Americus and Plains, Ga.
A Foundation for the Future

Standing in the red Georgia clay and swatting away hundreds of tiny black gnats in Plains, Ga., volunteer Don Mosley reminisced about where it all began.

Mosley is not just a veteran Habitat volunteer—he was there in the ’70s, when what would become Habitat for Humanity was just a dream. Mosley and Millard Fuller—HFHI’s founder and president —lived and worked together at Koinonia Farm, an intentional Christian community between Plains and Americus, Ga.

“One day in 1973, Millard announced: ‘This could be a historic moment,’” Mosley recalls. The two men had been brainstorming about exchanging volunteers between Koinonia’s house-building program in Georgia and Fuller’s new assignment to build houses in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), Africa.

“The next year I was in Zaire. It would have been impossible to imagine then the Habitat program as it is today,” he says. Mosley was among the first HFHI board members and is now director of Jubilee Partners, a Christian service community in Comer, Ga. Today, he stays closely connected to the work of Habitat for Humanity.

“I am more excited about looking forward than looking back at the past,” he says. “Looking forward, I see Habitat growing beyond the numbers—we must do more than build houses. Habitat is a wonderful vehicle for peacemaking and for bringing people together. We’ve already begun, but the potential is unlimited.”

Working alongside Mosley in Plains were five members of his Peace Corps class who served in Malaysia from 1963–65. Ray Gieri taught math in Malaysia and has worked for the past 34 years for the United Nations in New York.

Gieri came to the JCWP directly from the United Nations Millennium Summit where religious leaders gathered from all over the world. “I watched very infirm leaders who almost had to be carried to the microphone, but who have millions of followers,” he says. “I watched people with strange clothes and odd hats trying to put aside their preconceived notions and religious differences to be in that room together at a time when the world suffers from so much religious stress. Then I come here and I see a project that in its very nature crosses all boundaries—racial, ethnic, religious. There is a lot of diplomacy going on right here.”

It may not be too surprising that the project that bears former U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s name might also be a catalyst for diplomacy. What is surprising is that his name is so closely associated with Habitat for Humanity in the first place.

“How providential is it that a former U.S. president just happened to live right up the road from Habitat’s headquarters and that of all this country’s past presidents, Jimmy Carter is the one who is so passionate about these issues?” asks Mosley.

No stranger to such passion himself—prior to Koinonia, he served as associate director of the Peace Corps in Korea—Mosley eagerly anticipates next year’s Jimmy Carter Work Project in Korea. Gieri agrees: “This is my first JCWP,” he says, “but it won’t be my last. Doing this has made my two daughters proud of me.”

Others were proud to be there as well. Among them is Cecelia Dukuly, a Habitat homeowner from Milwaukee, Wis., who worked at the JCWP alongside President Carter. This wasn’t the first time she worked with the former President—he helped build her house during the 1989 JCWP.

“I was working with Habitat as a volunteer long before I was chosen to be a homeowner,” Dukuly says. “But I never knew my house was going to be the Carter house until just before the build. Mr. Carter didn’t [travel around to] other places that year—he just came to my house every day. We didn’t talk much. We just worked together all day long. You know, he’s a shy man.”

Originally from Liberia, Dukuly was happy to learn that Habitat is beginning work in her home country. Many members of her family are still there. Cecelia and one brother came to the United States in the 1980s. Later, as war raged in Liberia, she worked to bring her family to safety and a new life in America. Dukuly’s sister, Barbara Dunbar, came in 1997 and lives with Dukuly in Milwaukee.

For President Carter, building in Plains was more than building houses. It was a homecoming. “This place is precious to me,” he said of the site where five houses—including the 100,001st Habitat house— were constructed. “This was my daddy’s field. I spent a lot of time shaking peanuts and picking cotton in this field as a boy.”

Like Mosley, Carter reminisced about the early days, in particular the first JCWP held in New York City in 1984 before people knew about Habitat. “We’ve come a long way from practically sleeping on the floor of abandoned churches to [having a reception] at the Waldorf-Astoria,” he laughed. “Habitat has put housing issues back on the map in people’s minds, but we need to rejuvenate the commitment of the U.S. government to the issue of housing. It is a basic human right, and it is a shame and a disgrace that we don’t have more subsidized housing for the poor. Human rights mean not only being free from persecution. Human rights involve the most basic of human needs—food, clothing and decent shelter.”

Habitat for Humanity plans to continue its work toward that end. In fact, Millard Fuller made what may be yet another historic pronouncement during this JCWP: “Our goal is to build 100,000 homes in the next five years,” he said. “We have the know-how in the world to house everyone. We have the resources in the world to house everyone. All that’s missing is the will to do it.”


--Tilly Grey





Reprinted from Habitat World Magazine, December 2000/January 2001.
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©2000 Habitat for Humanity International