Hours before Leeteesha Walker and Marion Sullivan’s Alston Street houses were dedicated at a ceremony, volunteers landscaped nine houses, installed smoke detectors at 60 houses and provided emergency preparedness information in the neighborhood. Their efforts were among several deeds carried out across the nation for Make A Difference Day, which aims to better communities.

Not far from Alston Street, volunteers slipped on their gardening gloves and got a little dirty to clean up the Asian Gardens at Milam and Common streets. The Aseana Foundation, which manages the downtown garden, put on the event in partnership with Make a Difference Day.

“I just thank everyone who thought enough of me to come out here and work,” Sullivan said. “I’ve been blessed with a house before. The house before was from my parents, but this one is mine — it’s a lot different,” she said with big smile.

Make A Difference Day 2009

Walker said she never dreamed she’d be a homeowner at age 22. The house was originally built to be handicap accessible, but during the build process Walker’s grandmother, who applied for the house and convinced Walker to be a co-applicant, passed away.

“I say she knew that she was going to pass away. That’s why she wanted me to be the co-applicant,” Walker said, calling the house a blessing for her and her 5-year-old son, Rodrigues Walker.

Walker grew up in Allendale and her approaching move-in date is bringing her full circle. From birth to age 12, Walker lived in a small house on the very lot where her new three-bedroom, two-bathroom house stands in the 1400 block of Alston Street. She said she was shocked when she learned months ago the location of her future house.

Just outside her kitchen door is a sidewalk adjoining her house to the house of soon-to-be-neighbor Sullivan, 67, the woman’s granddaughter and two grandchildren.

In 2005, as Hurricane Katrina approached, Sullivan and her family vowed to leave together and stay together or not leave at all. “There were 21 of us, and we left in my granddaughter’s Hyundai Elantra.”

Walker’s and Sullivan’s houses are the 39th and 40th houses completed by the Fuller Housing Center.

“When we undertook our 40th home — 40 is typically a number of trials and tribulations — we knew we would have some trials and tribulations,” said Lee Jeter, the center’s executive director.

Construction began Aug. 31 and as deadline — Make a Difference Day — approached, the rains came.

The constant rain over the past two weeks “has proven this house is built on the rock,” Jake Owensby, dean of St. Mark’s Cathedral, said alluding to Matthew 7:25, which reads “The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock.”

Receiving the keys to their homes is not the last step, but the first step, in the women’s path to home ownership, according to Katie Weir, co-chair of the center’s board.

Sullivan and Walker will each close on their house later this week and enter a 20-year, no-interest mortgage. Their mortgage payments, set between $350 and $400, pay for the cost of the building materials.

The formerly adjudicated property the houses are built on is donated as well as all labor and some materials. And the city’s role in donating the land is one Mayor Cedric Glover said “represents the greatest of win-win scenarios the city likes to be involved in.”

The city is able to move out of the red when these property are no longer their responsibility to maintain. “We’re returning stakeholders to this community,” Glover said.

© Kelsey McKinney/Shreveport-Times