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living the dream: new home built, blessed in east st. louis

Story and photo by LIZ QUIRIN
Messenger editor

How do you wrap your arms around a dream? If you live in one of the dozen houses built by volunteers with East Side Heart and Home for first-time home owners in East St. Louis, you can see the dream, touch it, seek shelter in it and wrap your arms around it every day.

The most recently-built home on 8th Street was blessed July 26 when volunteers, family and friends of Theressa Wright and her new neighbors gathered to pray and express thanks for another home in the neighborhood.
Wright thanked all of the people present and made sure they knew all were welcome at her new home.

A neighborhood with new homes is the dream of many people but especially Sister Carol Lehmkuhl OP, site director of the Family Center, and Joe Hubbard, director of Catholic Urban Programs for the diocese.

The Family Center was opened in 1993 at the former rectory for St. Adalbert Parish. At the time, the drug dealers and prostitutes conducted business in the neighborhood, Hubbard said.The center “was opened to help families that were falling through the cracks,” Hubbard said. “Sister Carol was trying to help them change their lives.”

Working in this type of neighborhood would not give families opportunities to change their lives, and Sister Lehmkuhl soon realized more help was needed.

East Side Heart and Home was incorporated to handle buying lots and building homes. This would be “a more comprehensive way to help families,” she said.

The first two homes were constructed in 1997. The 12th house was finished this summer, and another corporation, Emerson Park has worked to build homes around the Lessie Bates Neighborhood House, again creating a safe neighborhood for families.

At the blessing of the latest home, Father Jim Cormack CM, said: “This is not just a house, a building, a dwelling; it is a home. It is so much more than where I stay, more than walls and doors and windows, more than bricks and wood. It is a home, a place of warmth, love, safety, family, growth and development.”

It was built with volunteers from parishes on both sides of the Mississippi River, with Catholics and people of other faiths, with young people and senior citizens.

Building homes “is also about making connections between people too,” Sister Lehmkuhl said. “It’s about connecting people outside the area and making people aware of social concerns.”

Parishioners from St. Catherine Labouré in St. Louis took on responsibility for building an entire house in 2005, and in 2007 St. Nicholas Parish in O’Fallon did the same as a way to honor the parish’s pastor, Msgr. Bill Hitpas, on his 40th anniversary as a priest.

Taking on full responsibility for a house meant not only raising the money to pay for the house but also lining up volunteers to work and to fix meals for the workers among the many jobs associated with a build.
Many of the volunteers come back year after year, donating their time and talent to the build.

Father Cormack described the volunteers in the blessing. These are “homes built by loving hands, skilled hands, committed hands, homes worth more than all their contents or assessed value because of how they were built and by whom they were built,” he said.

“Good, generous, industrious men and women built these homes. They will stand along with others here in this neighborhood as the homes love built, the homes that hopes and dreams built, the homes of good ideas and noble sentiment,” Father Cormack said.

People walked back to the Family Center after the blessing, along a sidewalk with other homes that were built the same way Theressa Wright’s home was built.

At the beginning, East Side Heart and Home holds the mortgage as the new homeowner begins to understand the responsibilities of owning the home.

Incarnate Word Sister Mary Kay McKenzie now directs East Side Heart and Home and worked daily on the build. She has a background with Habitat for Humanity and knows the amount of work that goes into building a home.
Sister McKenzie will meet with Wright and other homeowners who are becoming more familiar with ownership.
“It’s a two to three-year program,” Sister Lehmkuhl said.

After working through the program with East Side Heart and Home, the homeowner applies for a conventional mortgage and takes over payments. East Side Heart and Home is reimbursed, and that money can be used to purchase additional lots and pay for the next build.

When Sister Lehmkuhl began this she was not sure how it would turn out.

At the beginning, Sister Lehmkuhl said she was not educated in buying property or building homes. “But you follow your heart and say your prayers and God leads you where you need to go.”

Sister Lehmkuhl continues to plan for the future even in difficult economic times, knowing the future is uncertain.
“It’s been a long journey” getting to this point. “I have hopes and dreams, but it’s not always what I want to happen; I work with what is, and it’s not always easy.”

The neighborhood around the Family Center has changed over the years. No more drug dealers or prostitutes do business on the streets.

New homes hold out the prospect of changing lives for those who live there and for the children who are growing up there.

Sister Lehmkuhl continues to believe “we can change the world, one family at a time.”

For more information about the Family Center, please call 875-7295.