An (Un)Exceptional Story: Debra Wray’s Path from Poverty to Project Host

Debra Wray’s story could be told in a great redemptive arc of an exceptional woman beating terrible odds and clawing her way out of a cycle of addiction and abuse to a position of sobriety, stability, and success. But Debra wouldn’t want her story told that way. On the contrary, she’d want you to understand the ordinariness of it all.

Debra grew up in a poor household, where she was surrounded by dysfunction and abuse. She responded to that environment in the way most kids would:

“My goal in school was to not get noticed. I was a smart kid, but by the time I was 13 or 14, I was the kid other parents didn’t want their kids to hang out with. I graduated high school at 17—a year early. My whole goal was to get out of my house.”

Drinking and some light drug use had begun for Debra as a young teenager as a form of escape, but she describes her decline into full-blown addiction as a slow, gradual process.

“Before hard drugs came into the picture, I drank every weekend and was a blackout drunk. I never said no to anything anyone offered me. In the beginning, I could hold down a job, but you eventually just get to a point where finding ways to get one more hit is so time consuming that you don’t have time for things like jobs, family, friends.”

What followed for Debra was a downward spiral into joblessness, homelessness, criminality, and desperation for just one more fix. Debra spent 17 years living as an addict, burning bridges to family and friends. And then, she turned her life around.

At this point, it’s easy to think of Debra as exceptional. To know her and speak with her is to know that you are dealing with an intelligent, savvy woman, and it’s easy to tell yourself that her recovery was due, at least in part, to being inherently smarter or more capable than others in her situation. Debra is quick to disabuse anyone of that notion.

“You would be amazed at the ingenuity and intelligence it takes to survive on the street. It’s hard. I know women not just in the Jasmine Road program, but also in Serenity Place and in all sorts of recovery programs, and we are more alike than we are different. One thing that we all have in common is that we’re intelligent. You have to be to survive.”

She explains that just as her spiral down was incremental, so was her recovery. There wasn’t a single “ah-ha” moment or hitting rock bottom like you might see in great redemption films. Instead, Debra’s addiction was punctuated by a series of moments of need, and a series of moments when someone reached out to offer help.

“I was tired. It is not easy to be homeless. It’s not easy to be in active addiction. My road to recovery was answered prayers—foxhole prayers in the back of a police car, like, ‘God, please, if you’ll just let me get out of this, I’ll never do it again.’ Or, ‘God, I can’t do this anymore. However you need it to look for me to get better, whatever that is, I am willing to do it.’”

Help did come in the form of a petite woman and her husband, who would bring food to an area of Greenville where women living on the street gathered, including Debra. Beth Messick, now executive director of Jasmine Road, befriended Debra, and when Debra found herself in jail and had detoxed a little, she would reach out to Beth, who offered help.

“It was a cycle for a while of reaching out and then falling back into old ways. I always knew that I needed help, but then I finally made the decision that I was going to accept it. It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t the way that I wanted it, but it was what I needed at the time to move forward in my life.”

Messick helped Debra get into a program in Duncan, where Debra spent nearly a year while Jasmine Road was still in development. Then Debra became a member of Jasmine Road’s pilot class. From there, she came to Project Host through a partnership in which Jasmine Road residents participated in the CC Pearce Culinary Program.

While Jasmine Road tended to Debra’s physical and emotional needs, Project Host offered Debra a place to just be ordinary again. It was a place to come and work and joke and be herself. No judgment. No pressure. Just a regular person doing a regular job.

“I liked the mission and loved the fact that Project Host is no questions asked because I’ve been homeless, and, over the course of rebuilding my life, I’ve gotten to see how much red tape was involved in getting services. It was refreshing for that not to be how it was here. I got to work with people who you could tell really had a heart for the mission. I could tell that they wanted to see me succeed.”

“Coming here and having people who were so supportive was something else that really drew me to Project Host,” Debra continued. “Homeless, drug-addicted individuals are not always treated kindly. Even when you’re not treated poorly, per se, people look at you as less than. We were trusted here to do the right thing. No one was watching to make sure that we weren’t taking things or checking behind us to see if we screwed up. I knew that I could make a mistake here and it’s not the end of the world.”

And, so, student became intern became office manager, and while she was on that path, Debra attended Greenville Tech, earning a degree in human services.

“I really wanted to help people who find themselves in situations I have been in. Now I get to use the things that I learned in life and at Greenville Tech to help culinary students and interns get gainful employment. I get to help with resume building and other things that are going to eventually improve their lives.”

Beyond just focusing on employment, Debra tries to look at students’ lives holistically and offer assistance in dealing with other challenges and barriers to success.

“I have a lot of barriers in my own life, and I get to use my background to help students navigate things like finding affordable housing, job placement with a criminal background, applying for SNAP benefits. I want to hopefully make it easier for them to do than it was for me.”

In her work with students, Debra recognizes that change is going to be incremental for others, just like it was for her.

“I don’t measure the success rate of the culinary school or what anybody here is doing on who can pick themselves up by their bootstraps and go on to live productive, successful lives. I don’t measure success in who has a great redemption story. If any person is helped in any way, I look at that as a success. I don’t define success as a percentage of students who completely turn their lives around. The single mom that comes through here and gets some assistance finding affordable housing or getting on waiting lists for the Greenville Housing Authority—she may not leave here and go to her dream job, but it’s a success if she is able to find sustainable housing. It’s a success if we can find someone who can fix her car. It’s a success if we can point her in the direction of any other organization in the community that can help.”

And so Debra tries, one individual at a time, to just help them get past one hump, one barrier, one challenge. When asked if she sometimes finds it difficult to work with people who face the same challenges she did because it may hit too close to home, she answers with a resounding “no.”

“For me, it’s empowering. I can see people that are where I was at, and it makes me feel good that I did it, and I can help show them the way. And their way may not be exactly what my way was, but I know that I can offer them a hand to help pull them out of the hole. And if need be,” she says with a chuckle, “I can jump down in there with them because I’m very familiar with it.”

If there is a takeaway from Deb’s story, it’s precisely not that she is an exceptional woman, but that so many people in our community face similar challenges, and that the road to finding one’s way back to stability and security is long and very difficult. 

“People don’t realize that you are not starting at a level playing field of zero. When you are trying to better your circumstances, you’re at a negative balance in every facet of your life. Your bills are behind, your credit is bad, and you are pulling yourself out of a hole. It’s not like you are climbing a ladder that’s on level ground. A lot of people don’t realize that there’s so much to overcome in order to get out of poverty.”

If there is something remarkable about Debra, it’s that she has chosen to channel the many bad experiences and challenges she’s faced in her life and direct them toward making other people’s lives just a little bit better, or their journeys just a little bit easier. Imagine if everyone had the empathy and determination to do that for others—what a truly wonderful world this would be.

By Claudia Winkler