FEATURES

It’s a little after 8:30 on a Saturday morning in late May and the air already feels like the inside of an EasyBake Oven. Sweat drips into my eye as I train my handheld video camera on John and Yeamata Kollie. The occasion? A special wall-raising ceremony to kick off the six-month haul it’ll take to finish building the house in Kennedy Heights the couple is receiving through the good people at Habitat for Humanity. It will be the first piece of property they’ve ever owned.

John and Yeamata are flanked by representatives from Cincinnati Habitat for Humanity and Ohio National Financial Services, which has agreed to fund the construction of 10 homes throughout the area over the next five years. Yeamata is holding their son, John Jr., while their daughter, Esther, bounces around in front of her, her head full of colorful barrettes shaking wildly. This is the first time I’ve seen the couple and their daughter in nearly two years.

“Thank you all for coming and joining us in building this house,” John says into a microphone perched on the edge of the foundation. “This is your place. Feel free to always come and visit the Kollie family.”

After spending a few months interviewing and hanging out with him and his wife two years ago for a story delving into their lives as refugees in Greater Cincinnati, I’m certain his invitation isn’t simply hyperbole. John means it. This sincerity is part of what makes he and his wife hard sources to shake. You don’t always get a chance to follow up with the subjects of your stories, to find out what happens to them after you walk out of their lives. But in the case of the Kollies, I decided to stay in touch, to try to track what might become of them in their adopted homeland after enduring so many years of hardship abroad. Which is why I find myself standing in their soon-to-be front yard smiling almost as much as they are.

I first met the Kollies back in May 2007 while John was trying to teach Yeamata how to drive. I wanted to tell the story of an immigrant family in Cincinnati and was instantly drawn to them when I learned about their lives in West Africa. To break the ice, we had a late lunch at the IHOP in Oakley before heading off to a gravel parking lot across the street from Spring Grove Cemetery & Arboretum for one of Yeamata’s thrice-weekly lessons. John was instructing both his wife and one of his friends, so each time she waited for her turn, Yeamata and I stood off to the side, chatting. She let me hold her daughter, who was only 1 at the time.

Talking to the Kollies was probably the easiest set of interviews I’ve ever done. I was surprised at how comfortable they were with me right from the start. They seemed unconcerned with how much detail I needed about their lives here and back in Africa.

At that point they’d been in Cincinnati for two years, living in Kennedy Heights and in the process of moving to Western Hills. John was supporting his wife and daughter working as a panel builder at Blue Ash’s Advantage Architectural Products. Through the good graces of the U.S. Refugee Admission and Resettlement Program, the Kollies managed to get out of war-torn Sierra Leone, where they’d both grown accustomed to living with the violence of a country in constant turmoil. There was always something earnest and forthright about them, something about their unflappable air even as they faced disaster.

Describing the circumstances of their former lives down to its minutia—the horrific violence they witnessed, the miracle of their flight from Sierra Leone, the stress and strangeness of their first months in America—may have been difficult for them but they didn’t let it show. In the end, it was their story and they knew it. Speaking to a reporter could not change it or take it away from them. Of course, it probably also helped that I was retelling the story of a life they no longer lived; the bloody, internecine conflicts of Sierra Leone were far behind them.

I suppose it was the couple’s perseverance that attracted me in the first place. They nurture my ever-dwindling sense of optimism. John could have simply fallen apart, chosen to surrender to the adversities that tried to wear him down. He could have chosen not to pursue Yeamata, to not marry her in the middle of a war. The two of them could have chosen to accept their circumstances and not move to Cincinnati at all. It was—and still is—amazing to me that at some point they didn’t simply give up.

In most cases, writing a magazine article about someone is a lot like starting a book and never making it to the end; you’re only covering one chapter of a person’s life. After a certain period of time, some of my sources become something akin to distant relatives: I’m not involved in their lives on a daily basis, but I still care about what happens to them. So when I got an e-mail last February from Anne Garrett, the International Family Resource Center worker who helped me set up my initial interviews with the Kollies, I was thrilled to hear that they’d been approved by Cincinnati Habitat for Humanity.

The organization receives more than a thousand home inquiries each year. Less than 25 percent of those who inquire and meet the preliminary qualifications, including income and need, are actually interviewed for houses and less than 10 percent of those are actually chosen. “I just spoke with a rep at Habitat and she said that while their need for housing wasn’t extremely high, they looked at their past struggles as refugees and when they put it into context, they determined that the family was very deserving,” Garrett wrote.

Everyone who meets the Kollies already knows this. They are struck by their continual faith in what pursuing a better way of life will bring. The more than 250 volunteers who helped build their house would no doubt agree. By the time it’s all said and done, they will have put in nearly 3,000 hours of manpower in order to complete the house, getting to know John and his family in the process. “Feeling his enthusiasm and seeing all the hours of sweat equity he’s already logged on the construction site made me realize what an enormous undertaking this is,” says Peggy Williamson, a communications coordinator for Ohio National Financial Services. “The strain on the body is more than offset by the lifting of the spirits, and knowing that you are helping a good family have their first home,” says Mike Haverkamp, Ohio National’s senior vice president and general counsel. “John is a good and decent man who could not have been more gracious and thankful.”

Kimberly Plante, associate counsel at Ohio National, told me that John was so excited to be a part of building a home for his family and appreciative of the volunteers who showed up to help “that he made sure he got a picture taken with every volunteer.”

Over the course of the summer, I paid a number of visits to the house and was blown away by the progress the Habitat crew made in such a short period of time. Shortly after the May wall-raising ceremony, the walls and roof went up. By the end of September, the bulk of the work had moved indoors, with volunteers and site supervisors installing insulation and putting up drywall. Each time I went, though, I missed Yeamata, who was off taking care of the kids or working at Mountain Crest Nursing & Rehab, where she’s a nurse’s aide. Later, we caught up over the phone.

First, I found out that although Yeamata has been practicing for two years, she only recently went to get her driver’s license. Bad news: she didn’t pass the road portion of her driving test. The instructor failed her when she accidentally signaled right instead of left on her way back to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles office. “I was a nervous wreck,” she told me, still managing to be jovial about the situation. “I passed the written, but that one mistake that I made on the road test...I almost cried.” Good news: She took the test again and passed. The funny thing is, after all the hours she logged with John, barreling through that gravel lot and learning how not to give her very patient husband whiplash, she’s not sure if she’ll be comfortable driving across town to Western Hills in the winter.

Overall, the headaches and logistics of packing, filling out change-of-address forms, and the million other little things you have to do when you move is nothing compared to the joy that your own property brings. “I feel like I’m having a good dream,” Yeamata told me at one point, and I could hear John Jr. squealing in the background, mirroring his mother’s excitement. “I’ll be in a safe house, in a safe place. I can’t wait to move.”

The leaves, brilliant shades of orange, yellow, and red, are falling from the trees when I head over to the Kollie house on a crisp mid-October morning. Once again, I’m greeted by the constant pounding of hammers. There is still no landscaping to speak of, but the place has light gray siding and several volunteers are standing at least 15 feet off the ground on top of the skeletal frame of the porch, nailing down its roof. The temperature has dipped surprisingly low and everyone is wearing coats and hats, some opting for warmer hands by shoving on work gloves.

John is on the side of the house, talking to volunteers about the garden he and Yeamata are planning. He intends to use the type of traps he used to set in Africa to keep the deer from eating his plants. One woman promises to come back and help them with the garden once the house is complete. He thanks her by name. Turns out he knows most of the volunteers by name (he had them sign his prayer list—he plans to pray for each one as a thank you for helping his family) and shouts a rousing “hello” to each one as he passes.

Inside, there are doors stacked against a living room wall. Nail guns sound off as volunteers attach doors on the upstairs bedrooms. John says he and Yeamata have yet to choose a color palette. “They’ll be painted white for the time being,” he adds, smiling. “We’ll have plenty of time to pick colors later.”

Nick Vision, a tax manager at Ohio National, is at the back of the house installing drywall in the kitchen. Vision has volunteered at the Kollie home nearly every weekend since the project started and worked closely with John putting up the roof during the summer. They have a friendly rapport normally reserved for drinking buddies. “I told John that this is our house until the mortgage payments start showing up, then it’s all his,” he jokes. John laughs boisterously and shakes Vision’s hand before walking back around to the side of the house. I ask him how he’s feeling for the umpteenth time, as if I’ll get a different answer than before. Surely there have been some frustrating parts of the process. The actual date the house will be finished is something of a moving target, but Habitat aims to have the place move-in ready shortly before Christmas. That, John makes clear, is nothing they can’t handle.

“I’m rejoicing,” he says. There’s a twinkle in his eyes. “On Sundays, I bring Yeamata and the kids over here, and she stands out front and dances.”

That’s good news all around. Kennedy Heights could use some public displays of happy dancing. Before I leave, we stand side by side looking up at the house, lost in our own thoughts. I look over at him and am almost certain his eyes are a little watery. Maybe it’s the cold air, I think, though it wouldn’t surprise me if he cried. His life and that of his family’s has changed astoundingly and, I hope, irrevocably for the better. To shed a tear or two seems entirely appropriate.

Originally published in the December 2009 issue.