CityView Magazine

"That house was a mess, but I looked at it like it was a piece of gold. I was so glad to have it." – Barbara Marshall B arbara Marshall's whole life changed in July, that's when a crew from the television show "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" knocked on her door to tell her that she'd be getting a brand new, custom- built home for Jubilee House, a shelter for homeless female veterans that she operates on Langdon Street, near Ramsey Street and Fayetteville State University. "I thought, 'This is really going to hap- pen,'" Barbara said of the day she got the news. The following day she and three of the female veterans who lived in the home were whisked away to Disney World while the tiny, crumbling house they'd occupied was demolished and a towering home was built in its place — all in seven days. Now settled into the home, Barbara says she still can't believe all that has happened in such a short amount of time. Six years ago Steps N' Stages, the organization that operates Jubilee House, was just a dream of Barbara's. The Navy veteran and former chaplain had fallen on hard times her- self and, as she attempted to navigate the sometimes complicated paperwork needed to obtain veteran's benefits, she began to dream of ways she could help others. "I thought that the help I was receiv- ing would be the kind of help other women 40 | September/October • 2011 veterans needed. I guess that's just the for- mer chaplain in me," Barbara said. She said that the Veterans Affairs sys- tem can be even more complicated for women than it is for men because it is still adjusting to the large numbers of female veterans entering the system. And, with a daughter currently serving on active duty in the Army, the issue also had strong per- sonal ties for Barbara. "Being a woman veteran, it's difficult to maneuver," Barbara said. "Our VA has a new reality with women vets." Barbara noted that recent women vet- erans have an added hurdle to overcome in that the VA system is also more accus- tomed to dealing with older soldiers. "Traditionally, they didn't have to deal with pregnancies at the VA," Barbara said. "That's something they're having to get used to now." So Barbara founded Steps N' Stages and after a few years she'd managed to scrape together the $24,000 she needed to purchase the home on Langdon Street that would become the site of her shelter at a VA foreclosure sale. Later, she took members of the media and representatives from Fort Bragg on a tour of the home, so optimistic about the organization's future that she was nearly blind to the home's many defects. "That house was a mess, but I looked at it like it was a piece of gold. I was so glad to have it." Ben Abel and other workers in the Fort Bragg Public Affairs Office went on a tour of the home and were so moved by her mis- sion and by the lack of resources she had to work with that they contacted the ABC network's television producers to urge them to consider Jubilee House for "Ex- treme Makeover: Home Edition." "At first I thought it was a hoax," Bar- bara said of when a crew from the show arrived to interview her. "All the way to the end I didn't think it would happen." But it did happen. For a week hundreds of volunteers from around the region swarmed Langdon Street to assist the tel- evision crew and Blue Ridge Log Cabins, a South Carolina company that volunteered to build the home. Barbara's neighbors pitched in, too, allowing hordes of stran- gers to take over their yards and tolerating construction noise and bright lights that continued through the wee hours. And in the end, Barbara had a gorgeous home — and much, much more. "It feels like home but what feels really good is that it's home to more than just me," Barbara said, referring to both the PHOTO BY BYRON JONES

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