Personal Experience Essay: Building Homes with Habitat for Humanity

This essay provides a personal reflection on a student's volunteer experience with Habitat for Humanity during the summer before college. The student recounts their involvement in building a house in New Mexico, highlighting the social impact and the realities of poverty they encountered. The essay describes the process of working alongside the family for whom they were building the house, offering a unique perspective beyond statistical data. The student discusses the family's background, including the destruction of their previous home by a hurricane, and their struggles with homelessness. Through this experience, the student gained a deeper understanding of the organization's mission to provide a 'hand up, not a hand out,' and the critical role of volunteerism in addressing housing needs. The essay also references relevant literature, including articles on hurricane damage and poverty rates, enriching the context of the personal narrative.

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

2PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
alongside the family for whom we were making the house for. This made the trip even more
meaningful because as much as one may want, they cannot find the reality of a situation from
statistics given in a government report. Working alongside the family, I was able to get their
story and even though the work was hard, it was all worthwhile in the end to see how much
our help had mattered to them.
Talking to the father of the family, he told us that his last house was destroyed
because of a devastating hurricane the year before that which had rendered his whole family
homeless, as they continuously moved from one relative’s house to another. The father
started to get slightly emotional when he was describing how he wanted his house to look like
as he compared it to the house that he had before. Historically, the hurricanes that have hit the
area in and around New Mexico have usually been classified as being of either Category 4 or
5, and this can cause an estimated damage worth of $50-$125 billion dollars in the region
(Bilskie et al., 2016). Even then, there are many families who have applied and not gotten
through the application with Habitat for Humanity and the father had expressed how happy
that his application was accepted and he was that he would get to meet new people who want
to help him. Usually the aim of any volunteer experience is to gain perspective and awareness
of the lives of others, and this was exemplified by our interaction with the family.

3PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
References:
Bilskie, M. V., Hagen, S. C., Alizad, K., Medeiros, S. C., Passeri, D. L., Needham, H. F., &
Cox, A. (2016). Dynamic simulation and numerical analysis of hurricane storm surge
under sea level rise with geomorphologic changes along the northern Gulf of
Mexico. Earth's Future, 4(5), 177-193.
Hadler, J. L. (2016). Influenza-related hospitalizations and poverty levels—United States,
2010–2012. MMWR. Morbidity and mortality weekly report, 65.
Wilburn, K. M., & Wilburn, H. R. (2018). New Partnering Opportunities for the Nonprofit
Sector. Journal of Vincentian Social Action, 3(2), 9.