BUILDING DREAMS : Teen-Agers Lend Helping Hand So the Needy Can Own Homes

Sunlight flooded the skeletal frame of the house as the four Orange County teen-agers a thousand miles from home tried desperately not to drop the six-foot-long piece of drywall they were holding above their heads.

Finally, another youth manhandled a beam into place to prop up the drywall. But then came the to-and-froing, jostling the material this way and that before finally getting it in place, another part of what would eventually be a ceiling.

Muscles aching, faces bathed in sweat, it was time for another chore. How about jumping into the waist-high ditch outside the house and helping to shovel out some more dirt? Grabbing shovels, off they went, disappearing one by one into the ditch.

For some folks summer vacation meant palm trees, exotic shores and relaxing days in a beach chair with a good book. But for eight teen-age volunteers from the First Christian Church of Orange, it meant a journey north to build houses for people who otherwise couldn’t afford them.

The students, all in high school or just graduated, belong to the church’s Christian Youth Fellowship. Each summer the group picks a different project and hits the road. One year, they helped build a house in Yuma; another time they rehabilitated buildings on an Indian reservation in Washington.

This year the goal was housing again, and the site was Seattle.

The eight teen-agers and four adults stayed overnight in Disciples of Christ churches en route to Seattle, pitching sleeping bags on basement floors from Bakersfield to Grants Pass, Ore. Once settled in the Seattle area, the group spent six days helping to build three houses as volunteers for a program known as Habitat for Humanity International.

The organization is a nonprofit, ecumenical housing project that uses donations and volunteer workers to build affordable housing for needy families. Since its founding in 1976, Habitat has built more than 5,000 homes worldwide. Its most prominent member has been former President Jimmy Carter, a board member who leads work camps each year in poverty-stricken neighborhoods.

Although there is a Habitat affiliate in Orange County, it is working out final details of its initial construction projects and has not yet started building or rehabilitating structures, according to Ken Karlstead, chairman of the board of directors of the local affiliate. But for the teen-agers who went to Seattle, traveling out of the Southern California area was an important part of the summer experience, said Mike Post, a recent graduate of Orange High School who is now a freshman at Chapman College.

“You leave all of your troubles and worries behind you,” said Post, who, unlike most of the students, had been on these volunteer expeditions before. “When you are away from home . . . you are down to the basics. You are open to yourself.”

Kyle Prenzlow, a senior at El Modena High School in Orange who has a flair for construction and woodworking and became an informal tutor to the other volunteers, said: “You are a family for 13 days. You are forced to deal with all of the negative and positive issues on the trip, and you grow. It’s a place where you can be yourself and also cut loose.”

Despite the presence of the adults, the students themselves made many of the decisions on who would do what jobs and which sights would be seen during their time off. The teen-agers also had a major voice in choosing the Seattle site, figuring the temperate weather would mean they could get more work done than in other possible locations such as Bakersfield or Arizona.

“The kids have a hand in the decision-making for the trip, and parents and students ultimately make the final choice (together),” said Dan Oliver, associate pastor at First Christian Church and the staff director for the event.

For Prenzlow, a barrel-chested youth with close-cropped hair, the most rewarding aspect of the trip was helping others. “You need the work part to have a real balance,” he said, explaining why the Christian Youth Fellowship group chooses service projects over frolic for summer trips. “We can all do something. We all have gifts we can give. You can always use your talents for something helpful. The trip wouldn’t be the same without the work part. We were just one small group. If there were lots of small groups, we could accomplish a lot.”

Oliver said the trip gave the youths a firsthand look at how the other half lives, “finding out people’s needs in the world other than just reading about it or hearing others speak about it. It was a way to meet people and work with them as a community and get some good done,” as well as to provide the church group “with some real tangible types of experience,” he added.

Bob Stone, 35, was overjoyed to see the Orange County group arrive. Stone acted essentially as a construction foreman for two of the houses the volunteers helped build.

“Small groups are like pennies on the dollar--they all add up. They all count,” he said. “Habitat is made up of volunteers, and you need all the volunteers you can get.”

Stone, a single parent with five children, was himself a recipient of a Habitat home, moving into the first completed project of the Seattle chapter in 1985. He has strong memories of the work on his own home. “The house has more value to it than just monetary; it means so much more. You can remember building each room. I live there, and I hope to die there. It’s more than just a house.”

Each recipient of a Habitat home is required to help build it, usually supplying 1,000 hours of “sweat equity.” The new owners wind up getting involved in all aspects of the project.

Becky Hall, one of the volunteers from Orange County, said she was happy to give the Seattle residents “the chance to have a house like I’ve always had, to give them a better start, not having to pay such high rents,” so they could have enough money to “make sure they each get enough to eat each night.”

The homeowners-to-be “were definitely a lot poorer” than her Orange County friends and acquaintances, she said, but they impressed her with their hard work. “I feel that they really deserved the houses, wanting them so bad, working on them, having their friends and family work on them.

“I wasn’t sure what kind of work I’d be doing. Working for a family you don’t know, in a place you don’t know--it’s kind of an unsure feeling,” said Hall, a slender, sandy-haired sophomore at Villa Park High School in Orange. She ended up doing a number of tasks, from hanging drywall to digging drainage trenches and installing shower stalls. “Anyone who gets the chance should work for Habitat for Humanity. The ‘thank yous’ from somebody you are working for, working side by side, that’s really something special.”

Judith Pippen, a single mother of an adolescent daughter and a son not yet in his teens, marveled that the volunteers would come from so far away to help build the house where her family will live. Pippen uses a cane because of a leg problem. Before getting help from the Habitat volunteers, she was trying to dig ditches around her house with one hand while keeping the other firmly on the cane.

Numerous volunteers come by on weekends to help with construction, but during the week there were far fewer, so the California volunteers were especially welcome.

Oliver said the working experience was the main reason for the trip.

“This is the most significant ministry to young people that I know,” Oliver said. “To go and work with peers and adults, to work for someone else, is one of the most important things you can do. We were actually working with people who will be living in the homes. We could see who we were helping; it became really personal. A lot of the kids learned a new skill too, and it became fun.”

At one site where the volunteers worked, the house was just about done, except for details such as painting, spackling and sanding some rooms, and installing electrical fixtures. When the teen-agers left, the building was just a hairbreadth away from being ready for occupancy.

More needed to be done at the site supervised by Stone, where a pair of two-story houses--one of which will be occupied by the Pippen family--needed drywall, sewage and drainage lines, outlets installed, walls spackled. The volunteers also joined forces to roll piles of rocks into place to serve as impromptu retaining walls while final construction was done.

Post said the trip was “a great learning experience. It made you think.” In affluent Orange County, “we take a lot for granted,” he added. For the people in Seattle, the homes are “all they have,” he said. “It makes you feel good to be a part of that, to help them get re-established in their life.”

Typically, the group was up at 6:30 a.m. at the church where they stayed and on the job site by 8 a.m. After digging, putting up drywall, installing electrical outlets and the other jobs, they knocked off at 4 p.m. or so. Evenings included trips to Seattle tourist sites such as the Space Needle and, on one evening, a baseball game at the Kingdome, where the Seattle Mariners beat Anaheim’s own California Angels.

Nights also included discussions of the jobs just done and those ahead, plus what Oliver called “a centering time, a faith exploration time.”

And, toward the end, there was the “drywall mud fight”--just good, not-so-clean fun, said Oliver, who joked, “They found out the exact texture of drywall mud, which is important to know in life.”

Post said the experience was “wonderful.”

“The families we worked with are real nice, real dedicated, willing to help to better themselves. There’s a real tight community among the people working at Habitat.”