Making This House A Home

The woman whose house we are working on is named Celestina. She is a nice lady, but has so little. She has some mental handicaps. Celestina works at a nearby school doing janitorial work. She lives all alone, but has family on some of the other islands in the Bahamas. She keeps pictures of her family, 4x6 photos, taped to her wall. She's very proud of her family, and loves to tell you all of their names and where they live.

We were touched when we saw the small house we will be working on this week. The first thing that strikes you is how small it is. Her small house has no running water. Her kitchen is really just one particular corner of the house. She had some rice, a little cooking oil, a small jar of mayonaise - all of these were sitting on two small plastic 'Rubbermaid' containers. She cooks on a small camping stove fueled by a propane tank. She washed dirty dishes in five-gallon buckets, and had some dirty dishes lying in one of the buckets when we first walked in. That was ALL of her kitchen. She tosses the trash out the back door into a little pile. Her small bedroom had a very worn matress covered by dirty bedsheets and was strewn with dirty clothes. Her clothes didn't hang in a closet (becuase there isn't one) and didn't lay on shelves (becuase there aren't any). She has one chest of drawers and rest of her clothes hung around the room.




As a few of the adults surveyed the situation to guage where to begin our work, the youth and other adults began by simply picking up some of the massive amounts of trash that was all around the 'front yard' (and I use 'front yard' loosely). Once we'd decided on a plan, we moved everything out of the house, and then began scraping the weathered paint along her eaves. We'll repaint the outside of her house. Some began framing up the new kitchen cabinet. We plan to install a little sink later, because she hopes to get running water soon. And even if she doesn't get running water, she'll still be able to use the sink instead of the plastic buckets. The cabinet will be a place she can set her stove, but it will be setup so that the propane tank will sit outside her house (addressing the obvious fire hazard) in a small lock box just outside the back door. We also plan to put a door on her bathroom (a small luxury we thought might be nice). It turns out, we found some rotting wood in her roof in the front corner that we replaced.