CENTRE ASSISTS FEMALE ADDICTS

The green house with its back deck and a large backyard, perfect for flower
and vegetable gardens, is set back from the highway on a large treed lot.

Inside, a dozen single bedrooms welcome the residents who have access to
sitting rooms, a TV and recreation area with weight machines, meeting room,
kitchen and laundry facilities.

Marguerite Centre, in suburban Halifax, is home to a dozen women in
recovery from addictions and abuse. Opened last fall, the residence gives
women a safe setting where their needs will be met, issues addressed and
voices heard.

Regular programs at the centre and in the community help them recover and
create a path to healing. The women are offered 24-hour in-house
counselling support, an outreach program for those who have completed their
residential program, and partnerships in the community for women in transition.

Darlene is one resident who will succeed with the centre's guidance. She is
a bright, energetic 40-ish woman with a shock of curly auburn hair tumbling
over her shoulders.

She knows very well where she's been and why she's at Marguerite Centre,
and she wants to recover to experience a healthy life.

"This house nurtures me so that not only do I learn how to survive, I grow
and acquire the tools to succeed, as well as excel. I plan to do both,"
says Darlene, who reads voraciously and writes poetry.

She needs nurturing. Her life has been filled with turmoil, from her early
days in Cape Breton, where she became a child of the courts at age one, to
the years she moved constantly from foster home to foster home "because I
was so angry and violent. I felt worthless, had no self-image, and thought
that no one wanted to keep me. I never knew why."

Darlene never developed communication skills because shuffling from home to
home prevented her from establishing relationships.

By the time she was an early teen, she was at the Nova Scotia Hospital in
Dartmouth. Many therapies were tried, including lockups and rewards, but
"they couldn't do anything with me. I finally ran away (at 13) with a
15-year-old boy. We stole a car but got caught. I was charged with a
criminal offence and sent to Truro" to serve time in a juvenile women's
detention centre.

Darlene escaped and started to run - west to British Columbia, back to Nova
Scotia. She spent more time in corrections.

"I was a mass of anger. I didn't trust people who wanted to help me. I
assaulted a counsellor, attacked a guard, but eventually had charges
dismissed and was on my own - 15 and lost."

She stowed away on an Algerian ship but, when she was discovered on the
third day out, the captain didn't want to turn back.

"I was picked up by the Canadian Consulate in Algeria, spent Christmas
there and was flown home through Paris, where I also spent three days at
the Canadian Consulate."

Darlene arrived in Halifax and hitchhiked to Vancouver. "For the first
time, I felt I fit in, living with street kids. I was still angry but less
violent."

But a connection to drugs had been made, not as a user then, she says, but
selling to make money - for by now she was a 17-year-old mother of a baby boy.

"I had him because I wanted someone to love, not because I wanted to be a
mother," she confesses.

Darlene moved to Montreal, lonely, isolated and financially desperate, she
recalls.

"I met a part-time prostitute, saw the money she was making, knew I had a
son to support, and started work on the streets. I made $5,000 my first
weekend, a lot of money for a little girl. I'd play mommy during the week
and get a sitter on weekends."

At 21, she tried cocaine and "went crazy, addicted to the feeling of no
pain, no anger, no anxiety. It was a wonder drug."

Within six months, she put her baby up for adoption, thinking she couldn't
be a mother to him in the state she was in.

"I walked away from him," she cries, as the memory brings tears. "I still
think I did the right thing. He'll be 23 this month and I haven't seen him
since.

"I wanted to love him and be his mother but I failed him badly. I had two
choices, coke or my son. I still beat myself into the ground over that one."

Wednesday, Darlene falls further but is now coming back