She’s back home: Recovery from addiction in a residential facility

Myra Williamson is back home. She's moving into a house just around the corner from where she grew up - and where, not so coincidentally, her downward spiral began.

 "I spent most of my life in this community," Myra said as she prepared to move into a newly refurbished home at Monroe and Lexington streets. "I became addicted here."
" She had to leave town about 10 years ago to get the kind of drug treatment she felt she needed, but today, Myra will celebrate the opening of a residential facility in which she will help others fight their own addictions - without leaving the Southwest Baltimore neighborhood.

Myra will be the in-house manager of a new transitional home for women in drug treatment, through the initiative of Recovery in Community. She said she's "loving the thought" that she can now help provide what wasn't available to her back when she needed a place to live as she struggled toward recovery.

 "I had a nice job, a home, a car, and was blowing all that," Myra said of her use of first cocaine and then crack cocaine. "I knew I needed some help, and I started trying some out-patient programs, but it was not working." 

Instinctively, she knew she needed to be in a more structured environment rather than living on her own, and a friend ended up taking her to Philadelphia, where she moved into a group home. Ultimately, she beat her addiction and even became a manager of a similar facility. On a visit to family in her old neighborhood in Baltimore, she met RIC's director, Lena M. Franklin, and eventually was hired to manage the group's new residential facility.



"The farther people have to go, the less likely they are to go," said Jane Harrison, who as senior program officer at the Abell Foundation helped design RIC and now serves on its board of directors. "You have to give people the tools to be able to live in the community that they're from."

Among the first residents of the new house will be Cherese Roberts, 33, who has been clean for a year thanks to RIC's drug treatment programs. While living in a neighborhood where drugs are so readily available might seem like it would hinder recovery, Cherese said it's been just the opposite. 

"Everything out there," she said, "is showing me what I don't want to be a part of."


Advice to people in recovery: Look for ways to help others who are fighting the fight that you're winning.

Read another recovery story, or read Jean Marbella's source story or see the video in the Baltimore Sun.