Bill Whitaker

The 230 or so youths representing the Southern Baptist national mission group World Changers headed home yesterday after braving intense summer heat all last week while putting new roofs on 18 homes in a rough-and-tumble section of North Waco.

Community leaders were heartened to see the World Changers here, sorry to see them go and are eager to get them back next summer.

Jeff Wall, city director of housing and community development, tells me the roofs these youths put on are as good as those installed by professionals. Granted, Landon Moore, 42, the crew chief supervising a team of youths at a modest-sized home at Morrow Avenue and North 13th Street, turned out to be a NASA engineer.

Students from World Changers work to replace a roof on a home on Cumberland Ave. in Waco Tuesday.
Duane A. Laverty/Waco Tribune-Herald

When, in pure admiration, I asked Moore what advice he had for youths replacing a roof under his charge, he smiled and wiped the sweat from his brow: “The first thing is to stay on the roof.”

But the question remains. What did these kids — ranging from age 12 to college age — get out of the deal? When I asked 16-year-old Luie Herrera of San Antonio, he tried to explain, then handed me a card that cited John 3:16 and outlined how God’s love must manifest itself in community service.

That’s the point behind World Changers, begun in 1990 as a way for youths to demonstrate personal commitment and civic responsibility while learning about the world around them. And youths from around the nation learned lots about North Waco last week, not all of it savory.

The team of youths I met at Morrow and North 13th did cite the great joy of getting to know the owner of the house whose roof they tore off and replaced: Otis Gowan, 58 and disabled, is touted by some in our city as a de facto neighborhood leader, trying to drive off the drug dealers and prostitutes who mar this struggling area.

When I dropped by Otis’ home Friday evening, he said he was astonished that the youths saw him as any sort of role model.

“I just told them about life and how there are good people and bad people and that they were definitely good people,” he said.

Otis and wife Thresa have lived in the house since 1989. It was the ninth home built locally by Habitat for Humanity and he was just the sort of person they hoped might stay and shape the neighborhood. Otis remembers President George W. Bush addressing the media from his yard while the president helped build another Habitat home down the street in August 2001.

Madison Daugette, 13, of Albertville, Alabama, scraps paint from a home on N. 15th Street in Waco.
Duane A. Laverty/Waco Tribune-Herald

A quick cosmetic lift was given to a few homes nearby, Otis said, so it wouldn’t look quite so decrepit as background for the nation’s commander in chief.

Otis also told the youths about harrowing times in the crime-ridden neighborhood, mainly because he’s ever trying to highlight seedy elements. Once some individuals left a dead animal in his yard and indicated he might meet the same fate. Bullets have been fired at his house, he says.

“But if you don’t do anything, they will take over your neighborhood,” he said. “I used to have a sign out here that said, ‘This is a neighborhood, not a ’hood.’ ”

If Otis Gowan unwittingly taught some impressionable World Changers a thing or two about courage, compassion and community in a place as misunderstood as Waco, then perhaps the tradeoff this past week was indeed a fair one.