‘ELE‘ELE — Chicago residents Nicole Tersigni and Rob Frappier are building a home on Kaua‘i. But the home they started this week is not for them, but for a client with Kaua‘i Habitat for Humanity. Tersigni and Frappier are newly-weds
‘ELE‘ELE — Chicago residents Nicole Tersigni and Rob Frappier are building a home on Kaua‘i.
But the home they started this week is not for them, but for a client with Kaua‘i Habitat for Humanity.
Tersigni and Frappier are newly-weds who are spending their honeymoon here as part of the Global Village volunteer group helping to build a home at the Mehana Road site in ‘Ele‘ele.
After getting married on June 12, Tersigni said they were talking about different trips and were looking at service missions on the Internet when they discovered the Kaua‘i Habitat project.
“Rob was all over that,” Tersigni said. “We used the money we got from the wedding to help fund this trip, and we’re having a blast.”
Jude Welling of Washington, D.C. is the team leader, serving her third trip to Kaua‘i after coming here last year as part of Thor Erickson’s Global Village group.
The arrival of the group coincided with the start of a new build of a home for the Kaua‘i Habitat for Humanity, said Janis Benn, the volunteer coordinator for Habitat.
“The group arrived Saturday and spent the greater part of Sunday going through more than 50 containers of clothing that needed to be sorted and prepared for the ReStore,” Benn said. “On Monday, they started digging footings for the new home. When it got too hot at the site, they came back to the Hanapepe facility to build trusses and do other work for the new home.”
The group was done with the footings Tuesday and were preparing the driveway to the home while awaiting the load of concrete for the footings.
Joining the Global Village volunteers, Clay Chow of Kapa‘a was putting in some community service hours as a qualification for a scholarship at the University of Montana where he is majoring in wildlife biology.
“I did this last year where we worked at the Hawaiian Homes site in Hanapepe,” Chow said. “This year, we’re starting a new house and hopefully when I get back next year we’ll be somewhere else.”
Welling said this Global Village group has people from New York, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Wisconsin and Chicago.
Fred Snyder of Milwaukee has been to builds in Zambia, El Salvador, Costa Rica and Guatemala, Welling said. This is his first domestic build and he brings Leng Xiong of Wisconsin who is on his very first Habitat build.
Bree Aseltine is from Seattle, Wash., where she does work for the Habitat chapter there, Welling said.
“This is our first time to Kaua‘i and it’s very exciting,” Tersigni said. “Everything is so beautiful and every time you turn around you find something else exciting.”
For more information on volunteering with the Kaua‘i Habitat for Humanity, visit www.kauaihabitat.org or call Benn at 335-0296 ext. 152.
