Posted on Wed, May. 07, 2008

Building a new hope

Non-profit offers strong foundation to a deserving woman

By Merlene Davis

Herald-Leader Columnist

Charles Bertram

Diana Villiers Negroponte, a human rights activist and Habitat for Humanity International board member, crawled out from inside the foundation of a house that Habitat for Humanity's Women Build group is building for LaShonda Johnson at 208 Carlisle Ave. Photo by Charles Bertram | Staff

Lashonda Johnson, 26, hasn't had an easy life. At 14 she'd quit school, was working a couple of part time jobs and caring for her sick mother. But, she still had hopes, dreams and self-confidence.

Until four years ago.

That's when her mother, a traveling minister, died in the car as Johnson was driving her to church. It was Mother's Day of 2004.

"She had been sick," Johnson said of her mother, "and her sister had died two weeks before. They said it was too much stress."

Confused and alone, Johnson returned to the hometown she knew, trying to make a home for herself and her infant daughter. She soon discovered that although she had changed, the environment and people of Laurel, Miss., had not.

"It was waking up drinking and going to bed drinking," she said. "I wasn't raised like that."

She and her daughter came back to Lexington, moving first to an apartment on Versailles Road and later into a house downtown with a family friend, all in an effort to "find a decent home in a decent area," she said.

"Before we moved into that house, I said I had only two more moves left in me," she said. "This will be that second move."

Johnson, who works with a catering company, was pointing to the cinder block foundation of a two bedroom home at 208 Carlisle Ave. that will soon be hers, thanks to Lexington Habitat for Humanity and Women Build.

Diana Villiers Negroponte, an international human rights activist, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and board member of Habitat for Humanity International, was there Tuesday morning giving Johnson a big hug, congratulating her on her new home, and wondering if Johnson's very long fingernails would survive the work that lay ahead.

People who qualify for Habitat houses are required to provide a certain number of hours called "sweat equity" toward the building of their home or others.

"We're going to build a house today," Negroponte said.

Negroponte, whose husband John D. Negroponte is U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and a former ambassador to Iraq, was in Lexington to speak at the Women Leading Kentucky Conference during lunch.

During the morning , dressed in a T-shirt and shorts, Negroponte carried planks of wood and a crowbar, looking nothing like a novice.

"I came to Habitat to work with families who had never had a home before, who had never dreamed they could own a home before," she said.

This week leading up to Mother's Day is "National Women Build Week." But the big push in building Johnson's home won't be until July 25 and going through August, with officials handing over the keys on Sept. 7, the 20th anniversary of the completion of first Habitat home built in Lexington.

Negroponte has worked on a dozen Women Build projects, nationally and internationally, in the decade since Habitat created the program, she said. Women volunteers have built more than 1,200 homes nationwide, with Johnson's being the ninth in Lexington.

By the end of this year, Lexington Habitat will have served 300 families.

One of them will be Johnson and her 5-year-old daughter, Christina.

"We were out here last night taking pictures of it," Johnson said. "I told her this is our house."

Negroponte said Johnson shows the leadership she has witnessed in women throughout the world, but especially in resolute African American women. It is the "can do, will do, must succeed" credo, she said, that has taught women they can achieve what they set their minds to.

It has worked for Johnson.

She applied to Habitat in February 2007 and qualified late last year.

"If you put a little effort into it, there is always something better," Johnson said.

Even if the toll is a couple of nurtured fingernails?

With a couple of raised eyebrows, a shoulder shrug and a lingering look at her hands, Johnson said, "We'll see how many I have left."

I took that to mean c'est la vie.