St. Michael School sixth grader Ainsley Messina is not ready to build a house on her own.
“No!” she said. “But I might be able to help someone build a house.”
Messina, 11, her 7-year-old brother, Nolan, and parents, Steve and Jill, spent a chunk of their Saturday morning constructing walls at a home building event that included volunteers from seven area churches in the parking lot of St. Francis of Assisi in Orland Park.
Other churches involved in the project were St. Elizabeth Seton of Orland Hills, St. Stephen Deacon and Martyr, St. George and St. Julie Billiart of Tinley Park, the Incarnation Religious Education group of Crestwood and St. Michael of Orland Park.
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Ainsley might not be ready to build a house on her own, but she knows someday she can look at a house in the Joliet area and know she had a hand in building it.
It was a mixed day for her.
“It’s both fun and hard,” she said. “The hardest part is putting in the nails.”
More than 220 volunteers were on hand to pound nails and other tasks to help build the walls on a duplex house as a part of a project organized by Habitat for Humanity and CrossRoads Missions.
Some of the people who were sweating on a humid morning to get the walls of the house in order were family members working in solidarity.
St. Francis associate pastor the Rev. Jay Suero surveyed the noisy activity and appreciated all who helped.
“It’s amazing to see not just adults from seven churches coming here, but whole families,” Suero said. “It’s a learning process for the children. There is so much that goes into making a house. There are all of these little things just in the walls itself.”
The walls will be stored at the Will County Habitat for Humanity for the time being and the house will be completed by skilled workers and be presented to a family in need.
CrossRoads Missions is based in Louisville. Project manager the Rev. Joe Wilson and his wife, Colleen, based in Louisville, oversaw the two-day project, which started Friday with prep work.
Joe Wilson estimates that the years before the pandemic shut many things down in 2020, the organization built 70 houses a year.
One day a few years ago, he was a part of a Louisville church project that really went to town.
“Once we started 27 homes in one day and had 5,000 volunteers,” he said. “It was crazy.”
He has more than 40 years of experience in construction and was ordained in Kalamazoo, Michigan and moved to Louisville in 2006.
Cindy Wilson said she is a volunteer and tries to make it to as many building projects as she can.
“This is a whole different type of ministry,” she said. “It’s hands-on. Growing up, we heard that mission work was going on the street and evangelizing. That’s just not our thing.
“But to do physical things and help people in physical ways, that’s our thing. People say ‘ahh, I don’t know if I can do mission work, but I can build a house.’ That’s how Joe uses his talents.”
Joe Wilson said that over the years, the planning and system has been perfected to allow people of all ages to be able to work on these houses.
“They cannot make a mistake on this,” he said. “There is no way they can make a mistake. What they do is create a learning opportunity. They are going to learn how to take the walls apart and learn how to put them back together. We make sure everything is flush together so that two-by-fours are not sticking out too far. All of that is checked and we can cut it apart and fix it.”
During a morning prayer and speech, St. George pastor the Rev. Ken Fleck encouraged the volunteers to take a pen or marker to write a prayer or good wish on the section that they were building.
Each church had designated building leaders and the group as a whole finished 96 walls.
Jeff Vorva is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.