Jimmy Carter: How volunteering gave me joy

"If I Had a Hammer," by David Rubel, recounts poignant stories about the nonprofit group Habitat for Humanity and the work it has done to build homes. In the book's foreword, President Jimmy Carter writes about his experiences and shares why the organization is so important to him. An excerpt.

Foreword
When I left the White House, retired by the results of the 1980 election, I didn’t know what I was going to do next. I knew that I had a life expectancy of twenty-five more years, and I wondered how I could capitalize on the experience and knowledge of having been the leader of the greatest nation in the world. Looking to my Christian faith for a way forward, I began teaching Sunday school again at Maranatha Baptist Church — where my wife, Rosalynn, and I attend services in our hometown of Plains, Georgia.

Our religious beliefs are important to us. I have taught Sunday school since I was a teen, and we attend services regularly, but for a time that had been the extent of it. Like many people, Rosalynn and I have searched to find an outlet to put that faith into action. Rarely have we found the opportunity to follow Jesus Christ’s example of reaching out to those who are poor and in need and treating them as equals.

The underlying problem is that sometimes it is difficult for people like us — who have homes, good educations, and fruitful careers — to cross the chasm that separates us from people who may have none of these blessings. Often, the needy are scorned by us more affluent people who think to ourselves, Well, if those poor people would only work as hard as I do or study as hard as I do, then they could provide a good home for their families, just as I do. That kind of prejudice can be difficult to overcome.

Video   President Carter on new book Oct. 15: Former President Jimmy Carter talks with TODAY’s Meredith Vieira about his 25-year commitment to Habitat for Humanity, which he details in the forward to the new book “If I Had a Hammer.” Today show

Fortunately for Rosalynn and me, the international headquarters of Habitat for Humanity was located in Americus, Georgia, just nine miles from Plains. In Habitat’s work, building homes for those in need, we saw the opportunity — as so many others have — to put our faith into practice.

The goal of Habitat for Humanity is to rid the world of substandard, or poverty, housing. Habitat works hard to do this by building simple homes in partnership with families in need. These partner families pay the full cost of their new homes over time through no-profit loans that Habitat grants them. The prices of Habitat homes remain affordable because the homes aren’t extrav­agant and because they’re built with volunteer labor, including the labor of the partner families.

There’s no way to describe exactly why Habitat means so much to me, but I will try. If you are a person of faith, you learn certain basic lessons about truth, justice, love, and sharing that shape your life. It doesn’t matter whether you learn these lessons in a church (as I did), in a synagogue, in a mosque, or in a temple. Wherever the lessons are learned, they remain largely the same. One is that people who have been blessed with wealth should share that wealth with others who are in need. Finding a way to do this, however, can be hard because of the divide that separates the rich and the poor.

People tend to feel most comfortable with those just like themselves — people who have the same skin color, who talk like us, who live in equally nice homes — so we often shut out others who are different. It’s not easy to break through the barriers that we naturally erect. The great gift of Habitat for Humanity is that it offers us a way to reach out to fellow humans who don’t have a decent place in which to live. In fact, it’s the best way that I know to live out the highest moral values of my faith, because Habitat sees decent housing as a human right.

Human rights can be defined in many different ways. If you ask Americans on the street to name some human rights, they are likely to say freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to assemble, the right to a trial by jury, or the right to elect one’s leaders. Those are perfectly good legal human rights. But one of the most important — a human right that people often forget — is the right to lead a good life. By this I mean the right to have food to eat, a place to sleep at night, access to doctors and education, and a decent job, as well as self-respect and dignity.

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We affluent Americans frequently fail to realize that these things are missing from the lives of many people, not only around the world but also here in our own country. When the new millennium began in 2000, I was asked to make a few speeches in different places around the world about the greatest challenge facing humanity. It didn’t take me long to identify what that challenge was: the growing separation between rich and poor. Did you know that in the year 1900, the people who lived in the world’s ten richest countries were, on average, about nine times richer than the people who lived in the world’s ten poorest countries? That doesn’t seem like a lot, but as time passed, the gap widened. By 1960, the world’s richest people were thirty times wealthier than the world’s poorest people, and today the world’s richest people are more than seventy-five times more wealthy!

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