On October 6, 2019, Jimmy Carter fell at his home in Plains, Georgia and hit his forehead on a sharp edge. The wound took 14 stitches to close and left the 95-year-old former president with a black eye.
He had survived worse. In 2015, Carter announced that melanoma had spread to his liver and to four spots on his brain. After radiation and a then-new immunotherapy drug, a scan that December showed the brain lesions were gone. In May 2019, he broke his hip in another fall and needed a replacement.
So when he split his forehead open that October, nobody would have blamed him for resting. Instead, he and his wife Rosalynn traveled to Nashville the next day to kick off their 36th annual build with Habitat for Humanity.
Carter walked on stage with a bandage over his stitched brow and addressed the crowd directly. "I fell down and hit my forehead on a sharp edge and had to go to the hospital... And they took 14 stitches in my forehead and my eye is black, as you've noticed. But I had a number one priority and that was to come to Nashville and build houses."
He had been doing this since 1984, one week a year, every year. Across those decades, he helped build, renovate or repair more than 4,300 homes in 14 countries.
The Nashville project that week put up 21 new homes. Carter said he and Rosalynn would work on the porches, so every single house would have something the two of them built with their own hands. Contrast that with TRUMP.
