Kumar and her family have already begun to catch Habititis. In 2008, her older brother Nikhil joined a Habitat build. This past January her father, Teddy Kumar, built houses in Guatemala with Habitat’s Global Village program. 

“We got hooked,” Teddy Kumar says, and the family breaks into laughter.  

So last year, Kiran joined one of Habitat’s high school programs, working with 120 other students to build decks and paint houses. The experience stuck with her, and in the summer before she starts college, she wanted to do more. 

“Helping other people, it sounds cliché, but personally it’s really satisfying,” she says. “It makes me feel like I’m actually making a difference, instead of sitting around doing what teenagers do every day.”

For Kiran, the connection to Carter is a little more distant. Unlike Cravens and her own parents, she has few clear memories of the former president; she learned about him in school, she adds, and from that she respects him. 

Still, she’s never seen a president in person before; the closest she came was seeing Barack Obama’s motorcade. So the chance to work on a house, while the Carters are working nearby: “That’s going to be really cool,” she nods. 

At this, her mother, Renee Kumar, smiles. Carter was elected president in 1976, the first year that Renee was old enough to vote; four decades later, he will be picking up a hammer nearly alongside her, and getting a house built. 

“He’s walking the walk, instead of talking the talk,” Renee Kumar says. “We love them (the Carters) both. We have tremendous admiration for them. Never met them, but we think they’re a wonderful inspiration for people.

“We have to teach our children that there’s bigger things,” she adds. “When you meet people out here, it gives you that inspiration.”  

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca