THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 10, 1995 TAG: 9509100036
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ELIZABETH SIMPSON
LENGTH: Medium: 69 lines
The international women's conference in Beijing seemed, at times, a bizarre mix of lofty policy-making and absurd controversy.
Meanwhile, a conference of a different sort was convening on Granby Street. This one was more hands-on, less abstract. It involved nails and boards and mortar and sweat.
While the world conference was about improving women's lives by the millions, the project on Granby is about improving women's lives one at a time.
Two different approaches, one as important as the other. While the Beijing conference dominated the news, I spent time on Granby Street.
There, on a dusty corner lot, a crew is building a house for a single mother and her four children. This is the third House that Jill Built in the area, and like the others, designed and built by women volunteers of Habitat for Humanity, the organization that builds homes for poor families.
At the project's most basic level, it is women helping women, a worthy goal when you consider that the face of poverty, worldwide, is the face of a woman. Of the 1.3 billion people in poverty in this world, 70 percent are female. Women make 30 to 40 percent less than men on a worldwide average.
While a well-coiffed Hillary Clinton railed in China against these disparities, a leather-booted Mary Keith Garrett hammered against them on Granby Street.
As the construction supervisor for all three of the Houses that Jill Built, Garrett knows firsthand the power of women rolling up their sleeves and working toward a common goal. She knows about solving problems with blueprints instead of words, about framing solutions with boards instead of speeches.
This four-bedroom house is not just about helping the single mother who will move in later this year. It's not just about building a sense of security for her children. It's about instilling power in the hundreds of women who have helped put the house together.
One woman after another has walked onto this site not knowing how to drive a nail. They leave with a new set of skills: They know how to read blueprints. Hang drywall. Frame walls. Lay foundation. Install windows.
They take on qualities crucial in overcoming the problems of women: Seizing leadership. Gaining self confidence. Educating themselves in fields thought of as a man's domain.
Spend too much time listening to the dialogues and monologues at the U.N. World Conference on Women, and you find yourself discouraged. The problems seem overwhelming, the statistics daunting. China is distant, in miles and realities. Will the demands made at the conference be met?
But before you dismiss the problems of women in the world as insurmountable, go next door to Granby Street.
There you will discover a sense that everything is doable. That anything is possible if you have enough nails. That no wall is too heavy if enough hands are willing.
``Here there's an instant leadership, and a willingness to take on that leadership,'' Garrett said. ``You're building a house, but it's one stick at a time, one nail at a time.''
It's the same way a better world is built. MEMO: Anyone wanting to volunteer for The House that Jill Built can call the
Habitat for Humanity office at 625-1281. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
GARY C. KNAPP
Mary Keith Garrett, the supervisor on the building project,
instructs Kate Higgins, Carrie A. Gilbert and Melinda Woodall in
construction techniques.
by CNB