Rice Habitat for Humanity
When you look into the eyes of the men and women who have started and molded the Rice Chapter of Habitat for Humanity since its inception in 1992, you not only see the traditional Rice attributes of drive and intelligence, but you also see a compassion for mankind that you will not find anywhere else. With that compassion comes a dedication -- a dedication to themselves, the underpriveleged and the entire global community ...
Habitat Finds a Home at Rice
Much like the summer months when only graduate students and a handful of undergraduates roam the campus, students are rarely seen on an early Saturday morning -- except in one place. Just outside the Rice Student Volunteer Program Office, a small group of people gathers at about 8 a.m. to head out to the Houston Habitat for Humanity site for a few hours of sweaty volunteer work. Sometimes there is only one volunteer; sometimes there are 10.
Who's the "one" you might ask? Wiess College senior David Sissman, the 1995-96 Habitat Coordinator, never misses a chance to take a group of volunteers out to the site. Sissman has been religiously involved with the Rice Chapter since its beginning, holding the position of coordinator both his sophomore and senior years while spending his junior year abroad.
"I'm in it because it makes me feel a little guilty to see people hanging out under the highway with their signs," Sissman said. "That by some twist of fate they are there and I am where I am."
Graduate student Chris Wagner filled in as coordinator during Sissman's absence and co-coordinated with Sissman in 1993-94. Wagner left the Rice Chapter in 1994 because of his thesis, job hunt and marriage. For the past year or so, Hanszen College junior Kim Zalewski has been Sissman's frequent companion and co-leader of Habitat's weekly treks. Zalewski has recently had to step down from her leadership role in the organization for personal reasons, but she deserves a good deal of credit for the way the Rice Chapter has evolved over the past few years.
Will Rice senior Jane Kim is in charge of organizing and executing an architecture class which will give Rice architecture students hands-on experience in designing a home.
Waiting in the wings are Wiess College freshman Robbie Nason and Sid Richardson College freshman Kevin Murphy, the two people Sissman is currently training to take over the organization. Murphy and Nason have set some short term goals, but their training is their primary concern.
"At this point, we are in the very preliminary stages of being trained here," Murphy said. "Next year's gonna be a real big challenge to help them (the architecture class) get the house built in the 13 weeks Habitat wants us to build it in."
In the meantime, Murphy and Nason are being trained as Ask Me volunteers with eight other Rice volunteers. The Ask Me program is a way for volunteers to learn the details of construction and home building.
Baker College fifth-year Jennie Leslie, aside from founding the organization in 1992 with then-graduate student Nick Panaro, is serving as the fundraising chair this year. She is in charge of raising approximately $54,000 to fund the activities of the chapter, which include an annual spring break trip to Honduras, now in its third year, and an annual trip to a national site. This year's national trip will be in Gainesville, Fla.
Honduras and Gainesville
What good comes of Habitat's spring break trips?
"A real broadening of one's horizons; a completely new perspective on life," said Gregg Miller, a participant in the 1995 and 1996 Honduras trips.
The Honduras and Gainesville trips serve as more intense examples of Habitat work where students can concentrate on constructing houses for an entire week. The intensity of a week's labor is equivalent to about two and a half months of Saturday mornings in Houston. The trips are a throwback to the days when Habitat founders Millard and Linda Fuller worked for months at a time at the Bokotola project in Zaire and at the Koinonia project in Americus, Ga. But each year the expectations change, and so do the realized benefits.
"You can never tell," Leslie said. "It's always a surprise. Last year, I went down with the hope of starting a relationship with the people in Honduras. It follows through with the mission of Habitat which is not to be temporal, but to transcend time."
One thing stands in the way of fulfilling Habitat's mission in Honduras: the $14,000 price tag. Two thousand dollars pays for the house in Honduras. The largest chunk of the budget is devoted to the purchase of airline tickets. Last year, Continental Airlines donated the necessary plane tickets to the Rice Chapter. However, they were unable to do the same this year, leaving Leslie and the 20 trip participants scrambling to raise the money.
The Gainesville trip has a much smaller budget than the Honduras trip with only 16 spots. Each volunteer will pay his own way and will face a bill of approximately $220 per person for food, gas and the site fee. Fundraising efforts, including a T-shirt sale in the upcoming weeks, will be applied toward subsidizing the participants.
"Historically, it's the cheapest way to spend spring break unless you stay in Houston," Sissman said.
But the real benefits are the experiences and newly dedicated volunteers.
"For volunteers who haven't worked with us before, [the national trip] allows them to see how Habitat works on a greater scale," Sissman said. "We still have volunteers that work with us now who have gone on a national trip in the past."
The House and the Class
As if building houses for low-income families was not enough, the leaders of the Rice Chapter have begun to plan for a Rice-sponsored house, an aspiration since day one. But that dream comes with a steep price tag: $40,000 -- a daunting fundraising task. Further, the Habitat leaders made the house project even more complicated by deciding to involve the greatest number of Rice people possible in the project. This will give a wide array of students, faculty and alumni an experience they will never forget.
After a great deal of work in the fall of 1995, Kim established an architecture class in which Rice undergraduates would design the house. Visiting architecture Professor Danny Samuels and Associate Professor Gordon Wittenberg will be teaching the class of 10 volunteer architecture students. The course name, credit hours and overall structure have not yet been decided, but the details don't really matter to Kim.
"We're doing it to benefit the community," Kim said. "We're gonna flush it out as the semester goes along."
Even the details of the house are somewhat up in the air. The design of Habitat houses are relatively similar, but Houston Habitat can allow some leeway for special projects as long as they stay within the square footage allotment. For the time being, Kim says that the class will be closely studying a number of different houses to get a feel for the parameters of a Habitat house.
"We're hoping to do a lot of site visits," Kim said.
Leslie has already done some initial research; she contacted an Austin housing project named Casa Verde about alternative materials and building styles last semester. Casa Verde is an organization that has taken the Habitat philosophy and developed "low-income housing that would also be environmentally safe and economically conscious," Leslie said. Casa Verde accomplishes this by using organic materials, solar panels, cross-ventilation and tin roofs. Aside from the class, which will have a house design ready for the fall of 1996, the electricians and plumbers will most likely be Rice graduates hired to do the necessary work. Future classes will remain in the hands of the students.
"As long as there is student interest, we can keep it going," Kim said. "It's not about funding; it's about student interest."
Still, the Rice Chapter lacks $40,000. Vice President for Student Affairs Zenaido Camacho has given his full support to the project and is currently looking for ways to help with fundraising. Prominent Rice alumni who have supported Habitat for Humanity in the past have also been contacted. Students are also being asked to donate spare pocket change into small cardboard houses that have been placed in the Cashier's Office and the Campus Store. If the $40,000 can be scraped together in time, the Rice Chapter will realize its dream and begin construction in the fall of 1996.
"For the chapter, it will be a big boost to get volunteers more involved," Sissman said. "It will be something Rice can call its own. It will be a great boost to the name of Rice in Houston -- not only in Houston but in any recruiting done throughout the nation. Habitat is a brand-name organization."
The Habitat Organization
Millard and Linda Fuller founded Habitat for Humanity International in 1976. Since then, the Habitat organization has grown to over 1,000 affiliates world-wide, with 175 in foreign countries and 963 in the United States. Fuller has since written two books in which he documents the experiences that led him to form the organization. In his first book, Bokotola, Fuller describes his philosophy toward the underpriveleged as he writes, "What the poor need is not charity but capital, not caseworkers but co-workers." This philosophy is stressed in Habitat pamphlets and fact sheets which all proudly proclaim, "Habitat for Humanity is a hand up, not a hand out."
Philosophy aside, most Americans know about Habitat through former U.S. President Jimmy Carter's role in the organization. Carter frequents Habitat sites, especially at Habitat headquarters in Americus, Ga. He even showed up for a guest spot on the "Tonight Show" wearing his overalls after a day at a Los Angeles Habitat site.
Carter has made Habitat into a national and international organization through his name, but he would be the first to admit that Habitat is not about Jimmy Carter, but about people like Sissman, Kim, Nason, Murphy and Leslie who drive the organization toward a better tomorrow. As for the future of the Rice Chapter of Habitat for Humanity, Leslie sums it up in three words, "Houses and houses."
Additional Information
The Rice Chapter web page is at http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~siss/habitat.html.
This item appeared in the Features section of the January 26, 1996 issue.
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