The weekend before daycamp started, I attended a three day training program at Habitat for Humanity's headquarters in Americus, GA. While I was there, I toured the newly opened, Habitat for Humanity Global Village & Discovery Center.

This is a six-acre park, which is expected to attract 70,000 visitors each year. Part of the park is a poverty housing area, which depicts typical slum homes found worldwide. Surrounding the slum area are Habitat homes built like the homes that Habitat builds in various countries around the world.

I heard that the new facility inspired at least one negative comment from the press. Apparently one reporter said that now Habitat for Humanity has built a "slum amusement park". As one who has toured the facility I can assure you that it was not amusing.

I had some free time on the last day of our training session and decided to use it to tour the Global Village. Quite a few of the people in the training program had the same idea. We entered as a group and the first stop was the area where the slum had been created. I didn't hear the gleeful sounds of an amusement park as I toured the slum. In fact, people were very quiet.

Words like house, building, or shack are not appropriate to describe what I saw. They were small shelters that didn't offer much shelter. They were built from scraps of wood and pieces of corrugated tin. I have better building supplies in the scrap woodpile behind my garage.

The tent that I use on my bike rides has more room than many of the rooms in that slum. It would also be less likely to leak during a rain.

Beds consisted of foam mattresses lying on a dirt floor. There weren't any closets or dressers. In many cases, people who live in places like this generally wear all the clothes they have.

In one house a burned out light bulb hung from a piece of clothes line rope attached to a nail in one of the roof boards. There wasn't any electricity, of course. The sign outside the room said that people who live in these slums have hopes and dreams of improving their conditions. The useless light bulb was a symbol of that hope.

I don't know why the people in the group I was with walking through this slum were quiet. In my case, I think it was because I was almost in a state of shock. Still, it was less of a shock than an actual slum of this type would be.

Without people living there, you cannot recreate the smells that would be present. There was no outhouse as part of the display. I don't think there would be an outhouse in the actual slum either. There would also be no running water.

I began to think about whether or not I would be able to survive in a place like that. I wondered how depressed I would be if I was living there.

Then I realized that as grim as this was, it was better than an actual slum would be. The people who built it were Habitat for Humanity workers. These people generally have building skills, and tools. You wouldn't be able to get them to build a slum as bad as an actual slum would be.

While people in this country think about whether to use vynal or metal siding other people are debating about a piece of plywood with several holes, a smaller sheet of tin that would first have to be straightened out or the possibility of stretching a quilt between a couple of boards. While the slum was depressing, the other houses offered hope.

The other houses are replicas of Habitat for Humanity homes built in various countries around the world. They are well built using materials that are appropriate for the climate and the economy where they would be located. While they are many times larger than the shelters in the slum, they are much smaller than the homes most of us live in.

They are simple, they are decent, and they are affordable to their homeowners. Even if they are built using baked mud blocks, the baked mud blocks are built in a quality manner, and they will stand the test of time.

People touring the facility have the opportunity to make a mud block and a clay roof tile with the tools at the site.

The Global Village is in Americus, GA, which is two and a half hours from Atlanta. It's only a few miles away from Jimmy Carter's hometown of Plains. If you are ever in the area, I encourage you to stop in and see the Global Village.

For those of you who wish to do more than tour a pretend village, there are opportunities to go to real global villages. Habitat for Humanity has volunteers working all over the globe. Log on to their web site at www.habitat.org and see what it would take for you to become a volunteer at a global village work site.

While I was working on this article, I decided to log on to the Habitat for Humanity web site myself. I took out my credit card and ordered two videos. One is a video of the world record house built in 2002, and the other is a Global Village video. Both videos will be available in the church library soon after they arrive.

Our Habitat for Humanity affiliate in North St. Louis County tithes. We send ten percent of the undesignated donations we receive to Habitat for Humanity International each quarter. Our tithe is used to build homes in Mexico. I am proud of the work that Habitat for Humanity does with our tithe in Mexico and with the tithes from other Habitat for Humanity affiliates all around the world.

May God bless each and every one of you.

Sincerely,

Pastor Birk