Rehabilitation of a House--and a Home : Volunteers: The local chapter of Habitat for Humanity works on 4 projects in Santa Paula and Oak View to aid low-income families.

Esther Huesca’s roof has leaked for 20 years. Little wonder, then, as she was surrounded Saturday by volunteers from the Ventura County chapter of Habitat for Humanity, that the smile on her face radiated like sunshine.

“It’s a pretty happy day,” Huesca said in halting English as she surveyed the crew who came to repair her roof and clean her debris-filled garden.

Her 40-year-old home, fronting on a narrow alley in Santa Paula, has four small rooms added haphazardly over the years and topped by a termite-eaten roof.

The recent rainstorms added further injury to the house. The bedroom has been damaged by water, leaving a soggy hole in the floor. And in the kitchen, rain flowed in “like a cascade,” Huesca said.

Thanks to Huesca’s daughter, Maria, 36, who returned home recently from the Midwest, the family learned about Habitat’s program to rehabilitate the houses of low-income families.

In 1978, Linda and Millard Fuller of Americus, Ga., founded Habitat for Humanity International, an ecumenical, grass-roots Christian ministry with the goal of eliminating substandard housing. There are now more than 500 local affiliates of the organization, with about 10,000 homes built worldwide.

Using volunteer labor and donated supplies, Habitat works in cooperation with families to build or renovate houses. The families take an active role in the work and must repay the cost of materials through no-interest loans over a fixed period. The payments are then used for building or rehabilitating more houses.

The Ventura County chapter was begun in 1983 by Virgil Nelson, former pastor of the First Baptist Church in Oak View, and others who realized there was a desperate need for affordable housing in the area.

“We looked for an organization that we could model after,” Nelson said. “Why try to improve on what Millard Fuller had done?”

The Ventura chapter has not yet been able to build houses because of the high cost of land, Nelson said. However, the five-year goal of the organization is to build seven or eight houses and rehabilitate 25 or 30.

On Saturday, a group of 16 volunteers, mainly from California Lutheran University and several churches, appeared at Habitat’s Oxnard office at 7:45 a.m. to work on four projects in the Oak View and Santa Paula areas.

Nelson, recently appointed director of development, conceded that he was a bit harried, even though the day had just begun. He had spent more than an hour at a local lumberyard getting material for the day’s work, a chore that normally takes him 25 minutes. To make matters worse, the video he planned to show on Habitat’s history was defective, so he did a verbal orientation.

“The concept of Habitat is thousands of years old,” Nelson said. “The Bible talks about the economics of the kingdom of God in Leviticus. . . . Those verses say that we are forbidden to make a profit on poor people and we are forbidden to charge interest to poor people. While there is no problem against making a profit or charging interest, it is forbidden to make a profit on the backs of the poor.”

After the orientation, Nelson sent six volunteers to work on three projects in the Oak View area. Those projects included house painting, trimming brush and cleaning an old trailer.

The remaining volunteers were sent to Huesca’s home in Santa Paula. Upon arrival, the group was divided, with no more than eight people on the roof at one time, and the rest cleaning debris in the yard.

While Latino music blared from a neighbor’s house and men watched from nearby yards, the group began hauling wood, fiberglass, old appliances, wire and years of collected junk to a large dumpster. Those on the roof tore at rotting wood and worn shingles.

Working alongside the volunteers was Huesca, 65, and her daughter. Huesca’s 87-year-old husband, who is ill, slept despite the racket coming from the roof.

By midday, Huesca began to visibly tire.

“My doctor say no work because of bad heart,” she said. “But I don’t want house to be down. I want it to be up, up!”

The Cal Lutheran students welcomed the lunch break when it came but said they were glad they volunteered. Recently, CLU established a campus chapter of Habitat, said Wayne Dominick, a junior.

Saturday’s work was Dominick’s third volunteer effort with the county chapter, but it was the first for Mark Hallamore, also a junior.

“We all live in Thousand Oaks and don’t get to see places like this,” Hallamore said. “You get humility and feel grateful for what you’ve got.”

The miracle of the day, by Nelson’s account, was that it didn’t rain and that the Santa Paula building inspector had offered to inspect the work on the roof, despite it being his day off.

“We want to work with them,” inspector Jim Scheidt said. “We’re a small town here. (If) people come here to do this, we’re not going to work against them.”

The crew’s work was acceptable, Scheidt said, “considering the resources. They really need to take the whole roof off and start over, but that’s not feasible.”

Despite Scheidt’s final word to Nelson that other work needed to be done on the house to bring it up to code, the volunteers considered the day a success, with half the roof completed and the yard considerably cleared.

Volunteer Jeff Goodman had driven to Ventura County from West Los Angeles. A financial consultant, Goodman said he had heard about Habitat for years and decided that this was a good time to get involved.

“The day was just what I expected,” he said as he pounded nails into the roof.