Saturday's Internet Edition, May 17, 2008.
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The Rev. Dennis Marshall says there are plenty of people who are needy in the local community. - Photo by Robin Snow
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So, when he realized someone in this county was living with black mold covering the walls of her home and that another person was living in a barn, he decided it was time to do something to make sure at least one of those human rights was being taken care of.
That is how Hope Homes of Davie County began.
Marshall is the pastor of Bethlehem United Methodist Church. One day, about three years ago, Jim Sanders, the pastor at Union Grove, got a call from a woman who told him her truck was stuck in her front yard. She asked for help getting it out. Sanders knew Marshall, who was the pastor at Hardison at the time, had a larger truck, so he called him for help. Marshall ended up getting his truck stuck in mud, and when a wrecker came to pull him out, it, too, got stuck.
In all the commotion, Marshall said he noticed something about the woman, Marsha Tise, something that just didn’t seem right.
“She asked me if she could take a five gallon bucket and go to the church to get water because her well was out. When I left there, something just was not sitting right with me at all,” he said. “I went back a week later and asked to see her house. There was black mold everywhere. There were holes in the floor, huge holes, and one was right next to her bed. I could see the ground through her floor.”
Marshall said through a series of events, including the death of her husband and health issues, Tise’s living conditions had deteriorated to the point that her home was inhabitable.
“When I left there that day, in tears, I thought, ‘We go all over the world to build something for someone to make their lives easier, and here we have this right in our own backyard.’ ”
That day, a plan began to take shape in Marshall’s brain.
Because he was on the board for Wesley Community ... subscribe to the Davie County Enterprise Record, P.O. Box 99, Mocksville, N.C. 27028.