One Nail at a Time
By Brenda Farrell, 04.20.06 Providence, Rhode Island – Some lives are healed not by surgeons wielding scalpels or pharmacists dispensing pills, but by ordinary citizens brandishing hammers and paint brushes. Just ask Barbara Lewis. The 68-year-old Providence woman still can’t believe her eyes when she walks into her home.
The kitchen boasts a shiny new gas stove for cooking her family’s favorite meals. She’d been without one for months, relying on the microwave oven to make dinner for her ailing husband. Her bathroom, newly equipped with safety fixtures and a rebuilt floor, is no longer a slip-and-fall menace for an aging couple who already have more than their share of health problems. And the roof has stopped leaking now that a failing skylight has been replaced. When the 20-odd volunteers who performed all this work -- plus the landscaping – put down their tools at the end of the day, she didn’t even recognize her house. In fact, she drove right past it on her way home from work the following Monday.
“It was an answer to prayer, I tell you,” Barbara says. “I call these folks God’s earthly angels, because that’s what they are to me.”
Barbara shudders when she thinks that she almost didn’t call the phone number she saw in the paper for Rebuilding Together Providence.
“At first I thought they wouldn’t accept me,” she said. “I thought, ‘I have a job – there are lots of people who need help that have no job.’ But I prayed on it and prayed on it and it was as though the Lord told me to go ahead and do it.”
Barbara’s house needed a lot of help, and between the materials and the labor it was going to cost a lot of money. Money she needed to pay the medical bills for her husband, who suffers from lung cancer and emphysema. Money she needed to cover the costs of her own critical health problems. Barbara had just suffered her fourth heart attack, and everyday she faces the physical challenges brought on by diabetes and arthritis. But her spiritual wellbeing, it seems, couldn’t be better. When she got the call from Rebuilding Together that her home had been selected for rehabilitation, at no cost to her, she was “shocked, surprised and felt unbelievably blessed.”
Barbara is just one of thousands of Americans who have been helped by the organization Rebuilding Together since its inception in Washington, D.C. in 1988. Long before TV shows like “Extreme Home Makeover” were conceived, a grassroots group of business, community and religious leaders came together to make needed repairs for low income homeowners, enabling them to live safely with dignity and independence. They focused on helping the elderly, disabled and families with children, and the idea caught on. Today, Rebuilding Together has 255 chapters nationwide, serving more than 900 cities. The Providence chapter was founded in 1994, and is supported by a wide variety of local interests, from banks and health care organizations to construction workers’ unions, universities to church groups.
Every year on the last Saturday in April, thousands of volunteers from all walks of life strap on tool belts, don painting clothes and bring a special brand of goodwill to some of the city’s most economically fragile neighborhoods. It’s a one-day investment that pays long-term dividends for homeowners like Barbara. And unbeknown to Barbara, the work is as much a blessing to the volunteers as it is to her.
Carolyn Belisle, director of community relations for Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Rhode Island, oversees a team of approximately 160 employee volunteers for Rebuilding Together annually – nearly 15 percent of her company’s workforce. She says that this activity does far more to foster camaraderie than any corporate retreat ever could.
“Everyone is there – the CEO, our senior vice presidents, clerical workers and maintenance employees,” she says. “Our offices are scattered over several buildings, so a lot of people can go for months without ever meeting the coworkers they talk to and email every day.
Rebuilding Together brings us all together in a way that we simply can’t during the course of a work week. And it puts people on a level playing field – none of us are going by our job titles that day.
“Carolyn said that on Rebuild Day, you’re likely to see the CEO holding a ladder steady for a maintenance worker, or an administrative assistant teaching a vice president how to remove wallpaper.”
Linda DeMarco, a vice president for Webster Bank, walked away from her first Rebuilding Together experience exhausted and with a fresh appreciation for her own home and health.
“You don’t realize how rich you really are until you do something like this,” she says. “Being able to help someone in need is so rewarding, and humbling at the same time. When I saw how grateful our homeowner was for the simple things we did, like installing some safety rails and painting her fence, I realized that success is not measured by what kind of car you drive or where you spend your vacation. It’s about whether you are able to have a meaningful impact on other peoples’ lives.”
When she was asked to speak at the Rebuilding Together Providence thank-you dinner for volunteers and corporate sponsors, Barbara Lewis didn’t quite know what to say.
“Just be yourself, and you’ll do just fine,” was the advice she received from Jane Upper, the agency’s executive director. Jane was right. By the time Barbara was done telling her story abut the “beautiful people who blessed her home and her soul,” there was nary a dry eye in the place.
A year has passed since the people Barbara calls “God’s earthly angels” hammered the last nail into her house. It’s been a good year – her husband’s cancer is in remission, and she’s getting physical therapy for her arthritic back and working every day at the job she loves, taking care of preschoolers at the local head start. Her house is warm and safe and dry, and her church, Congdon Street Baptist, is on the list of places Rebuilding Together will fix this year. She can’t wait to be a part of it.
“I can’t lift anything heavy, but I sure can hold a nail or mix up a bucket of paint,” she says. “I just want to be there, to experience it, to participate, to be a blessing and to be blessed. I want to be one of God’s earthly angels, too.” Tell A Friend
