ABIDING BY THE NIA HOUSE RULES

HIGH POINT -- Nine o'clock on White Oak Street.

Twelve-year-old Zee Chambers runs down the sidewalk, thinking what flavor
soda she'll buy her mom from the corner store.

She won't step on broken glass. She won't see women sell their bodies for
$2. She won't see men hold up liquor stores with a beer bottle.

It used to be different. The corner of White Oak and Green streets was a
main artery for drugs, gangs and prostitution, say police, who answered 343
calls on the street last year for such violations as trespassing, drinking
and fighting.

"Everybody'd come to White Oak Street to get high," says Dennis Garrett,
who lives there.

The change started last year when Marine Gunnery Sgt. Derrick Whitaker and
some recovering addicts converted three boarding houses on White Oak into
halfway houses. They dubbed it the Nia Action Community Center.

Folks on the street let Whitaker know those changes wouldn't come easily.

"People told us they'd been drinking on White Oak Street for 40 or 50
years, and they weren't leaving," Whitaker says. "I said, 'Well, neither
are we."'

Derrick Whitaker joined the Marines in 1981 -- his way of getting out of
the Newark, N.J., slums.

He was close to his parents and extended family of five aunts, two uncles
and 30 cousins. He watched them all become addicts. By the early 1980s,
crack cocaine was turning part-time marijuana smokers and beer drinkers
into overnight addicts.

"Whoever created this knew what they were doing," Whitaker says.

He escaped by enlisting. Camp Lejeune, in Jacksonville, became his second
home. He visited New Jersey on the weekends and watched his family -- some
of whom were married and had children and attended church every Sunday --
battle addictions.

One of Whitaker's cousins and his mentor, James Walker, started 10 halfway
houses for recovering addicts in Minneapolis. Four of Whitaker's cousins
are living there now.

Halfway houses help people on their way back to society after leaving jail
or intense detoxification programs. People are usually referred there by
probation officers or the Guilford County Department of Mental Health.

The hope is that addicts living in a structured environment can help each
other stay sober. But Whitaker says his family showed him that recovery
takes more than hope. So he wanted his houses to be different.

Most halfway houses require residents to earn a steady paycheck in the
first week.

At the Nia house, residents can stay the first two weeks for free. And they
have to work as hard for recovery as they once did to score drugs.

Residents must apply for at least three jobs a day and adhere to a rigorous
schedule of house meetings and 12-step programs. For the first 90 days in
the house, residents must attend 90 12-step meetings somewhere in the
community.

Whitaker was planning for retirement and life after the Marines when he
borrowed $90,000 to buy himself a house. He didn't want a new boss in his
next career. So the money instead went to three houses on White Oak Street,
with himself at the helm of the Nia Action Community Center.

Whitaker's youngest brother, Jessie, 30, the last one to fall into crack,
came down from New Jersey to help. It would be part of his recovery.

On that first day in June last year the brothers hit the street, asking
people drinking and hanging around in the nearby lots if they had any skills.

"Some of them had problems with drugs or alcohol, but they were carpenters
or electricians," Whitaker says, who recruited them to fix up the three
houses. Some were eager to work, to have something to do.

Others watched from the empty lots across the street, or stood and drank on
the sidewalk in front of the house. Some were previous tenants of the
boarding houses, which were basically drug houses, Whitaker says. They felt
those houses -- and the street -- belonged to them.

So Whitaker called the police every day, sometimes four or five times a
day, to get them off the sidewalk. The police responded, and by August, the
calls had dropped to 84 for the year.

"That street has dramatically improved, there's no question about it,"
police Lt. Marty Sumner says.

Amy Crawford, 30, is fighting her own war. A few years ago, she lived one
street over from White Oak. She was married and had two children. Then
somebody gave her a hit of crack.

Her husband called the police on her to get her to stop. So she stopped
going home. She ended up sitting on the curb across the street from the Nia
house.

"I used to sit and talk junk to them all day," Crawford says. "Then I had
to come here. I took that last hit, and I ran straight to them. I knocked
on the door, and I said 'I'm ready to go."'

It's easy to spot those who start using drugs again, Whitaker says.

"They wind up staying late and don't come back," he says. "I had a girl who
didn't show up last night for a meeting. Yesterday was pay day."

Of the 75 residents who have passed through Nia House since it opened last
year, 30 have moved on successfully. One former resident overdosed and died
in a Greensboro hotel. Another was beaten to death by a man who lived in a
crack house on White Oak Street, Whitaker says. It's a tough fight out here.

"Some people come here and they just see these old restored houses," says
Seko Kirby, a resident and outreach worker. "They don't see it as a place
that can change your life."

Kirby is the house electrician. He fixed the air conditioner with a pack of
matches. He wrapped 30 match sticks together to make a torch and fused a
broken connection.

That's how they get by at Nia house.

"How do we pay the bills? We struggle," says Dennis Garrett, a resident and
a former drug hustler. He still cuts the figure of a drug dealer: gold
chains, oversized silky shirts. But now, Garrett hustles for souls, not drugs.

Garrett is Whitaker's "right-hand man" and a substance-abuse counselor at
the Nia House. He's getting his degree and is one of three students earning
course credit for his work at the Nia house.

The no-rent policy for the first two weeks is a blessing and a curse on the
Nia House, Garrett says. Many people come in and think they're miraculously
cured and leave again, some without ever paying a dime.

Over the last year, Whitaker has paid the monthly payments on the $90,000
loan for the first three houses out of his own pocket.

Some residents receive Social Security checks or disability pay. Others
find a job in two weeks, but won't get paid for another two weeks. Whitaker
lets them slide, filling the holes with his salary from his job as
recruiter, a little over $50,000 a year.

Some relief may be coming soon. The Nia House recently got nonprofit status
from the state. Now, Whitaker can apply for grants and other public money.

He wants to expand the Nia house program into Winston-Salem and Greensboro.
He has completed his board of directors, and the tenants continue to keep
the house and the streets clean.

"God's going to take care of us," Whitaker says.

On Monday nights, Nia house residents hold a house meeting as part of their
recovery. They talk over house issues and about staying sober.

When the meeting is ends, the group files out the front door and cigarette
lighters spark. Orange glows float in the night like fireflies.

"You see how beautiful it is around here," says Kirby, a row of street
lamps dropping pools of light onto the street behind him.

"A year ago you couldn't walk down this street."

He stands in a group, next to Pastor Molly Chambers, who ministers to the
drug addicted every Saturday in a parking lot. She also comes out to the
house and conducts Bible studies. She's converting an old, abandoned fish
market building on the corner of White Oak and Green into a church. "Does
somebody have a dollar to buy me a soda?" Chambers asks.

Kirby pulls a dollar from his wallet and hands it to Chambers' daughter, Zee.

"Go get your mom a soda," he says. "Whatever she wants."