SOUTH BEND — Country music superstar Garth Brooks spent yesterday talking about his plans to play a concert at Notre Dame Stadium, and spent today building a new home in Mishawaka.

Brooks’s real home is still in Oklahoma, and the Mishawaka house he was working on belongs to Habitat for Humanity.

It’s not the first Habitat home Brooks and his wife, Trisha Yearwood have worked on, and it probably won’t be the last.

It took a natural disaster to demonstrate it was a natural fit: Habitat for Humanity and the husband and wife team of Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood. “We started in New Orleans after Katrina (Hurricane) and we just, we went to do some press and to swing a hammer for a minute, and we stayed all day. We had the best time,” Yearwood said.

“Just one hour of doing this, and one hour will turn into eight hours, one day will turn into five, it’ll be a ‘must’ you have to do for the rest of your life. It’s a dream,” added Garth Brooke during an interview with NewsCenter 16 Tuesday morning.

Brooks and Yearwood have been back every year since, swinging hammers and swooning at the steady heartbeat of the Habitat landscape.

“Garth always says this is the sound of love, those hammers, that’s what it is you know,” said of the constant drone of hammer strokes.

“You know what they say about Habitat houses, where a carpenter will use but one nail, Habitat house will put about eight, and so when storms and everything hit they seem to do just fine,” said Brooks.

Yearwood added, “I think they’re built with love, so they’re built to last and you know, everybody has this tradition of kind of signing some of the frames and stuff that end up getting covered up but everybody is going to sign God bless this house of, you know, this is for you and your family, whatever, so all these blessings are in the walls.”

In Mishawaka this week, 22 homes are being built by about 2,000 volunteers as part of the Habitat Work Project named in honor of former President Jimmy Carter. “It’s pretty cool to have someone that’s been a world leader realize that love is probably the most powerful weapon that we have on this planet,” observed Brooks.

“I think things like this remind us that there is a lot of good and there are a lot of people here from all walks of life, all political affiliations all religions, everybody is together working together of love,
It’s possible,” said Yearwood.

Source: WNDU