By By LYDIA GRIMES – Features writer
Thanks to the volunteers of Habitat for Humanity, there will be two families living in new homes in the near future. All that remains to be done are the finishing touches.
Dr. Alecia Glaize has been very busy since first arriving in Brewton nearly a year ago. She is the director of the Brewton chapter of Habitat for Humanity and besides being a busy housewife and mother; she is the wife of the pastor of First United Methodist Church of Brewton.
On her first day of her job as director of Habitat, she got involved with the plans for a building blitz, which has just taken place.
Habitat received grants to build two houses for people who had been adversely affected by the recent hurricanes.
Three hundred volunteers showed up at various times over the four days of the blitz and work stayed ahead of schedule. Even on Sunday when it rained, volunteers marched to work. They put up two houses in four days. At the same time they re-roofed one other house, which will be renovated for another family, and did some work at another couple of houses in the area.
Habitat has three criteria for those who receive housing: They must need adequate housing, be able to repay the loan and have the willingness to put in 400 &#8220sweat” hours of equity on someone else's house.
In the 30 years since its inception, Habitat for Humanity has placed many families in homes they would not have had otherwise. Recently, the willingness of celebrities to add their names to those who volunteer their help, has gotten the program even more publicity and Habitat for Humanity is the perfect example of what happens when volunteers step up and take on a project.
Glaize was born in Troy and grew up in the Glenwood community. Her family consisted of her parents, one sister and herself.
Her father was the postmaster at Glenwood, and they attended school in Brantley. She came from a hard-working family, and their ethics were instilled in her at an early age.
As a youngster, Glaize attended and worked at Blue Lake, a church-run camp in Covington County.
She also met Ed Glaize while at Huntingdon. They got married in 1985 right after she graduated with a bachelor's degree in religion with a concentration in Christian education. He was in the Air Force ROTC and as soon as they were married, they moved to George Air Force Base in California.
She went back to college at Clermont Methodist Seminary and received her master's degree in religious education. At the same time she worked at First Methodist Church in Ontario and St. Paul's United Methodist Church in San Bernardino, Calif.
Her husband got out of the military and they returned to Atlanta where he attended seminary at Candler School of Theology at Emory University. She worked as a youth minister in Marietta the first year and then the second year she became the director of education at Auburn United Methodist Church in Auburn.
The couple lived in Beulah, and Ed drove to Atlanta to school during the same time he was preaching at Beulah.
In 1991 Dr. Ed Glaize graduated from seminary and both of them were hired by First Methodist Church at Montgomery. They lived there until 1998 when he was called to Tallassee First United Methodist Church to the full-time ministry. They lived in Tallassee for the next seven years where Alecia taught Christian education part-time at Huntingdon in Montgomery and LaGrange College in LaGrange, Ga., where she wrote Sunday school and Christian camp curriculum.
During these years the family grew. Curtis was born in 1993 and Anna Grace was born in 1996, both while the family lived in Montgomery.
Glaize became a stay-at-home mom when she was not working at the church.
In 2005, Ed Glaize was called to pastor First United Methodist Church of Brewton. Alecia commuted north to Huntingdon and south to Escambia Academy.
She also volunteered to help with Habitat and the first of 2006 she was hired to be the director, which was for the first time a paying position. She went to Americus, Ga. for training.
Upon her return and on her first day at the office, she received a note from Tom Gerdy about the building blitz for Habitat.
Alecia is not content if she is not busy. Her favorite thing is to spend time with her children, but she is also busy teaching an adult Sunday school class and coordinating children's church. She likes to read, attend the local book club, walk and exercise at the YMCA.