Personal Experience

Running head: PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
Personal Experience
Name of Student:
Name of the University:
Author note:

1PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
During the summer before college, my friends and I had decided to do something
productive with our free time and also, experience a taste of the independent life before we
were sent off to live by ourselves. I have always lived in a world where things have come to
me very easily, and I have never realized how thankful I should be until I made the decision.
Signing up for Habitat for Humanity with all my friends felt as if we booked our tickets for a
vacation in New Mexico, but little did we know that it would be better than any beach trip
that I could have ever planned. Some socially relevant questions that come to mind for this
situation is: why do people need volunteers to build their house, why aren’t more people
participating in this activity, what is the main motivation for people to apply for building their
house with this organization.
Over the period of two weeks that I was there, our group helped to build a house and
we made so many new friends who were all from different places. To give a little insight into
what Habitat for Humanity is, it is basically an organization that offers “a hand up, not a hand
out,” to homeowners (Wilburn & Wilburn, 2018). These homeowners have to first fill out an
application and the organization looks at their household income, their current living situation
along with their readiness to partner with the organization. The volunteers are required to pay
for their trip which includes their accommodations for stay and the meals for all of the days,
while the organization makes a commission from the fees and the rest of the money is used to
buy materials for building the house, while the homeowners bear little to no charges.
The rate of poverty in New Mexico is around 20.6%, with the population’s median
income being roughly only $44,000 USD (Hadler, 2016). Not many of these people can
afford to pay to hire someone to build their house, and usually not capable of doing so by
themselves and so they seek the help of organizations such as this to get some help in making
their home. I know a few of my friends who have gone to this trip and they were not able
meet the family for whom they were building the house for, but I had the opportunity to work