Home, at last

WADMALAW ISLAND --For a moment, among all the people hugging her, Henrietta Mack stood by herself on the porch steps of the new home she was about to be given.

Her fingers settled lightly on the rail. She looked over at the ramshackle mobile home where she slept the night before and blinked back tears.

It was about to be Christmas.

"It's just wonderful," she said afterward. "I didn't know all this was going to happen."

Mack's home is the first of two being built by volunteers through Rural Mission Inc. after Carol Etheridge, Charleston Place human resources director, read about the families' plight.

The Smiley family home in Hollywood is expected to be completed in the next few weeks. The mission is non-profit that has scraped since the 1960s to build and repair homes for elderly and low-income families in the Sea Islands and southern Charleston County.

Inside Mack's home, her children and volunteers with Rural Mission scurried like elves to assemble the bed in her bedroom, hang the towel racks in the bathroom and get a few kinks out of the water pressure so they could hand the keys to the 73-year-old Wadmalaw Island woman on Christmas Eve. It was a gift she "never, never" expected, made possible with the help of a community led by a few strangers.

In the home where she lived since the 1970s, the roof is falling and leaks. There is no central heat. The floors have been so soaked by rain that it feels like walking on sponges. Emily Champy, Mack's daughter, came from New York for the housewarming of her mom's new home.

"This place," she said, "is as nice as a dream."

These homes became a reality because Etheridge wanted to help. She took the desire to Mickey Bakst, Charleston Grill general manager, who picked up the phone, called Burrow Hill of Hill Construction and started a snowball rolling that raised about $30,000 and much more in the labor donated by workers who came from Lowcountry organizations and as far as a Mennonite school in Lancaster, Pa.

When Bakst introduced himself to Mack on Thursday, she grabbed him and squeezed.

"Thank you. God bless you. You might be my Santa Claus. You bring me a home," she said. Bakst deflected attention, saying he had only a small part in the effort. He urged people to continue to support the mission's work.

"It's about a bigger thing. It's about building homes in our community for people who cannot do it on their own," he said.

Then they all gathered on the porch. A crowd of people who had helped formed a ring and clasped hands in a yard covered with sand over the construction traffic mud. They gave Mack a Bible for her new home, told her that Piggly Wiggly had donated a Christmas Eve dinner for her, family and friends. Linda Gadson, the mission's director, gave her a bottle of hallelujah anointing oil to keep the demons out of the new home.

Hill handed Gadson a check for $1,000 to help keep the effort going. She put her hand over her heart and swooned.

Mack wore her Sunday best going-to-church outfit, with a sparkling heart pendant one of her daughters had given her as a Christmas present.

"It touched my heart," she said earlier about the effort from so many people she hadn't known before. "Thank you, thank you, thank you. God is good."

Gadson urged everybody to sing "Silent Night" and the melody rang soft and haunting across the yard. Diamond, Mack's dog, turned a circle in the sand by the porch rail and lay down, home at last.

Reach Bo Petersen at 937-5744 or bpetersen@post andcourier.com.