PARKSVILLE, B.C. –
Jayson Perry is in the midst of a journey he never expected to begin.
“It was a shocker for sure,” Jayson says of losing his custom cabinet business during the pandemic. “It was overwhelming stress.”
And then he lost his home.
“I’m just living in the bush (now),” Jayson says.
His former office manager, Shirley Chamberlin, says when Jayson realized that being homeless was going to be more permanent than just occasionally camping, his mental health started suffering.
“His walk was different. He was heavier,” Shirley says. “He was not taking care of himself.”
But then, one day, while wandering by a discarded box that had been stuck in a highway ditch for ages, Jayson felt compelled to do something about it.
“I just jumped in there and ripped it out,” says Jayson, who found the whole ditch was filled with garbage. “A lot more than I thought.”
So he spent the next couple hours picking up every piece of trash in that area.
“I …