CHILDREN OF POVERTY: 14 YEARS LATER. HEALING YOUTHS' FRACTURED LIVES

Atlas Youth Treatment Facility Attempts To Put Young Lives Back
Together While There's Still Time To Help

TERRACE - The brown two-level wood-frame house looks like any other on
Halliwell Avenue, with its rhododendrons in the yard and barbecue on
the back deck.

Walk upstairs to the second-floor living room and you might also
believe that 17-year-old Lorena lying on the couch and 18-year-old
Evan playing the guitar are just a couple of ordinary youths leading
out typical lives in the province's northwest.

But take them aside and you'll discover their lives have been anything
but uneventful, filled with the pain and emptiness of substance abuse.

This is the Atlas Youth Treatment Facility, society's attempt to put
young fractured lives back together while there's still time to make a
difference.

Lorena sits now at a small kitchen table in her black jacket, long
brown hair falling around a cherubic face. Her leg bounces nervously
as she tells me she started drinking at age six, drawn into the
booze-and-drug laced parties that dominated her mom's house.

She began drinking daily by age 10 and over the years would concoct a
"big s--- mix" before school, taking a bit out of every bottle in the
house to avoid being noticed.

She dropped out, of course, and found herself doing pretty much
anything to feed her addiction. "I always hung out with older guys, so
it was easy to get it," she says, almost matter-of-factly. "Get me
high and they'd get want they wanted. That's the way it is."

Lorena agreed to come to Atlas after she "drank a lot and took pills
and had a bad episode," winding up in detox where she could
re-evaluate a squandered youth. She has already learned to socialize,
open up to people -- something she did before only when she wanted
something.

Evan has a thin build and short clipped hair, and sits next to Lorena
in his blue pajama bottoms and white undershirt. He explains that he
didn't have the dysfunctional family life of Lorena, but still found
himself in a downward spiral fuelled by crystal meth, cocaine,
marijuana, ecstasy, pretty much "anything I could get my hands on."

He gave up hockey and snowboarding, stopped caring about everything
important to him. He talks quickly, but some words come out in slow
motion: "I was out of control. I was wasting away."

Crystal meth was especially affordable, but it exacted a high human
price. "I'd be talking to the walls, or fighting trees off in the
backyard with a baseball bat."

Evan only planned to experiment with the drug, but soon lost his way.
Reality hit when he overdosed and wound up in hospital, not knowing
where he was and wearing clothes not his.

At detox, he started once again to see the importance of loving
himself, loving life. On the day The Vancouver Sun visits, he has
eight days remaining at Atlas and is "stoked" at having successfully
landed a $21-an-hour job at an ice rink.

Yet one suspects the ghosts of drug addiction are lingering close by
in the bleachers. Society has plenty of experts on crystal meth, Evan
notes, but unless you've lived it, you'll find it difficult to
understand when he says: "I miss the absence of feeling."

Lorena can understand, recalling the day she watched a man go into a
seizure and all she could think was: "I wonder if he has any drugs I
could steal."

Atlas is a refuge for up to six youths at a time aged 12 to 19,
staying up to 30 days on a voluntary want-to-be-here basis. "Our fence
is only three feet high," says supervisor Anita Ziegler, who allowed
The Sun to interview the youths on the condition surnames not be used.

During their one short month here, youths eat well, exercise, read,
and receive counselling and life skills training. "We hope they leave
in a better state than they came in," Ziegler continues. "They're
healthier, plumped up, leaving with a glow. It's a vast
difference."

No one expects miracles from these kids, but it's hoped they are
better able to cope with the obstacles of life. A sign reads: "You
have to crawl before you can walk."

For those who fail, the downtown streets of Terrace, with their
homeless and addicted souls adrift in the cold winter winds, offer a
grim reminder of what might be.

Daisy Wesley raised the alarm on poverty in Terrace in November 1992,
when the 52-year-old died of exposure during a fierce cold snap. She
was living under a tarp on a vacant city lot.

Since then, the needs of the homeless and impoverished in the
northwest have steadily grown despite increased services -- and with
yet more tragic results.

In a scene reminiscent of Wesley's death, the body of 56-year-old
Melvin Aksidan was found in a wooded city lot one block from the
hospital in cold weather on November 2007. Alcohol and hypothermia are
thought to be the cause, although the coroner has yet to deliver a
formal report.

Blaine Stensgaard is an outreach worker with Ksan House Society who
remembers Aksidan as a talented musician who could play guitar, drums,
harmonica and saxophone, everything from gospel to rock, and who
readily shared his musical skills with others.

But the power of music proved no match for the lure of alcohol. Aksidan
would even be
spotted in Wal-Mart taking a tug of Listerine on the shelves. Laments
Stensgaard: "He
went to local treatment centres and stayed at the shelter. He tried."

Stensgaard adds that since Aksidan's death, four other street people
- -- all men, including three natives, aged between 24 and 56 -- have
committed suicide in Terrace due to issues such as substance abuse,
poverty, and a general inability to cope.

As for youths, he constantly hears the complaint that there is not
enough to do. Costly sports such as hockey are beyond the reach of
low-income families. Some aboriginal basketball teams even struggle to
fund proper sneakers for their players.

Not all of the social problems in Terrace are homegrown.

The city is a regional hub for social services, drawing people from
Prince Rupert to the west, New Aiyansh and Iskut to the north, the
Bulkley Valley to the east, and Kitimat to the south.

"The society service industry is one of the biggest employers in
town," asserts Ksan executive-director Carol Sabo. "It used to be mills."

The community continues to struggle from a downturn in the forest
industry, most recently evidenced by the indefinite shutdown of West
Fraser's Skeena Sawmills facility last October and the closure of
Terrace Lumber Co. in 2006.

The economy has bred a new type of poverty. Sabo cites the blue-collar
worker who dropped out of school in Grade 8 to get a good-paying job
in the bush and who now is faced with an annual salary of $25,000 and
no prospect of paying the mortgage.

"It's a different type of poverty," she says. "They don't know how to
be poor. It's a lifestyle change, a huge difference."

To make matters worse, it's getting harder for the poor to find
decent, affordable housing. Within the past two years, she says, one
apartment building that catered to single moms burned down, another
was torn down, and a third was closed for an upgrade.

That contributed to a vacancy rate of just 0.9 per cent for a
one-bedroom rental apartment in Terrace last fall, compared with four
per cent in downtown Prince George, 10.8 per cent in Prince Rupert and
23.9 per cent in Kitimat.

Landlords have the upper hand in terms of setting rates and being
choosy about their renters. "It's housing in large part," Sabo said of
the poverty situation. "People can't find it."

Ksan opened a homeless shelter in 1994 on the south side of Highway
16, a 10-minute walk from downtown. In the early days, it mainly
provided emergency accommodation in winter, but now is busy all year
round.

"We get people who fall through the cracks," explains supervisor Rob
McVey. "They have multiple barriers -- mental health problems,
physical disabilities, substance abuse."

The rising demand for the shelter is staggering: 4,530 day beds
provided in 2007 -- about three-quarters for men and one-quarter for
women -- up 17 per cent from 3,872 day beds in 2006 and up more than
200 per cent from about 1,400 day beds in 1995.

The shelter has beds for 19, plus one more on the couch. Homeless
persons can stay 10 days at a stretch, extended to 30 days if they
apply for special consideration, all on the proviso that they not use
drugs or alcohol.

"The guys have problems with landlords," McVey explains. "They burn
their bridges and where do they go? There are ratholes, but no decent
places to stay."

With new provincial funding, the shelter will double its staffing
effective April 1 to provide three square meals based on the Canada
food guide, and offer people assistance to get off the treadmill.

"We know people are shelter-surfing," Sabo said. "That's how they
live."

Last December, Ksan also opened a "damp shelter" that can accommodate
up to 15 drunk and homeless individuals, a group especially at risk in
cold weather. They start staggering in around 8:30 p.m., give up any
liquor bottles for the duration of their stay, enjoy a healthy meal,
and depart by 7 a.m. the next day to collect bottles. They sleep on
floor mats and get to dry out their clothes.

The plan is to build a new shelter, perhaps named after Daisy Wesley,
by the end of this year with provincial funding of at least $2.5 million.

"Poverty is worse," Sabo concludes. "There is no doubt in my mind."