How Jimmy Carter Made an Impact on My Life

Which is where the afraid part comes in. If his name was on this build, it was going to go well, and he really had high standards for us, and we wanted to meet them. So we tried to live up to his expectations, and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t, because we were all volunteers and we didn’t know what the heck we were doing.  Soon I was up on a roof. That was my first roofing job.

He always made a visit to every house on every build.  He would come around usually on Wednesday night. He was fully military, everything needed to flow the way it was supposed to: “Are you going to be able to finish on time? Can I get you more volunteers? Do you get anything else?” Like, “I want no excuses. You tell me what you need and I’ll get them for you.”

In the early days, he had a lot more energy. He tried to do at least one thing on every house, so someone could say, “Carter installed the railing on my porch.” Or “Carter put the awning over my front door.” For my first build, he was putting something on the front porch. It was wet and miserable, and he had to walk across a floor, and we were not so thrilled it would get muddy. It was awkward. We said, “Mr. President, could you just walk on the places where there’s paper?” And it was funny — we had to make him an honorary woman for him to work on the house.

Courtesy Holly Eaton

On that first build, I got bit by what is called the “Habititis bug.” Once you get bit, there’s no turning back. Over 27 years as a Habitat volunteer, I’ve built probably 75 houses total, 31 of which were on a Carter build, both in the U.S. and in eight foreign countries — the Philippines, South Korea, Mexico, Canada, Hungary, South Africa, India and Haiti. I’m usually a house leader, which means I’m responsible for the volunteers and seeing that the house is built the right way. On the Carter Work Project, it’s a blitz build. You start off with a slab, usually. And the goal is that the house is complete by the end of the week. I think the most we’ve done was 325 houses in the Philippines.

Over the years, Jimmy mellowed, and as I saw more of him, I lost my fear of him and saw him as just another wonderful human being. He’s so extraordinary that you couldn’t dream of ever being like him. He’s just such an amazing person on so many levels, and he remained sharp through his 90s. He had a tremendous memory. And you couldn’t hold him down. He absolutely lives his faith, and he’s a former president, but he really looks at people as if they are on the same level.

When we were in Hungary in 1996, I saw his humility in action. He went down to the Danube River and he met some fishermen there, and one of them got up the nerve to ask him and Rosalynn to come for dinner. And he said, “Sure, we’d love to.” But when he got there, he saw a table set for two. And Jimmy looked down and said, “There’s only two places here.” And they said, “Yes, we can’t sit down with a former U.S. president.” And he said, “Well, then we aren’t going to sit down. You must join us.” And they looked at each other in disbelief, but they pulled out all the chairs and more table settings, and everyone ate together. They were just stunned that a U.S. president would even talk with them, but that’s who he is.

I’ve led some trips of my own to Sri Lanka, Korea and Ghana, and my years of working with Jimmy remind me to be humble and open to people who are different for any reason. I started teaching at George Washington University Law School in 1998, and I used to take law students to North Carolina for spring break trips to build houses. I encouraged the international students to come on our builds, too, and we had two women from South Africa. They were like, “My family back home will not believe that I was up on a roof, building houses in North Carolina!” I have a photograph of one of the women balancing my very large, heavy toolbox on her head.

Jimmy was the longest-living president and also the one with the longest years of post-presidency service. I’m always having to defend him when people say he wasn’t great in office, but “he’s our greatest ex-president.” I guess we were feeling weakened by the Iran hostage crisis when he was in office, and he specifically said he couldn’t go out and campaign for president while Americans were in captivity. But he accomplished a lot. Turning down the thermostat to 68 during the energy crisis was not something anybody wanted to do in the ’70s. He was perhaps too moralistic for the times, which is unfortunate because he was really just standing for the right thing. I think history will judge him better in the end.  

— As told to Alanna Nash