In a stark white house on the West side, Harrice Jones is thinking about her drugged past and the future she’s forging as a resident of Alabaster Box home. The 33-year-old declares she now feels comfortable walking past a street corner teeming with drug s
"I was scared to come back into the city [from the suburbs] when I was living in my addiction, because I wasn’t prepared to face the streets," she said. "But now I walk by them with my armor on." But she’s dealt with her share of drug problems. "When I came here, I was 32, but I was acting like I was 2," said Jones, who also copes with bi-polar disorder. "I was doing drugs. "
In part, she has Pastor Carol Walker to thank for her newfound strength and sobriety. Walker, a minister and a registered nurse, founded Alabaster Box as a sober living and transitional house eight years ago, to help women trying to overcome addictions.
"I’ve been a psychiatric nurse for over 30 years, and I’ve seen women coming in and out of the hospital, and most of the time it was a dualdiagnosis," Walker said. She witnessed women suffering from depression, or other psychiatric conditions, who were also struggling with addiction to alcohol and drugs.
Today, the house currently is home to three women, and they work together to clean up their lives, once saturated with substance abuse. "I’m safe here," said Jones, who has been at the home for a year. Before she came to Alabaster, Jones said, she compulsively smoked marijuana and used cocaine.
"I always say if you get addicted in the ‘hood, you can get clean in the ‘hood," Walker said of the house on West Fulton Street. Most women at Alabaster start off in a trial period, where their endurance is tested most, Walker said.
Tenants are on lock-down during the initial 30 days and can only leave the house if they’re going to work or searching for a job. Not in my backyard But neighborhoods are not always open to the concept of community- based treatment, as managers of similar substance-free facilities have found.
"It doesn’t take much to stir up the ‘not in my backyard’ stuff about these homes," said Paul Malloy, CEO and founder of Oxford House, Inc., based in Silver Springs, Md. "But these homes are not treatment facilities, they are just substance- free environments." Malloy founded Oxford House in 1975, one of the first community-based approaches to stopping substance abuse.
What began as one tiny house has grown to more than 1,200 homes across the United States, with each one operated independently by residents. At Oxford House, there are no second chances. "You break your sobriety, and the house members have to vote you out," Malloy said. "It’s part of the organization’s charter rules."
Walker said, under her nonprofit status, she’s free to make her own rules. At Alabaster, they’re more forgiving. "Whether you come home drunk or not, we just want you to come home," said Walker’s daughter, Ayonda, "and we’ll go from there." Ayonda Walker serves as program director and is the only other staff. She knows what the women are facing, because she struggled with addiction as well, she said.
The importance of goals "We want to make sure the women have goals, or else they could just end up wherever when [they] leave," she said. As part of those goals, the women are expected to complete basic tasks, as a step toward reclaiming a sober life, Walker said. The tenants are expected to pay their $350 monthly rent on time.
And the house is closed from 9 a.m.-3 p.m., when the women are expected to go to work or look for a job.
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