Libby Szarka looked around at the people who had become her “new family.” They were a poor comparison to the family she had left behind—three daughters, the youngest only 8 when Ms. Szarka started living on the streets of Calgary, dealing and smoking crack.
“They wouldn’t think twice to stab you up for a hoot if they needed one,” Ms. Szarka told The Epoch Times. “And then even worse, I was the same.”
With the painful realization of all she had lost and what she had become, she thought of killing herself. Or getting help.
“I can ask God to help me and I can change my story,” she said of her thinking at the time. That’s precisely what she did, and helped others change their stories too.
Helping others has been part of Ms. Szarka’s recovery journey from start to finish. When she was recovering, she would help the elderly at her treatment centre cut their nails, or help put together care packages for those leaving the centre.
“It gave me a little bit of purpose. Maybe it kind of gave me a little bit of self-worth again,” she said. It also kept her busy, away from temptation.
Russell Purdy, executive director of the Red Deer community, has himself recovered from addiction and says that, like Ms. Szarka, helping others has been important to his recovery.
“It keeps me in a place of humility,” he said in an interview. “It reminds me how human we are, how fragile we are.”
He gives others who are recovering leadership roles within the community to strengthen their sense of competence, worth, and to give them purpose.
Ms. Szarka and Mr. Purdy said they are grateful for the province’s commitment to recovery. “We’re very fortunate in Alberta to have the support that we do,” Ms. Szarka said. “The blessings from recovery are just amazing.”
Danielle Swampy is one of the people Ms. Szarka has seen recover at Poundmaker’s. Ms. Swampy has in turn gone on to help others. The cycle of recovery and helping others recover ripples outward.
‘Divine Intervention’
Ms. Swampy lived with her father growing up on the Maskwacis reserve in central Alberta, and only occasionally saw her mother. He drank a lot, smoked marijuana and crack, beat her, and let their home fall into severe disrepair. But she loved him still.When she was 13, he told her he was sick with HIV and cancer. “I couldn’t lose him. He was my best friend,” she told The Epoch Times.
“Whenever my dad would get too drunk or something, he would sort of take his anger out on me, quite often hitting, stuff like that. But I would do the same thing, so I never usually seen it as abuse, I guess. But looking back, you know, it was very clearly,” she said.
“I grew up with a lot of anger because of the lack of food and the lack of just everything in my house,” Ms. Swampy said. Some days she would cry from hunger. She had to go to a neighbour’s house to fill jugs with drinking water.
“All I ever seen was addiction. It was normalized. Everyone in my family did it.”
She got pregnant at 14 and had another baby right after the first. She wanted to give her daughters a better life, and moved into a group home for young mothers until she was 16. She drank, smoked marijuana, and took pills, such as Percocets, which contain oxycodone, a potent opioid.
She and her boyfriend moved to Red Deer and lived there with their daughters, staying away from drugs except marijuana for some time. But then her boyfriend’s mother, whom she was very close to and who was also addicted to crack, died.
She started drinking more to dull the pain. One night after putting her girls to bed, she drank until she blacked out. Her boyfriend came home from visiting his father and the two started fighting. Ms. Swampy left their home and was later found by police passed out in a snow bank.
Her boyfriend also left the home afterward, not thinking about the girls—aged 1 and 2—still in bed.
“It was torture when I woke up the next morning and realized,” Ms. Swampy said. Her neighbour had heard the girls crying and called child services. She lost her daughters. “I just sort of gave up at that point.”
She was 17 at the time and tried to get her children back, but kept turning to drugs to deal with stress and couldn’t pass the required drug testing. At a court date six months after losing her daughters, she gave them up.
“They pretty much convinced me that I couldn’t be a mom to my kids, and I broke down and I cried and I ended up signing a piece of paper that just signed my children away basically.”
She started using meth shortly thereafter. Her 15-year-old brother committed suicide and her father died three weeks later. The two deaths “completely shattered my world,” she said. “There was no way I was going to be able to get clean.”
What followed were years of trauma. She lived in constant danger. Her new boyfriend beat her. She was homeless for years. She was often in houses that got raided by police, or places where shootings, stabbings, or beatings occurred.
The worst experience is still hard for Ms. Swampy talk about.
“I ended up getting kidnapped and tied up for three days in a house for me to pay off a debt while I was drugged up by multiple men,” she said. “I remember glimpses and just remember being tortured, beat up, drugged up pretty much that whole time.”
They injected her with heroin and fentanyl, and after she was released, she started doing heroin herself.
“I was basically trying to kill myself at that point. I was trying my best to overdose, and every time I did, I would end up in a hospital and end up getting saved.”
Partway through those six years of hell, she spent three months at Poundmaker’s. As soon as she left, she got high again.
“But I always had that experience at the back of my mind, like that is what it feels like to live a healthier life,” Ms. Swampy said.
When she was at her lowest, after being kidnapped, she was trying to decide what to do: Move to another city, commit suicide, or go to treatment. Around that time a woman walked up to her randomly on the street and handed her a makeup bag shaped like lips. “Give it to someone, I have no use for it,” the woman said.
“Inside were two bracelets big enough for two little girls,” Ms. Swampy said. Big enough for her two daughters. “I took that as divine intervention, as a sign.”
She returned to Poundmaker’s, and this time made a success of it. She will have six years clean in August. She got her daughters back a year ago. They’re now 15 and 16 and live with her in Edmonton. Ms. Swampy has been working at Poundmaker’s for four years and is studying child and youth care.
‘I Just Kept On Partying’
Ms. Szarka’s story started in her hometown of Red Deer with an alcoholic father. One time when she was in her early teens, the police came to her house because of a domestic dispute between her parents.Her father tried to kill himself with a gun while the police were there. He ended up attending alcoholics anonymous meetings, but as he stopped drinking, she started.
For many years, she was a “functioning addict,” she said. She got married, had three children, and was able to hold down a job, though she remained the “party hard” type. However, her life spiralled out of control quickly after she tried crack.
She was going through a divorce at the time. Her husband was often absent and she had had an affair.
“I didn’t know how to cope with all that guilt, and so I just kept on partying. And I started doing crack,” Ms. Szarka said. “When I was high, I just didn’t care about anything.”
When her children were away at their father’s home, her house would be “swarmed” with people doing crack, she said.
“Within a matter of months, I had my house repossessed, my children taken away from me, and here I was just in this world with these other people.”
She was homeless for about three years with almost no communication with her family. That’s when she realized she didn’t have good people around her and she couldn’t be a good person either because of her addiction.
After multiple tries, she found a treatment centre in Calgary where she got help. She asked for all the volunteer work she could get to keep her busy, because anytime she had a break, she relapsed.
Now, 15 years later, she still copes with bouts of depression by going out to help people. “It doesn’t have to be a big deal. It could be like shovelling my neighbour’s sidewalk,” she said.
She also remains mindful of the kind of people she surrounds herself with. That’s a key piece of advice she gives others as well. “We need to put ourselves around people, places, and things that nurture us,” she said.
In addition to her work at Poundmaker’s, she has opened a recovery home for people who are between detox and treatment. Sometimes there’s a wait-list to get into treatment after being in a detox centre, and people need that bridge support, Ms. Szarka said.
She opened Whitney House this year, named after her youngest daughter. Her three daughters had distanced themselves from her, and Whitney was the first to start speaking with Ms. Szarka again when she was in her early days of recovery at the centre in Calgary.
“I don’t know if I could have done it without her, because it’s lonely. It’s a lonely place when you—I was just carrying a lot of guilt and shame.”
Ms. Szarka plans to open two more recovery homes, named for each of her two other daughters.
Her eldest, Stephanie, who was 17 when Ms. Szarka started her recovery, began speaking to her again while she was in a sober-living home. She plans to open Stephanie House for people who have just finished treatment and are getting back on their feet but still need sober-living support.
Ms. Szarka’s middle daughter, Courtney, began speaking to her again when she had been clean for two years and was going back to school.
She said gaps still exist in getting people treatment for addiction, but Alberta is working to fill those gaps, and when the province made treatment free, that lifted a significant barrier.
“It used to be quite shameful, I think, to be a person in recovery. But now what I find is a lot more people are recognizing that, ‘Hey, this is my friend, this is my family, this is my neighbour, this is my colleague’—that it can happen to anyone,” she said. “And also, anyone can recover.”
