Cancer survivor thankful to have home of her own
Season for Caring donors helped 2013 campaign subject leave shoddy trailer for dream come true.
Two years ago, when Agustina Mandujano was introduced to readers as part of the 2013 Season for Caring campaign, she was a breast cancer survi- vor who had just had a double mastectomy.
Living with three of her four children on a meager ranch on the outskirts of Luling, Mandujano, 46, cooked outdoors
and slept in a dilapidated trailer on her sister and brother-in-law’s property. Aside from the kids she raised alone, her pride was a gorgeous garden yielding peppers, pumpkins and watermelon that she labored on, even when her aggressive cancer treatment made her weak.
Thanks to about $40,000 in Season for Caring funds plus additional donations of labor and materials, Mandujano’s ranch now has a new 864-square-foot, three-bedroom home on it. The little bright blue house with white trim came together largely through the tenacity of churches, nonprofit agencies, businesses and volunteers from as far away as Fredericksburg and the work of Community Action Inc., which nominated Mandujano for the campaign in 2013.
Each year, the Statesman selects up to 12 featured families nominated by local nonprofits to participate in the program. Since 1999, readers have donated more than $9 million in in-kind goods and services. Money raised in addition to the featured families’ needs go to help hundreds of other families the nonprofit agencies serve. On Sunday, the Statesman will introduce a new group of featured families.
Building the Mandujano home was a slow, challenging process. Jim Dickinson, a retired state worker who’s now a cattle rancher in Gonzales County, read the Season for Caring story and donated but decided that wasn’t enough. He thought Mandujano needed a home.
“Her story itself got to my heart,” Dickinson said. “From that point on, I think God just slowly nudged me more and more into it.”
He continued visiting and pushing others to work on the home for Mandujano until the work got done. The first long delay was trying to get a deed to the land transferred to Mandujano’s name before construction could begin. “I’d come back later, still nothing was going on with the house,” Dickinson said. “I got to punching and prodding people to figure it out.”
The prodding worked. Groups including Central Baptist Church in Luling donated thousands of dollars. Contractor Matt Goebler gave $5,000. Volunteers and businesses including Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative and McCoy Corp. donated time, labor, materials and the plans to build a slab home, get water and electricity to the home and even install an entire septic system, as required by Caldwell County.
In the blazing August heat, a group of 10-20 workers each day labored to get the home started while Mandujano cooked meals and made aguas frescas.
By last weekend, construction of the home was largely complete with the exterior painted, tile flooring installed and a small companion doghouse set up outside.
The family has been transitioning into the house as the construction winds down. On Saturday night, when temperatures dropped into the 30s, Mandujano spent her first full, restful night asleep in the home, warm and comfortable on a bed donated by Factory Mattress. “It was so cold, but we were happy. We were content,” she said in Spanish.
The blue color of the house has special significance for her. When her son Agustin, who is now 17, was only 3 and the family was new to the area, Mandujano labored on a ranch, bringing her kids to stay with her.
Her son would cry at night, missing the modest blue house in Luling where they lived. “He’d cry along with the coyotes,” she said. “‘I want my blue house.’”
He doesn’t remember the crying, but now he has his blue house, she said.
The home is not perfect and there’s still a lot of work to be done. A kitchen fixture hangs on its wiring, in need of securing. A rusty, leaking water heater needs to be replaced; until then, the hot water line has been shut off. The roof needs more work, and an area outside that will cover a washer and dryer is not yet complete. Recent flooding has also made Mandujano aware that she’ll need a path around the house where the ground gets muddy and slick. The volunteers continue to work to get it finished.
Her health is much better than it was two years ago, but Mandujano still feels the strong side effects of the medications she continues to take, which can sometimes make it difficult to walk or get up. She’s been determined to keep going for her kids and to provide for them.
But Mandujano is not a complainer or a negative person, a fact that’s made the volunteers working on her house gravitate to her cause. Her “angels,” her new family of people who’ve worked so she could have a roof over her head, are a family that Christ has given her, she says. They’ve made her a home, something Mandujano didn’t think was possible.
“It seemed like a faraway dream,” she said. “Now it’s becoming a reality.”
‘Her story itself got to my heart.’
Jim Dickinson
Cattle rancher who helped Agustina Mandujano