Green: Breaking into home construction

Lots of people like to use house metaphors. My high school French teacher loved it. An example: … Lots of people like to use house metaphors. My high school French teacher loved it. An example: Madame: What is the translation for that obscure word I once gave you on a 300-word vocabulary list three years ago? Veet! Veet! Moi: Uhhhh … Madame: Don’t you know!? French is like building a house. If you don’t have a foundation, such as obscure, irrelevant nouns, then the rest of the house comes crumbling down. Well, last week I helped build a literal house ‘mdash; none of that metaphorical French stuff ‘mdash; and luckily, the foundation was already there. Perhaps if I had helped lay the cinder blocks and pour the concrete, as Madame suggested, I would have found the second stages of construction easier, though somehow I doubt it. I had come to Columbus, Ga., under Pitt’s alternative spring break program with absolutely no construction skills, or, for that matter, general competence. I feel no shame in admitting that it takes me, on average, about 20 hits to hammer a nail into place, assuming I don’t accidentally hammer it into my shoe first. Which did happen. Twice. The first time was actually followed by an embarrassing moment when my shoe literally pulled the wooden stud out of the house’s foundation. But from the mess that is my incompetence comes the beauty of programs like Habitat for Humanity. It’s not about the speed of the construction, but the diligence. Because of this, supervisors gave us a lot of freedom and responsibility. Though they were clearly more competent, and likely could have completed the same task that took me 20 minutes in less than five, they allowed us to work at our own (painfully slow) pace, to do the work ourselves, to learn, to contribute. I admit, at times, this responsibility became frustrating. For example, and theoretically of course, imagine a capable supervisor happens to be watching you nail boards together ‘mdash; which can be a tiring task given enough time under the hot Georgia sun with only some coffee and chicken biscuit in your stomach ‘mdash; and that capable supervisor is telling you to go faster and to ‘bury’ the nail into the wood, and then that capable supervisor laughs when you take a short break to stretch your weak, famished arms, and still that capable supervisor never offers to help. Theoretically, that might be annoying. But for most the trip, despite my lack of experience or arm muscle, I felt needed and useful. If there wasn’t anything to be hammered, I would pick up trash. Or sort nails.’ At one point a cohort of mine (whom I will simply refer to as ‘Tenderfoot’ owing to her sensitive feet, a condition that has plagued poor Tenderfoot since childhood) and I actually had a makeshift competition about who had completed the most menial job.’ Despite my promising chances with my role organizing piles of old wood, it was decided that Tenderfoot won after she was asked to give a status report on the siding of the house just because someone was curious. It’s kind of like those studies about depressed mice who, when pushed into deep water, made no effort to swim. Except we swam, damn it. We did these seemingly pointless tasks because we wanted to contribute, even if it was in unorthodox ways. Similarly, if a job wasn’t done right, no one would hesitate to dismantle someone else’s work and do it again, only better. This is how I developed the term ‘negative output,’ which is when more work would have been produced if no one was working on the job at all than if I was working on it. I got to use this term to describe my work more than once. For me, it wasn’t unusual to have a hammer in one hand and a claw to remove nails in the other. But still I persisted, and so did my fellow volunteers. Perhaps the greatest example of this diligence to the Habitat cause came on the last day of our trip. Of the dozen colleges that had participated in the Columbus alternative break, only Pitt remained at the end of Friday afternoon. But instead of going home early, the 40 Pitt student volunteers descended upon the two remaining uncompleted houses and worked well beyond the required time frame. That is a well-earned star right there. And as for me, I swept and sorted nails until the very end. Care to see Molly and Tenderfoot’s illustrious construction career firsthand? Go to The Pitt News Web site for a multimedia presentation of the trip, or just e-mail her at mog4@pitt.edu.