Malawi - Pt 1

My Habitat story began with a roof.

I was terrified of getting on the roof. We were in Virginia, on a college build for one week. There were about 30 of us total building and there was this group on the roof and they were roofing and laughing and talking and I wanted to be part of that but I’m afraid of heights, so I just kept saying ‘I don’t know, I don’t know, what if I fall off the roof’ and finally I made it up there on the third day. And I didn’t come down the entire rest of the trip. And I guess I’ve been on the roof on builds ever since.

I used to admire people that I met who appeared to have no fear, because I was full of it. I thought they were so much more courageous than I was. They were, but looking at it now, it's not because they had no fear, it was because they fought past it. They worked through it. They faced their fears.

Today, in 2017, we are in Malawi, building two homes for children in an orphanage village. There is no electricity in this village, no running water and many of the children do not attend school. For some volunteers, it is their first build. For others, Habitat has been part of their lives for much longer. 

What inspires us to help others? 
What do we gain from traveling to a distant land, giving up our regular lives for several days to work under harsh conditions in the sun, the dust and the dirt? 
How do we continue to be advocates for compassion, love and forgiveness in the world? 
Are we influencing the world, or is the world influencing us? 
I asked; they all answered, one by one.