In 1976, a 9-year-old Faith Fuller got a good-bye gift from a girl in her class at Eastside Elementary School in Plains, Ga. – a little stuffed pig, from a girl named Amy, who preferred to read her books while sitting in a tree.
Amy left Eastside that December. She was moving to Washington, D.C., because her father was starting a new job there in January.
That same year, in a town just a few miles from Plains, Faith’s parents founded a nonprofit that sought to build houses for people who could not afford them. It was an idea her parents had explored in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), where they’d served as missionaries, before moving to Georgia.
The idea didn’t gain much ground for about seven years. Faith’s father, Millard, shopped the idea the old-fashioned way: by “going from church to church to church to church, to community center to community center,” she said, trying to get people interested in working with an initiative he renamed Habitat for Humanity.
And for that seven years, it was slow going. But Habitat caught fire by 1984 because someone who knew Faith’s parents also knew Amy’s.
“Somehow, somebody at Carter's Sunday school class, some Habitat volunteers, realized that Carter was a carpenter, or enjoyed woodworking,” Fuller said. “And somebody thought, maybe he would like to be involved in Habitat.”
Carter, of course, was former President Jimmy Carter, who’d returned home to Plains following his term in the White House and gone back to teaching Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church. It was through this connection, Fuller said, that her parents landed a meeting with Carter. And her dad got right to the main question.
“My parents went over to meet with President Carter and Rosalynn,” she said. “Basically, my dad said, ‘Are you interested? Or are you really interested in getting involved with Habitat?’ And Carter laughed and he and he said, ‘Well, I guess we're really interested.’”
That conversation launched Habitat for Humanity to world recognition and forever linked the agency with Carter himself. Fuller looks back on the former president’s involvement with Habitat and isn’t surprised that he put his heart into it.
“He was just such a hard worker, so humble, and just … inspirational,” she said. “You just wanted to be a better person around him. I mean, his whole life was about making the world better. He wanted to eliminate human suffering. He wanted to bring peace to the world. He was just extraordinary, but so normal at the same time.”
That last part, about Carter being extraordinary and yet utterly ordinary, is something Fuller said several times over the course of our conversation. She remembers a man whose presence enveloped any room he was in, but whose ego was nowhere to be found, especially at church.
In the early 1990s, Fuller was a television reporter in Florence and Columbia. When she left South Carolina, she went back to Georgia to work for Habitat as a filmmaker. Today, she is still a filmmaker, but lives in Mexico with her husband.
But back in the 90s, when she got back to Georgia, she would often see Jimmy Carter at Maranatha Baptist Church. That was where Carter still taught Sunday school classes – so enthrallingly, in fact, that even someone who does not consider herself to be particularly religious found herself attending his lessons.
“I loved, loved, loved going to his Sunday school lessons because it wasn't just a Sunday school,” she said. “It wasn't just a Bible lesson. He would bring all the real-world events that he's been part of [and] bring those stories into these Bible lessons, and it was just so fascinating. And you’d just learn something new every time you would go.”
Fuller also remembers a lesson in faith that Carter gave her through one of his (many) books.
“I was really thinking about religion and what it means to me,” she said. “I was questioning a lot and there was a feeling that you're not really supposed to question, you're just supposed to kind of like accept. And I kind of felt like, ‘Ooh, I can't really tell people I'm questioning.’”
However: “In one of his books, he said it's good to question. You should question, and then you really can sort through what you really do believe. He was the first person I'd ever heard say that it's okay and it's actually good to question. That really stuck with me.”
With her own story and that of her parents being so intertwined with Carter, Fuller remains connected to what the former president meant to so many, whether as a spiritual guide, a homebuilder for the poor, or the chief reason why guinea worm – a crippling parasitic disease once prevalent in poor countries – is now on the verge of eradication.
As Carter is being laid to rest this week, Fuller has contemplated the impact of someone she considers to be an extraordinary everyman. Her main conclusion is a simple one.
“The world is better,” she said, “because he was in it.”
