Season for Caring: After a year’s wait, a new home for Ethel Wright

Last Friday, Ethel Wright, 66, and her four grandchildren stepped into their new home in Kyle. It was a year in the making, but this Christmas, they will finally wake up in a home that doesnt leak every time it rains, that doesnt have holes in the floor, that has all its windows, and heating and air conditioning, and electrical wiring that works.

This is awesome, said 9-year-old Petey Crawford, as he and his siblings ran through the new three-bedroom mobile home picking out their rooms. We have a good home to live in.

Wright was part of last years Statesman Season for Caring program, which features 12 families each year and helps hundreds of others through local nonprofit agencies. Wright was nominated by Community Action Inc., which has spent the year trying to turn reader donations into a new mobile home.

Community Actions Jon Engel went to multiple mobile home dealers until finally Clayton Homes agreed to sell Wright a new home, worth $42,000, for the $30,000 Community Action Inc. had allocated from last years Season for Caring funds. Clayton Homes also removed the existing home. Matt Chambers, who is a home contractor and who teaches GED classes for Community Action, became the foreman to organize moving the new home onto the property and removing the old one. Pack-Rat gave storage units for Wright to store her things while the new home was being set up. Pullen Electric and Air Pro Heating and Air Conditioning donated their services. Students from Chambers GED class also helped.

Engel called it a Christmas miracle as he watched the family check out their new home. Without Season for Caring, this would not have been possible.

I appreciated what they did for me and my family, Wright said. Now we got a good place to stay, and we wont be cold anymore.

Without heat and with leaky windows, the family had placed tarps over the windows and put blankets in the doorways to keep in what little warmth they had from space heaters. Wright worried about the safety of the space heaters for Petey, 11-year-old JaRai, and 3-year-old twins Michael and Makhia, but she didnt have another solution.

It was really, really dangerous, Wright said.

Community Action still has work to do on the new home, including finding people to put on the skirting and build front and back porches and permanent steps into and out of the house. Scraps from the old house need to be cleaned up from the yard, and, sadly, Wright will have to replant her beautiful front garden.

I just want to thank all the nice people, Petey said.

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Season for Caring: After a year’s wait, a new home for Ethel Wright