A Business That Helps Prostitutes Bloom In Recovery
For prostitutes looking to get drug free and off the streets, the Magdalene program in Nashville, Tenn., provides a model for healing. Magdalene offers housing, therapy and a self-sustaining small business that allows the women it serves to make money and gain respect.
People gather in a support circle at Thistle Farms.
That business is Thistle Farms, and the recovering women who run it make body care products by hand and paper made of thistle.
If you open the door at Thistle Farms and ask a woman about becoming a prostitute, you hear about a world of pain.
There's Nina Phillips, who turned her first trick at 13 years old when she was a dancer at a gentleman's club in Atlanta. And Tara Adcock, whose mother left when she was 5. Adcock started stripping at a club in Nashville at 17 using a fake ID. Valerie Williams, who before coming to Magdalene, would be on a crack high for sometimes 5 or 6 days straight.
Then there's Penny Hall, a stocky woman in a perpetual flannel shirt, whose girlfriend's name is tattooed on her neck. Her voice is like burled wood.
"I am 47 years old. My family disowned me. And I started living on the streets up on the bridge and that's what I called home for about 10 years," Hall says.
Between manufacturing, sales and administration, 32 graduates or residents of Magdalene work at Thistle Farms. Hall is one of a couple dozen women currently making bath and body products there.
"I never thought I'd be at a place making healing oil," she says as she stirs a plastic bowl of bath oil with a whisk.
A Life Transformed
Thistle Farms makes lotions and balms, products intended to heal others, and these women.
After the oil is mixed, the bottles are wrapped in a special paper the women make from thistle they collect on roadsides and fields. Hall says thistle is their emblem.
"Like a rough weed, like we are, when we're out there on the streets. We was rough and tough, went through hell and back, got into situations and we just survived the cold and the drought like the thistle does. It don't need no water. It comes up out of the concrete, and it transforms into a beautiful flower," Hall says.
Hall's life before Thistle Farms was bleak and hopeless. And then one day, she said she just couldn't live under a bridge any longer. And a judge who said he'd send her to Magdalene or prison — and then gave her $10 for a bus ticket — gave her a nudge.
Women at Thistle Farms make body care products by hand and paper from thistles.
"I woke up and I guess something must have hit that morning. I said 'This has got to go.' I took a good hard look at my life, and I said 'I'm never gonna have nothing as long as I stay here,'" Hall says.
She turned to her buddies under the bridge — they called themselves the Alley Cats — and told them goodbye.
"The people said 'What do you mean bye?' I said 'I ain't coming back.' They said 'Yeah, you always come back.' I said, 'Well this time it's different,'" Hall says.
The bridge is actually a highway overpass. The homeless campsite is still there. There were — and still are — mattresses and blankets where Hall and the others slept at night. It's a trash-strewn, filthy, rat-infested scene, freezing cold in winter and baking in summer. But they'd still have to put blankets over their heads.
"And the mosquitoes are so bad in the summertime it's unreal. You can't even sit nowhere without being bitten up. You'd have to cover up and sweat to death," Hall says.
She kept a CB radio to meet men for prostitution, usually truckers at a nearby truck stop. When Hall left that environment, she says it was the first time she'd slept in a real bed in three years.
Source: NPR
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