Uruguay: Two Catholic centers work on the recovery and reintegration of addicts

The “El Campanario” home, belonging to the San Marcos Ji Civil Association, which works with people recovering from addictions in Uruguay, celebrated its first anniversary on December 4, while the “La Fuente” halfway house, another project of the same association, takes his first steps.

Inés Olivera is one of the driving forces of the association, which in the last year has worked a lot, through both homes, for people who need to recover from addictions.

“La Fuente” opened in September and is located half an hour from the center of Montevideo, the Uruguayan capital. There, accommodation and support are offered to people who are in the process of or have gone through a therapeutic community for drug use.

When the opportunity arose to open this second home, Olivera commented in statements collected on the website of the Archdiocese of Montevideo, “we were working to make a project for paradores”, lodgings to house street people.

“The director of social protection of Mides (Ministry of Social Development) called me because of the work in the first San Marcos Ji house. “He told me they needed another halfway house,” he recalled.

“There we had to start looking for a space, the rent of which was contemplated in the ministry’s budget,” he explained, and they chose a place in the western part of the city, with large spaces, which allowed it to be divided into a majority section for men and another with fewer places for women.

The halfway house is a solution between residential and therapeutic. Its coordinator, Nicolás Parreira, explained that “the idea is that while they are here, the boys—all over 18 years old—generate bonds, among themselves and with the house’s proposal.”

“It is not a shelter and it is not a house either. We ask users to have a means of supporting addiction treatment, and many times they carry out recreational or training activities in other institutions with which Mides has an agreement,” he explained.

What this home tries to do is generate networks so that the people who receive assistance, when they leave the therapeutic community, can begin to adapt, first to the house and then to the outside world.

“We are committed to ensuring that they have autonomy, we help them to be responsible with the use of money if they work, we help them with that administration. “It is a place of contention,” he summarized.

It was his own experience with addictions and his subsequent change in life thanks to Fazenda de la Esperanza that drove him to work for other people in the same situation. In this regard, he clarified that “it is not just about quitting the drug – since all consumption can be problematic – because sometimes there is functional consumption: you work, you are there for a while and you return to consumption.”

“Containment spaces are needed, because you are addicted your whole life,” he pointed out.

Both “La Fuente” and “El Campanario” seek to offer users an instance of containment in which, at the same time, they generate tools to find their own place. In this framework, the experience is complemented with workshops or state initiatives that strengthen the community.

The agreement with Mides covers the rent, expenses and food of the people who receive assistance, but they themselves are the ones who cook and maintain order in the place, where in addition to two coordinators six therapeutic operators work.

In the case of “El Campanario”, which is located in the Basilica Nuestra Señora del Carmen, in its first year of operation, people passed through there who not only had to recover from addictions but also leave the realities of confinement and several years. of living on the street.

Those who enter “El Campanario” come from the Fazenda de la Esperanza, with the requirement of having completed a year there. In El Campanario “you can have an experience of spirituality similar to that of the Fazenda, which is what the boys know and allows them to get ahead,” Olivera explained.

Currently nine people receive assistance at El Campanario, and of them, five are working and four are taking the therapeutic operator course.

In this case there are no agreements, but it is financed with private donors, so currently, they need sponsors for each person who arrives, to cover the costs of electricity, water, transportation tickets, and medical care.

“The people who arrive there are who Jesus asks us to be with,” stressed the promoter of the association.