King service project visits 67 Decatur homes over weekend
Mid-afternoon on Monday, Ms. Geneva Odister’s longtime Decatur home was in thorough disarray.
Dozens of strangers milled about, shuttling her furniture aside, hammering on doors and walls, climbing on her roof,or digging around her attic. And she couldn’t have been happier about the whole mess.
“This is such a blessing,” she said. “I have no idea how any of this could’ve ever gotten done.”
Odister, 73, wasn’t the only Decatur resident with a smile on her face this past weekend. Saturday through Monday, a record 1,220 volunteers participated in the 9th annual Decatur Martin Luther King Jr. Service Project.
“What you basically have here,” said Project Chairman James Matthews,“is a good old fashioned barn raising.”
Volunteer coordinator Lee Ann Harvey is one of three people who created the Service Project, beginning in 2003. Although a smattering of volunteers are highly skilled fixer-uppers, most, she said, are “unskilled laborers.” Many come from school or church groups, businesses. Some volunteer individually.
“What we do best is yard work,” she said. “We cut yards, rake leaves, rip out kudzu, prune and remove junk, which we put into two 30-yard dumpsters.”
Volunteers worked on 67 homes this past weekend. Sixteen received substantial repairs, and none got more attention than the house Odister has lived in with her sister, Alice Browner, since the mid 1960s.
In five 4-hour shifts over three days, volunteers repaired a gas and water leak, reqired the entire house and fixed wood rot, especially around the exterior base. They insulated various rooms, put up new fence posts and installed a new stove top.
Stuff cleared out of the attic filled five loads of a 24-foot trailer, according to another coordinator, Mike Curtice. The backyard, filled with a couple generations of old toys or, in Odister’s words, “just plain junk,” was so completely overhauled, it excavated, in her words, “a real yard with real ground.”
Matthews estimates the value of the Odister house renovation at $5,000, though the homeowner pays nothing.
To receive Service Project the resident has to be homeowner, has to have homeowner’s insurance, must be 65 years or older, and must have lived in the house for at least 20 years. The home must be within the four square miles comprising the city of Decatur, and recipients’ income is described as “low” or “modest.”
“This is not a charity event,” Matthews said. “We are helping people who are the cornerstone of the community. They were contributing 20 and 30 years ago when Decatur wasn’t quite as upscale as it is now. Now they’ve grown older and can’t do for themselves what they used to do for everyone else, and it’s our chance to give back.”
Odister and Browner raised four children in their house, along with several grandchildren, nieces and nephews. Odister said her sister was “a real blessing in the community,” among other thingsstarting the first homeless shelter for families in DeKalb County.
Browner was not among the dozens milling around the “barn raising” at their longtime home on Monday, however.
“Alice is in the hospital with cancer,” Odister said. “She’s a real fighter and I have no doubt she’s going to make it back home. I sure enough can’t wait for her to see just how nice everything looks.”
