Hi i will be telling you about the third rehab i attended. It was a South-African rehab and it was situated in the Limpopo Province between Ellisras and Vaalwater. I was in this rehab for about seven months.
Now let me tell you what happened in the time i spent in this establishment:
This rehab is a Christian rehab so they are all about Church services and we used to have cell group twice a week and a thing called Shabat on friday nights (Shabat means that: From Friday evening sunset till Saturday night sunset you have to relax, and your not allowed to do any strenuous work.) we used to have a three course meal and have a church service and praise and worship. And then Sunday morning services as well, during the week we all had work we needed to do so we used to work from about eight in the morning till about four five in the afternoon. We used to have breakfast before work, lunch at about twelve or one and then supper at about six or seven at night. In the beginning everybody used to be able to hang out together in the pool house but when the amount of people went up they gave the pool house to the girls and the guys had to hang out under a tree in the middle of the yard. The girls were not allowed under the tree and the guys we allowed in the pool house, the only way that you could get in the pool house if you were a guy was if you were dating one of the girls and the only way you were allowed to date one of the girls was if you had the owners blessing so if you did not have his blessing you were not allowed to date one of the girls. In the pool house there were nice chairs that you could sit on but under the tree there was not a single chair to sit on, so all the guys tried to hook up with a girls so that you could actually have a chair to sit on after you have been working the whole day. I really think that, that is not very fair if you ask me! So now you have a bit of background about what went on in this place I will start to tell you how my time there went!
When i got to this rehab i was still as high as a kite and i knew that i would start my withdrawal symptoms at about nine or ten that same night so i just wanted to eat and go to bed because i knew that i had a lot of sleep less nights ahead about two to three weeks worth. The first night i was there i was still sort of okay because i had used just before i signed in. I found out the next day that i would have seven days grace that i think is about fair if you have been using for a year or two but if you have been using for ten years and you had to use a gram of heroin before you can get out of bed in the morning seven days is a bit short because i used to have withdrawal symptoms for at least four weeks and i used to have insomnia for six to eight week where i used to sleep a max of one hour if i even slept at all! They used to give us medication for the withdrawal but you are very limited to the amount of medication that you used to get so the medication did not really work so well because they never really gave us the dose we needed to get. So eventually my seven days grace was over and i had to start working like everybody else and the jobs we had, well they were horrible for instance chopping clean used bricks, we had to chop off all the cement that was still stuck on them or we had to build walls because the farm we were staying at was not really done being built so we were actually building the place just because we were the first people to join this rehab center. The people that was well liked by the owner did not really have to do anything that they did not want to do. They also had the system were recovering junkies that have not even been clean for a year have power over the new arrivals and that i think is so stupid because everybody has there own issues that they need to be working on but now the older inmates have to "babysit" the newer inmates so in the end of the day when you leave rehab you have not worked on a single problem you had when you went in to rehab so 90 % of all the patients would just relapse as soon as they left!
In my seven months there i really got to know how everything works so i basically had free rains of this rehab because i knew when to do something and when not to do something so i was never really in trouble. I was in trouble a couple of times the reasons for me being in trouble was that in the first month i was there i tried to run away but i was not really sure where i was going so i got caught that time. The owner of this rehab told my parents that its basically imposable to run away because there was only one road out of this center on your way to the main road and this road is about eight kilometers to the main road. So i ran into the bush because i thought it would be harder to find me there, so i was running through the bush for about three or four hours till i got to the main road and i was just about ten kilometers away from the closest to and they spotted me and picked me up and took me back that was my first attempt and i tried to run with somebody. They took me back to the center and my punishment was that i will have to wash dishes for four weeks.
After my four weeks of washing dishes i was very tired and i just wanted to go home and go used drugs again. This time i went alone and i left at eleven at night this time it worked the only thing was that the main road was dead i think the whole night i only saw one or two cars so i had to walk the whole 48 kilometers to the next town called Vaalwater and i was through Vaalwater by six that morning. Just as i wanted to sit down and have a smoke a car pulled up next to me and the driver asked do you need a lift and where are you going so i said i would love a lift to Pretoria. He said well i am on my way to Johannesburg but i need to drive through Pretoria so i got in the car and about an hour later he dropped me in Pretoria about 5 kilometers away for Sunnyside I just started to walk towards town and someone else picked me up and dropped me right in front of my dealers house so i called my dealer and he gave me some drugs on debt then i went across the road to sunnypark shopping center toilet to go and use after i had finished using i sold my jacket just to get ten rand to get to one of my friends house and i spent the next two days there and during those two days we were just shoplifting all the time so that we could just keep using so after two days i went back hope and i spent a day there and the day after wards i went back to the rehab center. This time my punishment was a bit worst i got locked in the dog box for about three weeks the dog box was like a one bedroom flat that about fourteen people were sleeping in. The people that used to be locked up in the dog box used to get all the worst jobs in the center like cleaning toilets and dustbins, chopping bricks clean and chopping fire wood.
After my three weeks in the dog box I started to behave myself because I wanted to become a "leader" but I had some problems because not many of the leaders at that time liked me because i ran away and they could not catch me and they hated it.
After i had been there for about four months I met a girl there called Ane, she was also from Pretoria and she even got her drugs from the same dealer i used to buy from. We started talking and one day we decided that we want to start dating. We were dating for about a month, but most of the people started to treat her very badly so we decided that we are going to run away together, we set a date that we wanted to run away and we stocked up with juice and chocolates for the road. Before we left i made it very clear to this girl that I am not running away to go and use drugs I was running away to make a point. So that night at eleven I stuck my arm through her window and i shook her awake. Ane' was a small skinny chick so she fit trough the burglar bars so she go out and i had cut the fence already so we slipped trough the fence and we started walking on the way to Vaalwater again but this time it took very much longer that when i went alone because Ane' was scared and she could not walk as fast as i could so she slowed us down a bit. So this time we stopped at a road side resort because we herd that there are cars that come out there often that head to Pretoria so we waited and the first car that came out gave us a lift to Vaalwater then in Vaalwater we sold some clothes and we caught a taxi to the next town then in that town a man with a pick up gave us a lift to Warm-bath (Bella-Bella) and in Warm-bath we met a retired cop and he gave us a lift right to our front door. We only spent a day or two in Pretoria then her stepfather took us back again even though i had a very expensive camera with me we did not get any drugs in the time we were home. When we got back to the rehab center and all the other people saw us they all cheered me and her because we were not going to allow this place to suppress us just because they can. The point i tried to make by running away was that they will not stop us from being ourselves and that they will not treat us like slaves ether we are there to kick our drug addiction, we are not there to be walked over. So then after they searched us for drugs and after they did a drug test they saw we were clean but i still ended up in the bog box for two weeks for running away. After I got out the dog box I decided that i wanted to leave the rehab because they started to give me a lot of trouble because i was the only person that got it right to run away and not just ones i got away twice! If the people running this rehab was interested in my recovery rather than my parents money they might of been able to help me but most people that work in rehabs don't have an idea what they are doing and they don't really care ether!
If you come check my next blog i will be telling you what happened after myself and Ane' left this rehab!
In Loving Memory Of Ane' Smit Died (2010)
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