Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter collapsed on Thursday in Winnipeg, Canada, due to dehydration. He was helping build a new Habitat For Humanity house when he lost consciousness, The New York Post reported.
The 92-year-old former president was rushed to the St. Boniface General Hospital for treatment. After he collapsed, firefighters and paramedics helped him and took him to a hospital in an ambulance.
Working hard all week
The Carter Center, in a statement, said that Carter had been working hard all week. Since it is summer, working in the hot sun dehydrated the former president.
He was taken offsite for observation. Despite the incident, Carter encouraged Habitat for Humanity volunteers to keep building but to also stay hydrated.
He was working for more than an hour on the steps of a house with a drill when Carter became unsteady at the construction site. Eyewitnesses said the former president slumped away from his work area to a chair, Reuters reported.
Affordable home ownership
Helping people acquire affordable homes is the goal of Habitat for Humanity, a charitable organization. For his humanitarian work, Carter, who was U.S. president from 1977 to 1981, was given the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. He volunteered to build 150 homes with Habitat for Humanity in honor of Canada’s 150th foundation year.
Habitat, founded in 1976, is a non-government and non-profit organization that addresses the issues of lack of housing all over the world by functioning as a Christian housing ministry. Volunteers, like Carter, help build homes, and Habitat does not make a profit on the sales of the homes. Since 1976, the ministry has helped over 4 million people all over the world build, rehabilitate, or preserve more than 800,000 houses.
Carter, a Democrat, was the only president who attended in January the inaugural of the current Republican President Donald Trump. He admitted that during the primaries, he voted for Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton.
Before his election in 1976, a bicentennial year, Carter was the governor of Georgia and a peanut farmer. He was a lieutenant and nuclear engineer in the U.S.
Navy until he retired and became a farmer.
In August 2015, when he underwent liver surgery, the former president was diagnosed with melanoma, a form of skin cancer which spread to his brain and other parts of the body. Four months later, Carter – who has a family history of cancer – shared that according to his latest brain scan, he had no signs of cancer.
