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Sweet equity
Believe it or not, there’s something even
more heart-warming than Anne of Green Gables in P.E.I.
By Patricia Pearson with photography by John Sylvester
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THERE ARE TWO WAYS to approach a family vacation in Prince Edward Island, I figure. You
can go straight for the iconic stuff, which is basically Anne of Green Gables up the wazoo:
Anne-themed dinner theatre, Anne souvenirs, museums filled with Lucy Maud Montgomery paraphernalia.
Plus lobster and sand dunes. Or, you can add the exciting prospect of volunteering for Habitat
for Humanity and nailing your thumb to a wall.
I decided to include this extra element during a trip to the province with my husband and
two children last summer because helping Habitat build a house for a family in need seemed
like a good-hearted way to learn about home renovation.
At first I worried that I would be an unwelcome liability to Habitat — the Volunteer from
Heck. I’m the sort of person who is baffled by simple domestic repair jobs, such as darning.
I can’t build a garbage bin much less raise a barn. I can’t even assemble my son’s Lego projects.
What I discovered, however, is that Habitat really does provide on-the-job training for
its volunteers, and it does so in a spirit of easy-going generosity. Laughs abound. (And
not all of them at my expense, it turned out.)
Throughout the rain-swept month of July, the people at Habitat had been working with drop-by
volunteers to erect a simple, threebedroom bungalow on donated land beside a field of goldenrod
in a Charlottetown suburb called Hillsborough Park. The home had been earmarked for the Harding
family, a couple with two children who couldn’t afford to buy their own house at market rates.
The deal was that Habitat would build the house at a cost of roughly $90,000, and the Hardings
would pay them back via a monthly, interest-free mortgage over 20 years. The family also
had to put in its own “sweat equity” by working on the build.
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