DO-GOODERS WHO SAVED PHOEBE HOUSE SAVED US, TOO

You could call the people who saved Phoebe House a bunch of do-gooders.

They are. They're experts at identifying needs and finding solutions.

Often as not, when we call people do-gooders, it's with a dismissive tone, a
shrug that these people are saps, forever trying to help the ungrateful,
undisciplined and unworthy. If they want to be altruists, fine. If they want
to bang their heads against social problems, that's their business.

But the women of Phoebe House can set us straight about the value of
do-gooders.

For 13 years, Phoebe House served as a halfway house for women getting out
of prison or abusive relationships, or trying to get off drugs. Last year,
it was discovered that Phoebe House's books were a mess, and it was $280,000
in debt.

When it closed in the fall, a bunch of these do-gooders stepped forward to
resurrect it. That meant paying the debt, finding ways to raise operating
expenses of about $150,000 a year, forming a new board, setting new rules.

On Christmas Eve, Phoebe House reopened. Thanks to those do-gooders, the
women who live there now are trying to find their way back to being moms and
workers again.

Helen Myrick, executive director of the Greater Pierce County Community
Network and a world-class do-gooder, is rightly proud of her role in
resurrecting Phoebe House. She invited me to talk to the women living there
now. They go through drug treatment, then into Phoebe House for as long as
two years. The program strives for a 70 percent success rate.

The women say it doesn't really matter whose name I use. Their stories are
pretty much interchangeable.

Let Jacqueline, 19, speak for all of them.

"I was born and raised on welfare," she said. "My mom is a heroin addict and
a meth addict, and my dad's an alcoholic. I started drinking at 5 years old
with my father's family, not to get drunk, just a beer or a margarita to be
cool."

By 13, she was doing marijuana and painkillers with the drinking, and by 16
she started on methamphetamines.

"I lived to get high," she said. "I loved to get high. If I wasn't high, I
was sleeping."

"I was such a liar," she said. "I sold dope. I cooked dope. I stole from
people, stores, friends, my family. I did identity theft and forgery. I
introduced kids in junior high to meth. They had money and they wanted to
get high. Now they're big users. My trailer blew up. It was a meth lab."

She used meth all through her pregnancy, and immediately after.

"On Jan. 11, CPS came for my daughter. I wasn't there. I was in jail. My mom
was in jail. I didn't even know where my daughter was."

She went through drug court and treatment, but when she finished, she had
nowhere to go but her old life. She relapsed. She had her daughter back, and
lost her again.

"I'm not here to get my daughter back," she said. "The chances of that are
slim. I'm here to get my life back."

I hope she does. But not for her. For us.

Jacqueline is intelligent - she tested as a gifted kid at school. So I asked
her to do some quick math: Add up the costs of her arrests, trials and jail
time, the CPS busts, the stealing and cheating, getting other kids addicted.

Her estimate: "At least a million dollars."

Left out on her own, Jacqueline is a very expensive young woman, and we pay
for her.

If those do-gooders can straighten out Jacqueline - and a dozen other women
like her - they'll be doing serious good for rest of us cynical taxpayers.