A home with heart

American volunteers bond with a Polish family while tackling a big project in a small village

It was a little after 8 on a Monday morning, and our small bus bounced along the narrow roads that wind their way through the Polish countryside.

Gone were the tall buildings, the fine restaurants and the bustling streets of Warsaw.

So, too, as we learned one miserably hot night, were the air-conditioned hotel rooms of the big city.

Instead, we were now here, in Redzynskie, a small village of about 1,400 people nestled among Poland’s wispy fields of corn, wheat and oats.

Our group — a lawyer from Philadelphia, a Marine from Twentynine Palms, California, a career counselor from Tampa, to name a few — had ventured to this Polish village as part of a Habitat for Humanity Global Village trip.

In doing so, we joined the estimated 1.6 million Americans who participate annually in these types of humanitarian efforts. Each year, volunteers travel abroad to play a small part in addressing world hunger, tackling poverty and, yes, building homes.

As for us, we were here to finish a project that began two years earlier, when a group of volunteers from Switzerland stood in this same field, in this same village, and began assembling the jigsaw puzzle of concrete blocks that would eventually become a two-story home for a deserving family.

It’s a far cry from the sagging farmhouse where Miroslaw Kawka, his wife, Agata, and their six children currently live — all crammed together in one room that measures only 269 square feet.

See those three sofas along the walls?

That’s where everyone sleeps. There’s no heat. No bathroom. No real kitchen.

See that small sink?

ANNALISE KAYLOR / HABITAT FOR HUMANITY INTERNATIONAL Habitat for Humanity volunteers have helped build this two-story house for the Kawka family: (from left) Dominik, 9; his mother, Agata; his brothers, Kacper, 11, and Sebastian, 14; his sister Veronika, 8; and his father, Miroslaw, who is holding 3-yearold Amelka. The couple’s oldest son, Szymon, 16, is not pictured.

CONTRIBUTED BY PERRY SHULL Mark A. Waligore (left), managing editor and senior director at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, traveled to Poland as part of a Habitat for Humanity trip. He and Stanislaw Bartosik, a Polish contractor, have stayed in touch via Facebook. The interaction, Bartosik said, will help him with his English.