Habitat fulfills another dream

It has been a long struggle for Novlette Thompson.

She came from Jamaica as a young woman, leaving four children behind with her estranged husband while she looked for work and a better life in this country.

After three years, she was able to bring her son and three daughters here. Her family continued to grow to nine children, however, and she had to work two jobs for them to survive.

Despite the hardships, all her children finished school with no disciplinary problems, said her oldest son, Nicholas Easy.

On Thanksgiving morning, children and grandchildren gathered to celebrate their mother's richly deserved reward: her first house, built with the help of Habitat for Humanity.

"I thank Habitat for helping her out and finally making one of her dreams come true," Easy said. "Now she has a place where her grandchildren can all come at Christmas and Thanksgiving. It's truly a God-sent blessing for her."

The house is all the sweeter to Thompson's family because they helped build it with their own hands. Habitat for Humanity, founded in 1976, is dedicated to building simple, safe and decent housing for low-income families, but the organization requires recipients to invest "sweat equity" during construction.

Daughter McQurria Easy remembers leveling dirt, picking up trash and nailing up sideboard.

"Pretty much from the ground work on up, we had to be here," she said.

Thompson and her youngest child, 9-year-old Adonijah Telemaque, started moving into the pink-and-white house a week ago.

On Thanksgiving, screaming children ran in and out, stopping only to munch on muffins and bagels brought by Habitat community relations director Kathy Brogli. Nicholas Easy finished hanging the last of the kitchen curtains.

Easy said his mother, a seemingly affable woman in her early 50s, was a strict disciplinarian who used to send misbehaving children out in the yard to cut a switch when they needed a whipping. Her favorite saying, he recalled, was "I brought you into the world; I'll take you out of it with this hand!"

But the children said the discipline helped shape them.

"When we passed our neighbors, we were the only children to say, 'Good morning,' to everybody we'd meet on the street," he said.

Thompson's house in the Belmont Heights section of East Tampa was built at the same time as the house next door during Habitat's second annual Suzie Q. Blitz Build. The build is held during Breast Cancer Awareness Week and honors the memory of Suzanne Hastings, who lost her life to the disease in January 2008 at age 36.

More than 400 volunteers worked on the two houses, completing the work in two weeks, Brogli said. The house next door to Thompson's was built by women, except for a couple of male crew leaders.

After the Habitat-sponsored breakfast, Thompson and her family were going to head to her brother's house for dinner. Next year, and every Thanksgiving and Christmas after that, dinner will be at her house, she said.

"I have a house and all my kids around me," she said. "It's more than I can give thanks for."