Rankin521web

MARY ANN KIRBY
Shower Power Operations Manager
“Medgar? How long has it been
since you’ve had a proper place
of your own to call home?”
He furrows his eyebrows as he calculates.
“I don’t know. I guess eleven or twelve years....
maybe longer. Hmmmm, yeah–longer.”
We met Medgar back in December of
2019 while we were just getting our feet wet
(pardon the pun). We are Shower Power,
a ministry that provides showers for, and
serves, many members of downtown
Jackson’s homeless or marginally sheltered.
Medgar was one of our original adopters,
has come regularly ever since, and remains
one of our very favorite friends.
So during the course of one of our
conversations around mid-2020, and
months after we’d known him, Medgar
mentioned having a house. We knew him
to spend most of his time on a bench
around one of the downtown landmarks–
so this news of a house was very surprising.
He said, “Y’all wanna come see it?” And
that’s all it took.
We followed Medgar to a structure
that was completely dysfunctional and
dilapidated. It explains why the majority
of his time was spent on that bench. Both
his mother and brother had spent their
lives living in it prior to their deaths and
were unable to manage any type of upkeep.
And since their passing, it just continued
to deteriorate.
It had no power and no operable
plumbing. It had become a hoarding site
with rooms of rubble and remnants of
former lives piled from floor to ceiling–
the result of years-long neglect. We thought,
at the very least, we could help clean it out
so that on days when it rained–or in the
extreme cold–Medgar could have shelter
from the elements.
So on Labor Day weekend the Shower
Power team, along with additional recruited
friends and family members, descended
upon Medgar’s house with shovels and
gloves, buckets and respirator masks, and
a commercial-sized dumpster. We shoveled
our way in and created a path from room
to room.
It took days of nothing but clearing out
in order to get the house completely emptied.
Nothing was salvageable. And what we
were left with, structurally, was devastating.
There were broken floor joists and rotten
subflooring. At one point, what used to be
the kitchen was now only dirt below.
An entire exterior wall gave way, rotten
from the absence of any type of vapor barrier
and moisture from a roof that didn’t seem to
deflect a single drop of water. In all honesty,
any reasonable human being would have
simply written the house off and slated it
for a complete tear-down.
We started a social media campaign
including a GoFundMe to raise money to
Hometown RANKIN • 91