Pennington Gap, Virginie – On a Saturday evening in June, people from this rural region met at the Historic Lee Theater to celebrate the Foundation of the Recovery of Women’s Recovery on the Superior Sol.
The author Barbara Kingsolver opened the installation in January with royalties of his winning novel of the Pulitzer Prize, “Demon Copperhead”, whose intrigue revolves around the Opioid crisis of Appalachia. The house offers a favorable place so that people stay while learning to live without drugs. Kingsolver had asked women who were living there now to join her on stage.
Kingsolver, who grew up in the Appalachians, suggested that women share with the public what they were most proud to have won their first weeks in higher terrain. But she learned that they were more impatient to boast.
Supporters say that the higher ground ensures stability and a back -to -school point after leaving prison, prison or a treatment center. It offers a range of services and support in a field devastated by dependence on analgesic pills and other types of opioids. More fundamentally, it is a real house, with rooms to one and two people, a common kitchen and a den. Residents say they have found the assertion of a cohort of women who understand how dependence can demoralize a person and keep them away from the family and the community.
Ronda Morgan, a resident, said her family had always been in her corner. But when she was serving a prison sentence for drug possession, she said to herself: “I am fed up that they had to have time with me.” She was ready for recovery. His daughter, who is a nurse, told her about more land, the first installation of the genre in the county of a sprawling rural. Morgan learned that she could live there up to two years to win the base that had escaped her in more than three decades of dependence.
What she did not plan is the kinship she forged with her roommates – among them, Syara Parsell – and with the staff of Higher Ground.
Parsell, 35, one of the first residents of Higher Ground, said that in her time there, she had received aid to find a job and register for community college lessons.
Staff and Kingsolver said Parsell, she received support without judgment. “Together,” she said, “we understand it.”
Traditional treatment facilities generally operate under highly structured medical supervision. Restoration houses, such as higher land, offer a more relaxed environment, helping to move a resident “to an independent human being, fully functional and autonomous”, said Marvin Venrell, CEO of the National Association of Addiction Treatment Providers.
“Restoring occurs in the community,” he said. But the start of the school year is to be delicately approached. “When dependence occurs with a human being, it also occurs in a family social structure.” If a person being recovered returns to a family who is not prepared, the chances of success of this person “are seriously reduced”.
For Kingsolver, the opioid crisis has become a focal point for what it hoped to be “the great novel of the Appalachians”. The epidemic “has changed a large part of the texture of this place”, families and devastating communities.
The pharmaceutical companies targeted the central appearances for sales of what they wrongly claimed were opioids on prescription resistant to drug addiction. Kingsolver wanted to “reject my net on all the extractive industries that came there, eliminated what was good and left a mess”.
“The way I put it on is:” They came to harvest our pain when nothing left, “she said.
In the search for “Demon Copperhead”, she immersed herself in the stories of people who have sailed on dependence and those who care and defend themselves for them.
The novel was a huge success, having sold more than 3 million copies and won much more than its previous work. Kingsolver decided to devote hundreds of thousands of dollars to face the crisis that submerged the region where it was raised – and to which it returned full time in 2004.
Again, she started listening. Based on a wide range of expertise, she determined that a women’s recovery house was the wisest investment.
Joy Cantrell works as a nurse in public health in reducing misdeeds for the Virginia Department of Health, support policies and practices to slow down the negative effects of drug use and serves as chairman of the board of directors of Ground Higher. She has long recognized the need for such a house.
“It was the missing game,” said Cantrell. Too often, when someone came out of a treatment center or incarceration, “we lost them. He fell back into the same old models. ” She said that the region sorely needed a safe and stable environment where women could recalibrate.
In August, the house reached its capacity of seven women. It’s just in town, “what is so important,” said Kingsolver, “because in this part of the country, we have no public transport.”
Parsell has long suffered social anxieties; Drugs were his escape. Here, his roommates kissed her. They offered the support she had never received.
“Every two seconds, someone is like” Syara is here! “” She said. “I am very grateful.” If there is a problem in the house, “one of the seven of us has the solution”.
Four residents are employed outside the home, one is registered in community college lessons, one ends his GED with plans to continue his studies and everyone volunteers in the community. Manufacturing lessons are offered. Visit family members.
“They live life,” said Subrenda Huff, who filled director Liz Brooks took maternity leave.
Morgan said that she had accomplished more in a month on a higher ground than she had done for years. This includes the request for identification documents, taking budgeting lessons and the search for permanent housing. It includes the sharing of maintenance tasks in the house.
This was Kingsolver’s vision. But, she said, “Here is what I did not expect: the community kissed this with loving arms. I thought people may say, “I don’t want that in my court. »»
Most furniture have been given. The quarter of Kingsolver about the social media subscribers played a decisive role. “But they are not only reading clubs in Switzerland or California; they are people in Pennington Gap,” she said. Religious groups have donated “shortpoints, bedside lamps, things to hang on the walls just to make it intimate.”
Before the opening of the installation, local people volunteered to pull the weeds, shoot down an old fence and put a new one. Kingsolver said the support well “was simply endless. He was deep, and loving, and a wonder to see ”.
A higher land, with a single member of paid staff, estimated the annual operating costs of $ 120,000, said Cantrell. Residents are billed $ 50 per week. Venrell said that costs in other recovery houses vary considerably, but that $ 2,500 per month are an approximate average.
“We want them to focus on savings of money and the payment of any restitution or fine that they may have past costs,” said Cantrell. “Some may focus on refunding child support for children they may have.”
Higher land receives no federal or state funding. Donations continue to pour out. And Kingsolver recently bought the building alongside plans to open a thrift store, which would be an additional source of income for the house and would offer retail work experience to its residents.
Supporters aspire to open more houses on the ground higher elsewhere in the region.
What these women win, Kingsolver said: “It is not only sobriety, but belief in themselves.”
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