Collin’s Blog – Planting Hope

By Collin Quigley, AmeriCorps Member & Volunteer Coordinator

The mission of Habitat MontDelco is through by putting “love in action,” to build homes, communities, and hope. We know that activating our mission is not something that we do alone. In celebration of Veteran’s Day, we were so happy to join one of our military families with the Veteran Service non-profit Heroic Gardens, and the military fraternity Mu Beta Phi to work together to grow hope on the Hite family’s front yard.

Christine Hite and her late husband George are a testament to service to our country. George joined the United States Army in 1981, where he served as an Army Chaplain, and retired with the rank of captain. Christine served alongside him overseas, working as the base librarian while the couple raised four children. In recent years, the Hite family has been through a lot. Last November, George passed away after a long, courageous battle with dementia.

George and Christine have been pillars of their community in Crestmont and are people who look out for everyone. While we were on the project, Christine and George’s daughter Debora briefly broke away from our group to talk to one of their neighbors driving by. When Debora rejoined us, she told us that she just talked to her former school hall monitor. Back then, Debora’s hall monitor did not have a car, so George would give her a ride to work every single day. Families like the Hite’s serve our country so well overseas and continue to serve others when they get home. They have never stopped serving others. Even as George battled dementia, he continued to provide pastoral aide to younger veterans battling post-traumatic stress disorder.

When George and Christine served overseas in Germany, a favorite task of theirs was tending to their garden. Habitat MontDelco believes that we need to go beyond offering words of gratitude and support to military families; we need to thank them by our actions. So, this Veteran’s Day season, we worked with Christine to restore the garden that she and George tended to overseas.

Our work to serve Christine and her family was a true team effort, with the help of the veteran’s service organization Heroic Gardens and the military fraternity Mu Beta Phi. Heroic Gardens is a grassroots veteran service non-profit, rooted in the belief that by planting seeds of hope, military families can grow and heal together. Mu Beta Phi is a brotherhood of military veterans who are committed to strengthening veteran communities. Together, our organizations and volunteers dug up the grass, build a retaining wall, leveled the ground, and planted the trees, flowers, and seeds that Christine can take care of and nourish.

This was the first partnership between all of us, with the hope of many more projects together to come. We were also lucky to be joined by Julia Vaughn, the newly appointed Abington Ward Five Commissioner, who has made history of her own as the first black woman to be an Abington Commissioner.

At a time of hurt and sickness in our country, our work was an effort to create anew. Those of us working on the lawn were of different races, creeds, identities, and lifestyles, but all sweating together to grow new hope on Christine’s lawn.