The job you love to hate but hate to leave…

“ I am like a man pursued by a bear,” said the prioress, “ and who carries twelve small children on his back, and a horsefly settles on his face. He might like to knock off the horsefly, but how can he? --For with both hands he supports the children, and if he stops to put the children down the bear will catch up with him.”  Sylvia Townsend Warner “The Corner That Held Them” 1948

What started as a temporary (I thought!) job as the house cook at Christian Fellowship Home has lengthened for me into a twenty year commitment to the place, and those twenty years have passed more quickly than I care to admit. There are jobs that enrich you, jobs that inspire you, and jobs that ennoble you; some people have even managed to find all three benefits in a single employment situation.  That’s definitely been the case for me here, although there have been enough “horseflies” and “bears” thrown in along the way to make it interesting! I can only conclude one thing – it takes a special kind of idiot to work at a halfway house.

A halfway house owned and operated by an individual may be different, but the ones that are sponsored by small local non-profit charitable organizations like ours depend primarily on funding and donations, and those can swell, ebb, and wane according to the circumstances of the community’s economy like tides under the phases of the moon. Some people actually think that there is money to be made in operating a halfway house, as one well-meaning but naive lady breathlessly told me over the phone one day. Her plan was to open a halfway house using nothing but available grant money, which she was convinced was abundantly plentiful and going begging -- unclaimed funding that was just hanging around unpicked like ripe fruit in an abandoned orchard. She was convinced too that the residents who came to her would all gladly contribute, paying their fees promptly and responsibly --and holding hands and singing Kumbaya as well I guess!

Reality check: the residents are probably the least reliable source of funding you can depend on. I mean, really, who comes out of treatment, or off a long disastrous binge with an improved credit score?

In most halfway house operations, money is in short supply. In spite of that, many people have the idea that working in one is a lucrative position that pays exorbitantly well. Our annual budget of slightly more than $100K earmarks approximately $45K for salaries and wages, and we have three employees. You do the math.

Finding the money to keep the lights on with is challenging enough, but dealing with the residents is just as challenging.  Very few end up at a halfway house because they want to be there. Most of us got there because we had absolutely no other viable alternative. When he first arrives, the new man is battling all sorts of devastating feelings about his recent addictive crisis and the consequences of it. That doesn’t always make for pleasant social interaction right off the bat, and is one reason that a lot of the newly recovered relapse in the first 90 days of new found sobriety. Then there’s what I call the “Thank you/screw you” complex. The first couple of weeks or months a resident is usually constantly sharing how glad he is to be there but later on nothing the house does suits him and gratitude has flown out the window.

And don’t be looking for a lot of positive strokes from the people you work for either, there aren’t many employee of the month appreciation award  programs at any of the halfway houses I know.  Your bosses, the board of directors, may not be practicing addicts and alcoholics, but they are sometimes going to bring the same amount of “personalities before principles” to the situation that the residents do!  To paraphrase the Conductor’s Lament:

            I do not get to drive the train,

            I cannot ring the bell,

            But let the dam thing jump the tracks

            And see who catches hell!” – author unknown

So why do I keep going to work day after day at this halfway house? There are several reasons. To see the light of sustainable recovery come in to the eyes of a man who was convinced it was impossible for him to get sober is a wonderful thing to experience. To share the daily task of staying sober and clean with other men who are facing the same challenges I am gives me the strength to endure.  To know that there would be a hole in the fabric of our community if the house disappeared (as several of the eastern North Carolina halfway houses already have) helps give me the determination to carry it forward. But for me, there’s an even more fundamental benefit from working here that I never found at any other place of employment--

It’s the only job I’ve ever had that I could stay sober doing.