How You Might Help Others
Submitted by:
Chuck Vogt, President
Central Indiana Fuller Center for Housing
If you are on the outside looking in at the Fuller Center for Housing of Central Indiana and trying to decide if this is something you should get involved with your resources or time, let me share a few glimpses of what I have seen right here in Indianapolis. Then you determine for yourself what path you might take.
I have helped build a house in Indianapolis for a single mom and three small children. The house where they previously lived had no door knob on the front door, any door lock, holes in the floor where varmints came in biting the kids and holes in the roof through which rain & snow cam into their house. Payment for their new home was less than the rent they were paying.
Another family of four lived in the attic of a three story house. The only way up and down was a pull down stairway that was down all the time. Do you know how hot an attic gets in the summer and how cold it gets in the winter? They had two mattresses spread on the attic floor, a small college dorm refrigerator, an electric fan and a hot plate for cooking or heat plugged into two extension cords that ran down the stairway and plugged into an outlet on the next floor. Yes, their new house payment including taxes and insurance was less than the rent they were paying.
Another lady cried when her "new beautiful bathtub" was carried into the bathroom area as the home was being framed. I asked her what she was crying about and she said they were happy tears because she and her husband of fifteen years plus their two children had only a wash basin to bath in all their married life and you guessed it…by her new house payment was less than their rent too.
Millard Fuller once told me about a family that he built a house for that had lived under a bridge for over a year. He looked me in the eye and said, "No six year old little girl should ever have to live under a bridge." So the next time you look around your house at what you have, think of the less fortunate that live in Indianapolis and all over the world in sub-standard housing. We all take a lot for granted.
Thank God for what you have and ask him how you might help others.
Your Friend in Christ,
Chuck Vogt, President
Fuller Center for Housing in Central Indiana
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