Margie and Don Cook embraced their retirement with a heart full of purpose, leading to the establishment of Hands On Houses—a beacon of hope for widows subjected to societal neglect. With deep-rooted faith and innovative engineering minds, they reshaped not just communities but the lives of countless women. Hear senior widows praise their newfound sanctuary and young widows share how a home changed their children’s future. Dive into this heartwarming narrative that weaves technology, faith, and compassion together in creating secure futures for struggling widows.
00:00:00 Introduction to The Good News with Angie Austin
00:00:09 Introduction of Guests Margie and Don Cook
00:01:04 Margie’s Story and Mission of Hands On Houses
Welcome to The Good News with Angie Austin. Now, with The Good News, here’s Angie.
SPEAKER 06 :
Hello, friend. Angie Austin here with the good news. Well, I’m really excited about my next two guests because they were on my show, I don’t know, 10, 12 years ago. It’s been a long time. Their organization, their nonprofit is called Hands On Houses, and it’s Margie and Don Cook. And after they retired many years ago, they started a nonprofit building houses. And you’ll find out exactly who they’re building them for. It’s such a wonderful organization. Welcome, Margie and Don.
SPEAKER 05 :
Thank you, Angie. So nice to reconnect with you.
SPEAKER 04 :
Thank you to all the people listening, too.
SPEAKER 06 :
Well, you know, Don and Margie, I’ve been following you over a decade now, ever since you came on the show. So, Margie, why don’t you start and tell us about your journey after retirement and about this organization you started. And then Don will move to you and get into the specifics of how you’ve gone about doing this. So go ahead, Margie.
SPEAKER 05 :
Well, I’m 75 now and Don’s 78, and we’re never going to retire. So in 2007, we felt the Lord calling us to go out to build houses for widows in Southeast India. And we started just with going out with two suitcases each, not knowing where we personally would stay, but knowing that we had a pastor to work with. And we started building suitcases. slowly in the very, very poor villages, mainly for widows. And our organization didn’t even have a name in those days, but now it’s called Hands on Houses. And up to date, we have built just under four, about 460 houses, mainly for widows all over India. Now we’ve expanded. God has opened many doors to us. We’re building in Nepal and Sri Lanka. We’re building in Zambia and Africa and El Salvador in South America. And we just keep walking through the doors that God opens for us. And he’s so faithful. He’s just continue to expand the work. And there are more and more widows who are so grateful to have a home that they thought they would never, ever have.
SPEAKER 06 :
And I want to talk to people a little bit about the circumstances in which they live. So handsonhouses.com if you want to donate, get more info. And I know, Don, you’ve improved the process and how you build these little homes. And can you talk to me, Don, a little bit about how widows live or are treated, what happens to them in society when they do lose their husband, and how many of these women were living before you built them a house?
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, Angie, it’s quite shocking in the way that widows have had to survive in India. There was a time probably about 300 years ago when widows were required to die with their husbands, you know, when their husband was cremated, they would, they would be put on the funeral pyre with him. Um, so there’s a, there’s, there’s just a real antagonism towards widows in India and in many other parts of the world too, but in India has been the worst. Um, the, uh, they’re seen as carriers of bad luck and, um, people don’t really welcome them in their communities they’re sort of required to stay out of sight and wear clothes that represent the mourning you know that they’re mourning for their husbands so it’s really it’s a very sad tale what has happened though is that Christianity has been spreading through India for many years and that whole attitude has been moderated but the The widows are still not expected to remarry. In the 17 years that we’ve been involved in India, we’ve come across two ladies who were well-educated and were in a position to get remarried. But generally, the system in India is that I think 90% at least of the marriages are arranged. And the arranged marriages usually have to fit in with the caste system, which is a very I don’t know whether that whether I should discuss that a bit more, but not really. But it’s just in a nutshell, widows have really, really had a hard time in India for a long time. And so we felt sorry.
SPEAKER 06 :
No, no, no, no. You carry on, Don.
SPEAKER 04 :
So when we went out to India in 2007, we actually thought we would build houses for people that had lost houses during the tsunami that had hit Banda Aceh and Indonesia and a lot of that area. But somebody, I don’t even remember who it was, could have called me almost anonymously and advised me not to get involved with the disaster relief in the tsunami hit areas. And a friend of ours who was showing us around took me to some of the villages and he told me that he’d been trying to help the tsunami victims by giving them rice and helping them in whatever way he could. And he found that they were not giving any rice to the widows in their communities. Oh, my goodness. And when he asked them, he said, yeah, he said, they said, the leaders have said, look, we just don’t really want them here. We wish they’d leave and go and stay somewhere else. So that’s been, that was what triggered our decision to focus on widows as far as possible. So I’d been working, I’d actually, I taught chemical engineering for 20 years and then sort of took an early retirement to get involved in a project in a way but i was impressed by a indonesian man who’d found that by using appropriate technology opened doors to villages where he’d previously been warned to get out and stay away and don’t come back sort of thing but he’d worked out how to use biogas and a few other sort of pumping systems and found that people were just begging him to come to the villages and help so that’s what sort of inspired me I thought well I’ve got a technical background my father had been in construction so I thought well Maybe we could start making cement out of seawater, which is quite a long story. But a friend of mine said, look, you know, there’s just been the tsunami. People are going to need houses. Stop talking about cement. Get out there and start building houses. So that’s really what we ended up doing.
SPEAKER 06 :
You know, it’s so shocking to me. Like, I knew that they were treated poorly from our interview, you know, over a decade ago. And I’ve been following your journey and over 400 houses built now. But I didn’t realize you started because you found out after the tsunami that they didn’t want to even give rice to the widows. and that i know they were living outside or under like they’d make you know some kind of a makeshift lean-to with you know leaves on top and you know of course there’s a lot of rain and so they’d have to rebuild their little lean-to and they basically were just living in a manner which was not healthy or at all comfortable and you know basically dangerous that these women were barely surviving And so, you know, following some of the stories, I’m sure both of you have some, you know, special ones. But Margie, do you want to tell me one or two stories about some of the women you help? And by the way, again, these aren’t big, fancy houses. It might be as big as your walk-in closet at home. But to these widows, it is life-changing. So tell us about some of the people you’ve helped. They all, of course, are special stories, but any that really stuck in your mind?
SPEAKER 05 :
Yes, it is amazing because so many of them are living in a car shed or they don’t have proper walls and they go to sleep at night. We had one woman who we built a house for. And when we went to see the house that had been built, she was there praising God and saying, thank you, thank you, thank you, Jesus, for giving me a house. Because I used to have to go to sleep in a car shed at night. And there were no doors that could be closed. This was all through translation. And she was constantly afraid of snakes coming in and biting her during the night because she didn’t have a house where she could close the door and know that she could sleep safely. So that was one story that touched my heart because I just felt, I can’t imagine going to bed at night and not being able to rest peacefully. And she couldn’t do that. And she’s one of many widows like that. We’ve built for young widows. You know, there’s a high proportion of suicide rates amongst husbands. And I remember one widow we built for a few years back. She was pregnant with her third child and her husband committed suicide. And she had these two little children together. and we were introduced to her and the pastor we were working with at the time wanted to build her a house. She was 23. She’s probably never going to get married again because of the culture and she had these two children and another one on the way and we’ve subsequently seen her and seen her house and she’s just so grateful because her children will grow up in a safe environment. They’ll probably do better academically at school and then when she’s In her old age, they’ll probably care for her because there’s no insurance there for people in villages. They live from day to day, and their children are their insurance that will look after them when they’re older. So it goes from one generation to the next, Angie. It’s quite amazing. It’s not just something that’s going to look after a widow for. a few years, you know, can affect her life and her children.
SPEAKER 06 :
Yeah, from 23 on, her whole life, like you said, probably not remarrying, which is unheard of in, you know, in the States and where you’re from as well. Now, a car shed, is that like a carport in America where it’s just a roof with like, you know, four sticks to balance the roof and it’s not enclosed?
SPEAKER 1 :
No.
SPEAKER 05 :
Angie, that’s my accent. It’s a cow. K-C-R-W. Cow.
SPEAKER 06 :
Oh, shit. Okay. Sorry. I thought it was like a carport. Oh, goodness. No. Margie and Don, your whole family has gotten involved with you. Your kids are also Christians. Tell us about that. Before we take a break, we have about two minutes. Tell us about your family getting involved.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yes, our oldest son Andy and his wife Carla joined our team about 12 years ago, lived in India with us for three years and they’re now living, they’ve been in Hawaii for a while, they’re now living on the US mainland with their three children and Andy does a lot of the work, he manages the different projects, he’s our accountant, Carla is a graphic designer, she designs all our books that we send out and cards that we do and our website and so they’ve been part of our team for as I said 12 years and it’s wonderful to have them on board and then our other children have introduced us to partners in different parts of the world Zambia came through one younger daughter’s recently after teaching in South Korea for 10 years she and her family have relocated to Kenya and we will be visiting them in February and hoping to find some partners in Kenya, East Africa, Central East Africa. And our youngest son has also done a lot of introducing. So our family has all been involved at different levels.
SPEAKER 04 :
We started off with us. Go ahead, Don. No, you carry on. Okay, thanks, Angie. So when we started off, our youngest son decided he was going to bring three or four of his friends to come and help us and he came out and spent time with us and our two daughters have also been out with their husbands. And so it’s been a, it’s been a very sort of, we’ve been very encouraged by our children. Our children have been incredibly, uh, supportive of what we’ve done. And we’re, you know, uh, in looking back, it’s, it’s amazing what they’ve done to help us. And, how so many people have helped us. It’s really been a sort of a journey of seeing the body of Christ come to life and just to where we’ve just been so blessed by so many people and helped and guided. And so it’s been a wonderful story, Angie. Yeah.
SPEAKER 06 :
I want to hear more. Hold on. Keep that thought last year, Margie. The website is handsonhouses.com. We’re going to take a break. Again, it’s handsonhouses.com. If you can get there to their locations, you can help volunteer. But there’s also a donation button there and a lot more about the work they do. We’ll be right back with Margie and Don Cook. And the nonprofit is handsonhouses.com. We’ll be right back.
SPEAKER 01 :
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SPEAKER 03 :
You’re tuned to AM670, KLTT, Commerce City, Denver, KLTT HD, and streaming worldwide at 670KLTT.com.
SPEAKER 06 :
Welcome back to The Good News. Angie Austin here with Margie and Don Cook, and we are talking about their nonprofit Hands on Houses. After they retired, well over a decade ago, they started building houses for widows. They were in India at that time, and they wanted to help out people after the tsunami, but they heard that widows weren’t even getting rice when the rice was being handed out to people in need. And then they found out that they were really left behind, that Many of them didn’t have homes that the majority of them don’t remarry and that they’re really living in an extreme situation of poverty. And so, Margie, let’s pick up where we left off. You were saying?
SPEAKER 05 :
We were just talking about how our whole family has been involved with us, our four children, our children-in-law. And then last year, we had the wonderful opportunity and privilege of having our oldest grandchild, Max, come out. And he helped paint a house and watched a house being built. And he was with us with his father, Andy, for two weeks. And he was eight at the time. He’s now 10. He was nearly nine, actually. But it was just such a joy to have one of the next generation come out and actually see what we’re doing and be part of it. So, you know, it’s been a family affair, Angie.
SPEAKER 06 :
Don, I remember asking you and Margie, like, you know, you could be like you mentioned one of your kids moving to Hawaii after they worked with you and now living on the mainland U.S. And I said you could be sitting on the beach in Hawaii. But you really felt led after your retirement to start building these homes across the world for these widows who’ve been, you know, just really set off to die. And so explain what led you to feel, you know, what was the calling all about for you and Margie?
SPEAKER 04 :
As I said, I taught engineering for 20 years, and I really felt that, you know, I should use my technical knowledge as a way to reach people with the love of Jesus, you know. So I I had these plans for, as I said earlier, making cement, but then I’ve also had plans for making a type of house that could go up quickly. Um, and that would, you know, hopefully start meeting the needs of so many people as quickly as we could. So that, that was what sort of encouraged us to go out and use, to use the gift of a house as a platform for presenting the love of Jesus to people who need to know about that. And so, um, So our motivation is really to spread the gospel, but it’s just using technology and the gift of a house as a way of opening the door to people asking the questions, you know, the sort of questions, why are we doing this? And. And there’s some other questions that we’ve had difficulty answering. We were watching a house being built once, and one of the neighbors came up to me and said, so tell me, what can Jesus do for me? So those are the sort of things we’ve had to deal with. And it’s been very interesting just communicating. Having some sort of idea of what the culture is like and what people have, you know, what their sort of impression of Jesus is and that sort of thing. But the purpose is to use technology, to use some sort of ability that we have to reach people with the love of Jesus.
SPEAKER 06 :
And the process, I know, even back when I talked to you like 10 years or more ago, you mentioned that your process had improved from maybe a wooden lean-to kind of structure. And again, these are not fancy houses. They’re like an oversized closet in some cases. But your techniques improve and you are building more and building them quickly and less expensively. Talk a little bit about that because I know your engineering mind can’t wait to tell me about that.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, Angie, it’s interesting. When we started off, I had this design that involved making concrete panels and tipping them up and then putting a cement roof on top of that. But I found that just through a whole lot of trial and error that we actually ended up with houses that we felt… were not as good as the houses that people would have preferred to get. And so most of our houses towards, you know, in the last 10 years that we were in India, were built out of cinder blocks with a sheet metal roof that was guaranteed to last at least 20 years. So I had to sort of, what actually happened was when our son Andrew decided to join us, he said to us, looked at, You know, you’re experimenting with all these different houses, but we’re only building about 10 houses a year. So why don’t you consider sort of laying your research and development aside for a while and let’s focus on production. So that’s what we did. We ended up going from 10 houses a year to 30 houses a year just using the normal construction techniques that the local people knew. um what we discovered or what we sort of realized after a while was that we didn’t really want to build our houses quickly um initially we thought well you know be great if we could build a house that could go up in a day or a week and then uh you know we’d be able to build so many more houses that way but our our purpose is really to use that time that we have where the people that are receiving the houses and the neighbors who are receiving houses or watching going on can interact with the people who are doing the construction who are all Christians and some of them are using their construction jobs as tent making to keep themselves going while they focus on developing little churches in the area. It’s interesting that we decided, we realized that we actually want to spend a bit more time on the construction than just to go in there, build a house and get out.
SPEAKER 06 :
So you can kind of spread the word of the Lord while they’re building.
SPEAKER 04 :
Exactly. Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER 06 :
That is so neat. Now, Margie, I want you to tell me, that’s interesting that it went to now more labor intensive so you could talk about Jesus. Margie, tell me how people have volunteered with you. You mentioned how your kids got involved. And so tell me a little bit about that.
SPEAKER 05 :
Well, initially we had a team that came out with our younger sons. from his university and they helped us for the first month and got the project going really quickly, which we were so grateful for. And then subsequently, we’ve had teams come up from mainly from YWAM. Are you familiar with YWAM, Angie?
SPEAKER 06 :
No, no, no, I’m not.
SPEAKER 05 :
It’s a very big missions organization internationally. They train young people. to go out and take the gospel using different methods. They use all sorts of things. It might be health-orientated. It might be creative arts. It might be all sorts of different ways, and they’re constantly training up people. And their main university is the University of the Nations in Hawaii, and that’s what we were connected with. And so we have many friends there, and they’ve sent teams of about 12 or 13 young people to us In the early days, we had quite a lot of teams coming out. We’ve had volunteers over the years. We’ve had young people come. We’ve had older people come. And so that’s what people have done as they’ve come out. Sometimes they’ve spent a week. Sometimes they’ve spent a month. It just depends. In fact, we had one young man who came out for a couple of months, and we rented a house next door for him. So that’s how people have helped us on the ground. And otherwise, I have a team of prayer people who pray constantly for us. And I know that without prayer, we could never do what we’re doing. And then we have people who don’t want to come, but they’re happy to donate. So, you know, it’s a sort of… many-faceted support group all around.
SPEAKER 04 :
Just an interesting story. We had a young guy, a Polish lad, who heard our radio interview in Dublin, Ireland, and asked if he could come out. And then we discovered that it was part of his honeymoon where he and his wife came and painted a house in one of the villages. Quite interesting. And then afterwards, they said it was the highlight of their honeymoon.
SPEAKER 06 :
Oh, that is so neat. Yeah, what do they say? The best way to get out of yourself if you’re not feeling so great, or if you are feeling great, is to do something for others. So how has this impacted you? Your life, Margie or Don, whoever wants to answer this one or both of you, how has this impacted your, and I’m using air quotes, retirement? That’s pretty funny. You never really retired.
SPEAKER 05 :
It’s funny, Angie. You know, we were just such a normal, ordinary South African couple living in the Cape Town area at the tip of Africa. We never think we would ever move. And so I think God just called us out of our easy environment, and we spent 10 years in Hawaii, and then it’s been 17 years in India. And it’s just given us such a greater perception, I think, of who God is and what he does and how he wants to use you if you’re open to that. And the world is one’s oyster. You know, if you prepare to go, you know, there’s that scripture in Isaiah, about who will I send, who will go. And we used to sing that song back in South Africa, not really knowing that we were opening ourselves up to God sending us somewhere. And just the fact that we’ve had the opportunity to go and to do and to be what God’s wanting us to be has just enriched our lives incredibly. We’ve met so many amazing, wonderful people. And we’ve just had so much interface with all sorts of people all over this world. And we would never have ever imagined that when we were young, living, as I said, in an easy life, just raising our kids in the local community and church and greater family, you know. So we’re just so grateful that, you know, God has just opened doors to us and held our hand as we walked through. You’re so faithful, Andy.
SPEAKER 04 :
Go ahead, Don, go ahead. I just look back and think whether the last 17 years haven’t been the most exciting years of our lives so far, you know, because people have often said to us, oh, it must have been terrible having to sacrifice so much and go out and work in the villages there, but It’s been an incredible time. It’s just been exciting. It’s been just full of the Lord. It’s just been one of those things where there’s never been a dull moment. And we’ve just seen so many amazing ways in which the Lord’s faithfulness and the Lord’s Your presence has just been, you know, sort of addictive. So we’ve been having fun and we, you know, it’s been great.
SPEAKER 06 :
You know, and in following you, you didn’t, you know, you had a place to live, but there were times when it was also rather makeshift as well. You weren’t living high on the hog while you were building these houses for widows in these towns. you know little villages so you know you’ve made sacrifices too you didn’t have that quote-unquote comfortable life maybe that you had when you were in south africa raising your family and don was working as an engineer but what a great thing to do um you know for the lord as a team you know the two of you together and then joining your family in and i want to make sure that people can get information the website is hands on houses.com hands on houses.com And as Margie and Don Cook mentioned, they’re building houses in other locations as well. You can find out more about them and their family and their support staff, the builders and what they’re doing for the widows. God bless you both. And what a privilege to have you on the program again.
SPEAKER 04 :
Thank you, Angie. It’s so wonderful to talk to you again, Angie. Yes, wonderful.
SPEAKER 06 :
You too, Angie. God bless you too. HandsOnHouses.com. Thanks, guys.
SPEAKER 02 :
Thank you for listening to The Good News with Angie Austin on AM670 KLTT.
