#4: Spend a day volunteering with Habitat for Humanity

Since high school, I've always enjoyed volunteering, and for some reason, building a house for someone through Habitat for Humanity seemed to be the pinnacle of volunteer experiences. Perhaps because building a house seems so hard and complicated, but also because of the underlying notion of how important a "home" is to a person's life, and here you are making that possible for them. Surprisingly, actual "build" experiences with Habitat seem to be harder to come by than you might imagine! I have been trolling their Web site at random intervals for a few years now, but every time I search for volunteer experiences, they are always at their "home office" doing who-knows-what. In my mind I wanted to get in on the actual physical labor, toiling away at the land, not sitting behind a desk, which I already do for 40+ hours a week.

A few weeks ago, just as I was starting to dive back into my 30 Things list, I got an e-mail from Disney VoluntEARS saying they were organizing a Habitat build day, and as you can imagine, I jumped at the chance to participate. I recruited my friend Anna from work to come along with me, and together we donned our white VoluntEARS t-shirts and headed over to Pine Hills to do some building.

Of course right off the bat, my sunny optimism about the day was shot down as we hit an atypical early morning Florida rain storm on our drive over to the build site. Any other Saturday, a morning shower would have made for a great excuse to stay in bed and read a book, but when you're en route to a construction site of sorts to do landscaping and yard work (in a white t-shirt nonetheless), this is not a welcome experience. Needless to say, we arrived at the site and were greeted by a very sandy (and ever-so-rapidly becoming very muddy) landscape in the middle of a semi-creepy part of town. Already I started to ask myself why I ever volunteered for this in the first place.

 

It was hot. It was raining. And the two together created my very favorite Florida weather condition -- steamy humid air -- the kind that creeps under your clothes and makes everything stick to you...the kind that your hair oh-so-quickly absorbs to create a frizzy mess. And here I was gathered under a very small car-port with 30 other sweaty people waiting to begin sloshing around in mud for 6 hours. What fun.

All this in mind, you can see why I very quickly volunteered to be a part of the crew that would do tasks other than lay sod and landscaping around the very large yard, thinking this would be a way to not get totally wet and utterly dirty (although I was warned to wear clothes I wouldn't mind getting dirty, it had become clear that if I took part in the yard work my clothes would go beyond dirty and reach into the range of becoming garbage, which I was not prepared for). So instead I was relegated to the task force of 6 women who would clean the inside of this new home to prepare it for the owners.

 

Let me back-track for a second and talk about Habitat for Humanity as an organization, as I learned some new things in this experience. Firstly, I never realized that Habitat was a religious organization. And even though they claimed to be "non-denominational" and supportive of all religions, they started the day off with a prayer in Jesus' name (and might I remind them that many religions, including mine, don't actually pray in Jesus' name, so if you want to be supportive of all religions, you might want to re-think that prayer). More importantly, I learned that there is actually a really rigorous application process to get a Habitat home and that the homes aren't given to the new owners scott-free. Rather, it's a loan like any mortgage, but Habitat sells it to the owner at-cost and interest free. They call it a hand-up rather than a hand-out, which aligns really nicely with my personal charitable beliefs, so I quite liked the sentiment.

 

Back to cleaning. This task seemed SO much better than the yard work, until we quickly realized that the home had no power. This meant no air conditioning, no fans, no lights, no nothing. And of top of that, the "cleaning supplies" we were given to clean an entire house included a couple very old, nearly broken vaccum cleaners (which we had to hook up to an external generator outside), some dirty mops, a couple of sponges and some rags. And this was a VERY dirty house. I'm talking sawdust everywhere, mud and grime tracked all over the floors and into the bathrooms, windows coated in fingerprints and cobwebs, etc.. This was a serious cleaning job that would have required a lot of new cleaning tools...and some air circulation.

 

We did the best we could. But when I realized that mopping the tile floors in the bathroom was actually making it dirtier than it was before, I sort of gave up. It wound up that Anna and I stood around feeling sort of awkward and useless for much of the time, although we did plenty of vaccuming, dusting, window cleaning and the like. By 11:30, I think both of us were over the experience and just ready to get cleaned up ourselves, eat something and sit in front of the blasting A/C for a long, long time.

So am I happy that I chose to volunteer with Habitat? Certainly! Do I ever feel the desire to do it again? Unless it's a freezing, sunny day in February where we're not tracking around in dirt? Probably not. Of course, I still believe Habitat for Humanity is doing great things for the community, so I'd encourage others to give them some of their time, but I warn you that the physical side of it may not be as glamorous as it appears when you're actually in the moment.

And with that, I can proudly say that I've reached the half-way point in my 30 Things list. It's honestly taken me longer to get here than I hoped, and with only 13 months remaining until I turn 30, it's going to be a bit of a challenge knocking through the second half of the list. But I remain determined, and even if it requires a little bit of altering to my items, I will get there! Until then...