"After All, It's Home"
By Rebekah Graydon

A retired farm worker, Martha Bachelor finds stability and security in her house built by one of Habitat's earliest affiliates.


After making her last house payment in December 2000, Habitat homeowner Martha Bachelor burned a symbolic mortgage surrounded by family, Habitat for Humanity volunteers and new homeowners at a dedication for 17 new Habitat houses in Immokalee, Fla.

The feeling, she says, is one of freedom: “It’s like a person let out of prison. I just feel like a big bird.”

Her excitement is tinged with sadness, however, because her husband, Warren, who died in 1998, missed the celebration. “He’d been a hard worker all his life, and he just worked himself down to where he couldn’t go,” Martha says. “I wish he could be here today. He loved Habitat.”

Paying off the mortgage comes at a fortunate time for Martha, whose finances are still tight from the loss of her husband’s Social Security income and the injuries she suffered in a car accident in October 1999. In the midst of difficulties, Martha’s neatly painted white cinder-block Habitat house provided a point of stability. There was room for her daughter to move in to help her recover after the accident, and her low monthly mortgage payment helped ease the financial crunch of costly medications.

“If it weren’t for the house, I’d have been in a nursing home,” she says. “It means everything to me. After all, it’s home.”

The Bachelors’ path to homeownership was a journey—literally and figuratively. Seasonal carnival food vendors from Illinois, they moved to Immokalee in the early 1970s. They first picked oranges and then found jobs in the packing sheds, where the vegetables and oranges grown in Immokalee’s fields are packaged and prepared for transport. During harvest times, they would go to the packing shed early each morning and work until the field workers returned and the day’s harvest was in. During peak season, they worked as late as midnight.

Each spring, they packed their bags, forfeited that year’s trailer and headed north to South Carolina, Maryland and Pennsylvania to other packing sheds owned by the company that employed them. At the end of each summer, they returned to Immokalee for another growing season.

In the winter of 1977, Millard and Linda Fuller came to Immokalee at the invitation of local volunteers with the Church of the Brethren. That meeting sparked the interest that launched Immokalee Habitat for Humanity, later to become Habitat for Humanity of Collier County. In March 1978, the Bachelors joined several carloads of people on a trip to Americus, Ga., to learn more about Habitat. “What I liked up there was that they appreciated each other,” Martha says. “Something just told me it was the right thing to do.”

On Dec. 5, 1978, Warren and Martha were selected to be Habitat homeowners, and the time-consuming process of initial fund raising and building began. A boost came in late 1979 when Warren was able to buy two houses for $100 each in the middle of Big Cypress Swamp, a wilderness area that had been slated to become a federal preserve. From these houses, plus four more the affiliate purchased, Warren and other homeowners were able to salvage enough concrete blocks, lumber, plywood and fixtures to significantly reduce the cost of the Habitat houses they were building.

Each family invested more than 2,000 sweat equity hours in the construction of their homes. “When you get something like that started, and you know it’s going to be yours, you work hard at it,” Martha says. Warren and Martha eventually retired from the packing sheds and made ends meet with their Social Security checks. In January 1998, two years shy of paying off the mortgage, Warren died after a lifetime of hard labor, four bypass surgeries and 10 years of cancer.

Perhaps it is empathy for hard times that leads Martha to give something back to others when the opportunity arises. Last fall, her daughter, Sally, was at the grocery store when she met a woman and child who needed help getting their groceries home. After seeing the family’s circumstances, Sally told Martha, “Mama, they need help.” Martha’s front hall became crowded with clothes and toys they collected for the “needy” family.

“Habitat teaches a way of life and how to work with people,” Martha says. Having been a part of Habitat from the beginning, she should know.


Snapshot
Martha Bachelor, Immokalee, Fla., United States
House description: Single-story, cinder-block house.
Moved in: 1979
Total amount of mortgage: $20,753
Monthly payment: $86.50
Paid off in: 2000


Rebekah Graydon is editorial assistant for Habitat World.


Reprinted from Habitat World Magazine, April/May 2001.
This article may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
©2001 Habitat for Humanity International