Home Town Heroes
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Vets Gallina (left) and Beatty (right) Flank Morrell
outside his renovated home
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Building Homes
for
Disabled Veterans
Back from war, two injured soldiers help other vets rebuild their lives.
By Alison Caporimo with reporting by Jan Goodwin from Reader's Digest Magazine | December 2012
Gravely injured and disoriented, National Guard Spc. John Gallina squinted into the sun, desperately scanning the sand for a trace of his friend Staff Sgt. Dale Beatty.
It was November 15, 2004, a blistering 110-degree day in Bayji, Iraq, a windswept city about 120 miles north of Baghdad. Less than ten minutes earlier, Gallina had taken the wheel of a partially armored Humvee; Beatty rode shotgun, and two other soldiers sat in the back seat. Their mission was to provide security for an engineer unit combing the area for mines.
Suddenly, their vehicle launched into the air, floating in a shower of sand and smoke—they had driven over an antitank mine. The blast threw Beatty and the other two soldiers from the truck. Gallina’s helmet flew off, his skull smashing into the truck’s metal rafters. When rescue crews arrived, Gallina and Beatty were battered but alive. The other two soldiers also barely survived.
Gallina—diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injury, a wound that can erase short-term memory and cause intense mood swings and migraines—completed his tour of duty. Then he returned home to Statesville, North Carolina, where he and Beatty had met as teenagers in the National Guard.
Within days of the accident, Beatty had both of his legs amputated above the knee. While recovering at home with his wife and two kids, 40 miles north of Statesville, he got a surprising call from the Iredell County Builders Association in Statesville: Some of their contractors, many of whom were vets, had volunteered to build the local hero a new wheelchair-accessible house with a custom shower and wide-frame doors. Beatty volunteered to team up with the builders and ended up working on many of the projects himself. “Building the house became one of my goals to prove that I could still take care of myself and my family,” says Beatty, now 34.
As construction on the house wound down, Beatty, determined to provide other wounded vets with customized homes, reached out to his buddy Gallina, now 33, with an idea: to create a nonprofit organization using volunteers to remodel existing houses or build new ones for disabled vets. “I told [Gallina] that we should make what happened to me a reality for others,” says Beatty. The old friends pooled their modest veteran pensions to create Purple Heart Homes. The group persuaded banks like Wells Fargo and Maryland-based financial group NewDayUSA to donate foreclosed homes and inspired some contractors to offer their services for free.
Former aviation specialist Kevin Smith was one of the first vets to get help, after he found out about Purple Heart Homes through a chance meeting with Gallina’s mother. He had returned injured from Vietnam in 1978 and often used a wheelchair. Navigating from his front door to the driveway was nearly impossible. “There were steps, but there was no railing, so I couldn’t get into and out of the house very easily,” says Smith. The Purple Heart Homes crew installed a ramp that allows Smith to roll right out the door.
David Morrell, also a Vietnam vet, returned from war with type 2 diabetes, which led to the amputation of his left leg. Gallina and Beatty met Morrell at a local coffee shop that serves as a gathering place for vets. “They really surprised me when they said they could fix up
my house,” he says. Purple Heart Homes eventually removed carpet, widened hallways, and added ramps. Morrell thanked them by joining the group as a fund-raiser.
So far, Beatty and Gallina have overseen the completion of ten projects in North Carolina, Connecticut, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee, and New York. “It’s a lot more than bricks and mortar that we are giving people,” says Beatty. “We are not Heroes, we can only help give them back their dignity.”
Battle the Bank
When Belva Davis lost her job and fell behind on her mortgage, her Detroit neighborhood rallied together to fight foreclosure.
By Melody Warnick from Reader's Digest Magazine | June 2012
● Who: Belva Davis, 59
● What: Rallied neighbors to fight foreclosure
● Where: Detroit, Michigan
● What: Rallied neighbors to fight foreclosure
● Where: Detroit, Michigan
As a 50th birthday present to herself, Belva Davis bought her first home, a brick Cape Cod, in a friendly neighborhood ten miles east of downtown Detroit. The 72-block enclave, East English Village, was the kind of place where kids still pedaled bikes on the sidewalk and neighbors invited you over for parties. “It felt like a community, like when I was growing up,” says Davis, who moved there from a rental apartment in inner-city Detroit. “I didn’t hear gunshots. I didn’t hear people cursing. It was peaceful.”
Two years after moving in, the 52-year-old lost her job as a nonprofit administrator and fell $18,000 behind on her mortgage. Even after she found full-time work again, her mortgage lender refused to negotiate. “I told them, ‘I have a job. I can make payments,’ ” says Davis. “But nobody was willing to work with me.” In 2008, the foreclosure notice arrived in the mail.
It wouldn’t be the neighborhood’s first foreclosure by a long shot. Detroit’s economic woes had hit East English Village hard; month in and month out, 5 to 10 percent of the homes there sat empty. Usually people were too ashamed to say they’d lost their home until the moving van pulled into their driveway. Not Davis. At the next neighborhood association meeting, she grabbed the microphone. “I want to stay in my home, but the mortgage company isn’t listening to me,” she said. “Would you be willing to protest?”
For many longtime residents, it was what they had been waiting for. “We were just so glad someone was willing to stand up to what was happening to our neighborhood,” says neighbor Nancy Brigham. She and a handful of other residents helped Davis organize a series of protests against her eviction. They distributed flyers in the area and convinced the local newspaper and television station to cover the events.
In December 2008, locals waved signs in Davis’s yard during a snowstorm; come summer, the protest turned into a backyard barbecue. City council and neighborhood association members gave speeches about Davis’s plight. Another neighbor posted video footage of the protests and interviews with local residents on YouTube, attracting hundreds of views.
But the bank didn’t budge. Davis lived in fear. “One of the most devastating things was not knowing if you’d come home and all your stuff would be in a Dumpster,” she says quietly.
In fall 2009, she made a final push, asking neighbors to flood the bank president with e-mails and phone calls. On a sunny September Saturday, a few dozen of Davis’s supporters marched in front of a local branch, chanting, “Let Belva stay! She’s not going away!” At last, Davis got a phone call. The bank would modify her mortgage loan. She would get to keep her home. “I’m just glad I live in the type of neighborhood where people help each other,” says Davis.
These days, Davis spends more time scheduling the neighborhood book club than organizing picket lines. But if turning protests into block parties is what it takes to save her neighborhood, she’s all for it. “Not only in Detroit but all over the nation, neighborhoods are being devastated,” she says. “If more people would band together, people could stay in their homes. But one person can’t do that by herself. It takes a community of people.”
Plus, she says, laughing, “it’s certainly a way to get to know your neighbors.”
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The Dirty Dozen
How a group of former sorority sisters found peace, purpose, and carpentry skills in New Orleans
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From left: Cheryl Josephs Zaccaro, Carolyn Brown Cox, Debbie Brown Britt, Janis Dropkin Smythe, Marilyn Zwick Storch, Sondra Daum Berman, Judith Fagin, Carolyn Macow Leatherwood, Sharon Graber Purcel, Amy Goldenberger, Linda Lewis-Moors, Rachelle Galanti Parker (kneeling)
from Reader's Digest | June 2011
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At the week’s end, the women exchanged their mud-splattered clothes for clean outfits and made their annual pilgrimage to meet with the family who live in the first house they had helped build: Kewanda Baxter, 35, and her three children, who had lost their home in the hurricane but who had, with amazing grace and strength, endured. Every year since Katrina, there has been a festive get-together with 20-year-old Dominique, 17-year-old Jeremy, 13-year-old Rodney, and their mother. Surrounded by his 12 guardian angels in a local restaurant that night, Rodney beamed. “It feels like my birthday,” he said.
Who are these women? They are middle-class mothers, wives, career women, and sorority sisters, now sixty-somethings who happened to see a photo and bio of the Baxters tacked to a board in a yard during their first stint with Habitat in 2006. “I was a single mom for ten years,” says Carolyn Brown Cox, a social worker and an actress in Seattle, remembering her emotional reaction. “I just felt like a kindred spirit to this woman. I know what it’s like to go to the grocery store and tell your kids that you can’t afford soda or candy.”
The family coordinator at Habitat arranged for Cox to speak with Kewanda Baxter, who didn’t quite know what to think. “I was kind of shocked. I told her, ‘You don’t have to send me any money, but my kids aren’t doing too well in school. It would help to have a computer.’ And then I just thought, If it happens, it happens.”
Baxter was stunned when a new PC was delivered. Then the women arranged tutoring to help with the children’s schooling, which had been disrupted in the aftermath of the storm. That was followed by the uniforms required by the kids’ new charter school. “Kewanda only asked for two sets of clothing for the kids,” says Cox. “She gets every drop out of every nickel.” But even more important than the financial aid was, and is, the emotional support.
“Nobody ever told me I was doing a great job before,” says Baxter. “When I feel like I’m not doing so well, I call or write them. They’re my friends, and they’re my strength. They tell me: Take a deep breath, take a bath.”
Hurricane Katrina actually presented a kind of meteorological bookend for some of the former Sigma Delta Tau sisters. Forty years earlier, they had arrived in New Orleans as freshmen at H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College (then the women’s school at Tulane University), just as Hurricane Betsy ripped through the city, earning the nickname Billion Dollar Betsy for the amount of damage left in her wake. They slept in dorms with no electricity and helped clear Betsy’s detritus from the campus. Close friendships were formed in an era of bouffant hairdos and war protests; after college, there were occasional updates about marriages, children, divorces. But over the years, their lives and careers spread out across the four corners of the country: Sondra Daum Berman became a financial adviser in Florida; Marilyn Zwick Storch did marketing for hospitals in Illinois; Janis Dropkin Smythe produced commercial music in New York. In time, most of them lost touch with one another.
Until Katrina. Cheryl Josephs Zaccaro, a retired occupational therapist from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, hooked up with Habitat first. She slept in a trailer with other volunteers, building low-cost houses, a job for which she had no prior training. Zaccaro began e-mailing her sorority sisters, asking, “Is this something we want to do?” From Texas and Pennsylvania and Georgia, the answers came back: yes, yes, yes! Everyone had sent checks to the relief organizations, but it didn’t seem like enough.
Zaccaro returned to Habitat with her sisters ten months later — an act of extraordinary selflessness, since she’d just completed chemotherapy for breast cancer. “But I kept thinking, I get to go home,” she says, “while all these people were still homeless, still dealing with the mess.” And after hearing the story of Baxter and her children, the group determined to get involved in an even more personal way.
When Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005, the Baxters were forced to evacuate their ground-floor apartment with only the clothes on their backs. Two days later, they took refuge, along with thousands of others, in the Convention Center as the floodwaters rolled down Canal Street. For several days, there was no food except for what had been looted from abandoned stores. “I didn’t eat, but I took vitamins and made sure the kids ate,” says Baxter. “One day somebody gave me a tomato. After three days, the Louisiana National Guard came in with water and those rations in packs.”
The family began a two-month odyssey through Arkansas and Texas. Eventually, Baxter rented a car and drove back to her traumatized city to find that the only possessions she could salvage from her ruined home were three track medals Dominique had won in school. Baxter returned to her job as a custodian with the city’s building services, and her office helped arrange housing, first on a cruise ship docked in the Mississippi River, next in a FEMA trailer that turned out to have toxic levels of formaldehyde. Then she heard about the opportunity for an interest-free mortgage from Habitat for Humanity in return for 350 hours of “sweat equity.” It was pure serendipity that the women from Tulane were assigned to work on the new Baxter home and fell in love with the family.
The women helped out with the teenagers’ immediate needs — football uniforms for the boys, a calculator for math class, high school graduation photos for Dominique. “We’re just plugging up holes in the dike so Kewanda can keep her boat afloat,” says Cox. “It’s women helping women.”
A highlight of each trip to New Orleans is a celebratory dinner — party of 16, tables pushed together, with so much hugging that it’s hard to actually eat. Baxter always brings a little gift for everyone; this year, it was a photograph of the newest family member, Dominique’s baby girl, D’Jai Blackburn. Baxter herself became a mother at age 14, and the women quietly acknowledge their disappointment that this cycle of early pregnancy continues, but they are determined to help Dominique realize her ambitions. Last summer, she became the first in her family to graduate from high school, and Smythe and Cox flew to New Orleans for the ceremony. Dominique now says she’d like to be a medical assistant. Baxter attends classes for a high school equivalency diploma, despite the overwhelming responsibilities of keeping up house payments and caring for her family, including her new granddaughter. She had never been interested in reading, but the women encouraged her and sent books; now she carries a book everywhere she goes and loves to discuss her new interests. “I haven’t figured out what I’m good at yet,” she says. “That’s why I like to talk to these women.”
The Baxters’ new house was furnished with the help of the Red Cross and FEMA, so the Tulane women decided that one of their priorities would be maintaining the family’s truck, which is a lifeline for them: On a typical day, Baxter drives to work at city hall, picks up the boys for tutoring after school, drives Dominique to her job, brings the boys home, and then gets her daughter at 11 p.m. or later. When all four tires on the truck went bald, the group bought four new steel-belted radials. Then, a week before Dominique was due to give birth, the truck’s motor gave out. “I was hysterical,” says Baxter. “The hospital was 30 minutes away.” The Tulane group arranged for a monthlong car rental and recently helped finance a gently used smoky-gray Volkswagen Passat.
The Dirty Dozen have their own share of middle-aged problems, but for one week a year, they put aside personal concerns to do whatever is asked of them in New Orleans. “Most of the women in our group are currently in or have been in leadership roles,” says Linda Lewis-Moors, a hospital administrator from Norwich, New York. “But they are all willing followers and strong team members when that’s what is called for.”
For Carolyn Macow Leatherwood, a former CPA from Houston, it’s the work itself that becomes more meaningful each year. “We moan and groan about minor issues in our lives, but seeing people struggling here, and then seeing an opportunity to fix things, is amazing.”
For all 12 of the Dirty Dozen, the annual pilgrimage has become something of a magical time machine. “We were girls together, meeting the world for the first time,” says Smythe. “And here we are 40-plus years later, women who have lived those lives with triumphs and tragedies. No one has been spared, and I’m not sure any of it turned out quite as we’d planned. But when we reunite, we are those girls again.”
When young Noah Jones got a glimpse into the world of foster care, he created his own charity to help ease transitional times.
● Who: Noah Jones, 12
● What: Supplies foster kids with bags
● Where: Bowling Green, Kentucky
When Sara and Nathan Jones were training to become foster parents, their son, Noah, learned a tough thing or two about foster care. For instance, nearly 600 local foster kids changed families every year, and they carried their belongings from one home to the next in black garbage bags.
Noah, then ten, couldn’t imagine stuffing his clothes, favorite toy, and soccer ball into a trash bag and dragging it to a new house in the middle of the night. “Packing kids’ belongings into garbage bags is like telling them that their stuff has no more worth than trash,” says Noah.
So with help from his parents and younger sisters, Macy, then nine, and Molly, then seven, Noah began to collect suitcases and duffel bags from friends and extended family; he received more than 100 bags in less than two weeks. He then sent letters to churches and put ads in local newspapers and on radio stations asking for donations. Within a few months, the family was collecting about 500 bags a week, which they stored briefly in their spare bathroom and downstairs hallway before giving them to foster care caseworkers at the Department for Community Based Services.
In addition to suitcases, Noah now provides foster kids with backpacks containing shampoo, soap, a journal, and a toy—all donated. “My hope is that by giving the children things that are just theirs, they will feel a little control in the midst of the chaos,” says Noah. Noah’s group, A Case for Dignity, collects and distributes hundreds of bags a year. He recently convinced foster care managers from 15 Kentucky counties to pledge to use his bags instead of trash bags. “I’ve been so inspired by him,” says his mom. “If a ten-year-old can see a problem and create a solution, how much more can we do as adults?”
To learn more about A Case for Dignity, visit acasefordignity.blogspot.com or email acasefordignity@gmail.com.
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