Bird Sisters ‘stick together’ in recovery
The first person to wake in the Bird Sisters transitional home is Tonya Palmer. She sits by her bathroom window on the top floor of the house, a mug of warm coffee in her hands. Outside, the town of Waynesburg is still dark and cloaked in thick fog.
In a house with five women, the mornings are the only part of the day when she is alone with her thoughts.
When she rises, the hallway in the old house creaks as she passes the spare room, also on the top floor. There are two beds inside the room—where her four children have often slept when they visit; but they are soon to be filled with two new members of the family.
Two more girls who came looking for help.
By the time she moved in three and a half months ago, Tonya had tried everything to overcome her heroin addiction—including Narcotics Anonymous, in-patient facilities and a five-year stint in a state prison. But she continued to struggle.
Now, as she walks down the narrow steps, stepping over random pairs of shoes and personal items to greet the other women downstairs, she is more than 90 days sober, and she has a job.
“Just having that kind of love and support,” she said. “It boosts you up; it makes you want to do the right thing.”
At the Bird Sisters, where each member is given a specific position and job—Tonya is president—applicants are interviewed by the current residents, and are voted in by an 80 percent majority. But these days, with heroin and other opioid substances ravaging the community, Tonya and the other women often have no choice, paradoxically, but to turn them away.
Most of the women in the house are a lot like Tonya. Traditional rehabilitation programs did not appeal to her, because it meant separation from her children. She would leave before she was ready, and she would relapse.
The Bird Sisters, an all-female transitional home branching off the Oxford House organization, aims to change that pattern. Aside from one facilitator, who monitors the residents and makes sure they are following the basic rules—no substances of any kind and attendance at 12-step meetings—the house is mostly “democratically-run” by the women, said Tonya.
They wake up together, drink coffee together, go to NA meetings together. They have house meetings, too, where they make schedules for fundraisers and public forums, talk about how they will pay the bills and address any conflicts between residents. When someone new applies to join the facility, they are all present for the interview, and they can all ask questions.
It is really about supporting one another through recovery, Tonya said.
“We all work together as a team to try to help other people and share our experience, strength and hope,” she said.
The facility has become increasingly active in the conversation for drug recovery, on a county level.
The opioid epidemic in Western Pennsylvania is mounting, with overdose deaths in Greene County having doubled since 2014—nearing Washington County levels, according to an article in the Observer-Reporter. The residents do all they can to address the crisis. Tonya, for example, regularly visits the county courthouse to advocate for probation violators with crimes linked to addiction.
“They need help,” she said. “Sitting in a jail cell isn’t going to help you; you need to go to treatment.”
Unfortunately, the general consensus in the house is that there are not enough resources to combat drug and alcohol addiction in the county. According to the Pennsylvania Youth Survey 2015 results, which was the most recent year the survey was conducted, up to 46.2 percent of students in 12th grade reported easy access to prescription pain medications, including narcotics. Abuse of narcotic pain medications has been linked to heroin addiction nationwide.
Yet, Tonya thinks that the issue is underestimated in Greene County.
“A lot of people I don’t think quite understand how bad the epidemic is for alcohol and substance abuse. And they feel like ‘Oh well, Washington’s only right there and they have rehab.’ But that’s not the case, because Washington has their issues,” said Tonya.
“We need one here.”
But it’s not that simple.
According to Kira Sisks, director of the Drug and Alcohol Program in the Greene County Department of Human Services, the system in place in Greene County is statewide.
“We are pretty much that central contact for the county for drug and alcohol services,” she said. “So, we provide the prevention, intervention and referral to treatment services. We help people find the most suitable bed for them, and we do follow up calls.”
Sisks said the county offers level-of-care assessments to any person in recovery who makes contact with DAP and then helps place them in available programs across the state.
“The problem is…there might be several counties who are looking for this same bed,” Sisks said, explaining that if there is no space in any detox agencies, the patient will have no choice but to wait.
In the eyes of the Bird Sisters residents, making patients wait is unacceptable, and more treatment options should be made available within the county lines.
That’s what brought one of the women in the house, Treasurer Kelly Riley to take up the issue with state legislators by leading a trip to Harrisburg.
The Bird Sisters lobbied for three main points for the county: a halfway house, a rehabilitation/detox center and more youth outreach programs to prevent cases of addiction in the future.
With no in-patient rehabilitation facility located in the county, Tonya is beginning to feel desperate. As a transitional home, the Bird Sisters does not have the resources available to provide medical detox—their purpose is to help women only after they’ve gotten clean.
Tonya is asking herself, what should she tell women when they come asking for help?
What if there is no alternative?
What is going to happen to them?
The hardest part is having to turn people away.
It’s one thing to deny someone because of a lack of space, said Tonya. But it’s even worse to have no place to send them.
“I’m terrified, now, of anybody that’s using. I’m just waiting and waiting for a phone call,” she said. “I don’t want to have to turn people away and have no help or resources or anything to do for them, because what’s going to happen if they [die] that night?”
She thinks about the importance of having a support system during recovery, and the guilt of denying that from someone in need.
She remembers finding her own cousin, dead of an overdose. Only with the help of her friends in the house was she able to make it through the trauma without relapsing.
And she is not the only one in her community to watch loved ones struggle and succumb to addiction. Alissa, a former resident of the house and Tonya’s sponsor, said she has lost more than a dozen friends to the epidemic.
“I think people are seeing that this is affecting our community more and more because people are having family members die, and this disease is affecting everybody,” she said. “I know, us that are sober…we’re all just trying to come together and make a difference.”
Alissa is a part of a community recovery group in Waynesburg, which includes both recovering addicts and concerned community members. They recently petitioned to start a rehabilitation center in the building that used to be Graysville Elementary, but the request was denied.
“Nobody wants to take that step, to be the first people to make a rehab,” said Alissa. “But, you know, we’re just going to keep trying.”
On a Friday afternoon, the women sit together on the back porch of the house, reclining in lawn chairs and sharing an ash tray. The newest member of the house, Rachel Molish, just returned from a job interview, with good news.
Breathing smoke into the unseasonably hot air, they make plans for the evening, a candlelight meeting down the street, and they talk about their next step with state legislators.
The women plan to host two senators and their aides for dinner, to keep discussing the issues plaguing Greene County. They are composing handwritten letters, too, to send to Harrisburg and make their voices heard.
No matter the outcome, though, Tonya said they will carry on. She knows they will be OK.
“When you’re doing the right thing and you’re staying clean, blessings will start to happen,” she said. “That’s what this house is about: saving lives, and giving people a second chance.”
As the late afternoon sun sinks lower, they tease each other, share jokes and laugh. Tonya said it isn’t always easy being there for each other, but she knows they all need it.
“It’s like a family; we’re kind of like sisters, here. And it ain’t perfect; we don’t always get along, but at the end of the day, we’re here for each other,” she said.
“We stick together.”