“Thank you and Kairos for always being there right from the beginning when I started to want to get my life together. I wouldn’t of got here without you. You helped me with and through everything. Support on the street, until you helped me into supported accommodation and now I’ve been a year in my own place. You have just helped me with everything, my daughter, and making sure I had everything I needed before she came into the world, helped me sort all my benefits out. Helped me get a little job and get on courses. Always there if I just want to call and talk, and pointed me in directions when I needed help. Everything in my life right now, my beautiful girl, I got with the help and support of Kairos. There are no words for how thankful I am that Kairos was there when I needed you”.
“My worker is helping me sort my life out. She gets me and doesn’t judge me. I feel like she understands why it is so hard to get out of my situation. She’s patient. She doesn’t put too much pressure on me and lets me go at my own pace. There’s even been times when I’ve gone AWOL and she checked in on me until I was ready to come back. She didn’t close the door on me. She isn’t like other workers I’ve had, who were always trying to get me to do things they way they wanted me to. She encourages me to never give up trying”.
“Yeah, because of obviously, when I was a child, I went through lots of different sexual exploitation and abuse so, for me, naturally as an adult, sometimes being around men can be quite triggering. So, in order for me to grow and process and do things I need to do, it’s important that my environment is like, as calm and relaxing as it can be for me, so yeah, it is really important that I’m around females in order to kind of, feel safe and to feel like I can be involved and feel free”.
“My life was in turmoil. I was a really bad cocaine user. I fell pregnant, and my Kairos worker helped me turn my life around, she helped me see the future I could have. After about 6-7 months, I started feeling back to the happier me. I could see a life without the drugs and without the alcohol. The team at Kairos supported me through everything, through times where I’ve had no shopping, to times where I’ve just needed someone to talk to, to when I’ve been literally at breaking point. Helping me go to case conferences, to keep my children, reading letters and just giving me a better understanding of how things actually work in the real world. Nearly four years in, I still struggle, I still get tempted. There’s been times where I’ve literally had it in front of me, and I’ve gone to do it, but I’ve pulled myself back because I know the place I came from, the very dark place, and to leave that lifestyle alone. It nearly destroyed me, more than actually taking the drugs did. My future now, is so bright and I can actually see that. I can see me working, to give me and my girls a better life and hopefully to help others in the amazing way I’ve had help”.
“…and that’s one thing I’ve always said is Kairos is one of them places where, most of these other places you go to like counselling places and stuff like that and like, especially mental health teams and stuff like that, you find that you feel like, they’re only doing it because that’s their job, whereas it feels, with Kairos, and every single member of staff that I come into contact with here, it’s like, they do it because they want to, like, it’s not because it’s just a job to them, they do it because they actually care…”
