Eliza no longer homeless

Thank you for supporting Cincinnati Union Bethel in Cincinnati, Ohio. Your contribution provided Eliza with a week of emergency housing. Eliza explains: “My mom had problems with drinking and so did my step-dad. I saw what it had done to my mom and I didn’t want that so I stayed away from it.” It did not occur to Eliza that drugs could be harmful in similar ways. By 13 she had started smoking marijuana to deal with the emotional hardship of growing up in a family of alcoholics. Over time, Eliza began to use other drugs too, but a caring husband and the birth of two children helped her kick the habit.

Years later Eliza relapsed and things got worse. She lost her job and turned to panhandling to support her family. While she was panhandling, men offered to pay her more to work the streets. The prostitution eventually replaced the panhandling as her economic means of survival and her addiction worsened.  Eliza says that her drug habit cost her everything: her husband, kids, and home.  For the next two years she was homeless.

Today, as part of Off the Streets^SM, a Cincinnati Union Bethel program, Eliza has been sober for 60 days and is focusing on learning how to process her emotions instead of mask them with drugs. She has also been granted supervised visitation with her children.

One of her favorite things about Off the Streets^SM is having a roof over her head. “It’s amazing,” Eliza reflects. “The days I’m most often temped to use again it is usually snowing or raining. When that happens I open the window to feel the outside. I think what it would be like to be living in that again. Then I go take a hot shower and use soap and shampoo with good smells. I do it because when I was outside there were so many days I couldn’t shower.”

Thanks to you, Eliza now has a room to live in and a shower to give her the encouragement she needs to commit to a healthier way of life.