ADAM
When I arrived at KwaSizabantu Mission, I was addicted to heroin, had spent two years in prison and was living on the streets of Durban. I had harmed my family greatly and things had reached the point where I was considering committing suicide. After seeking help at many other rehabs and institutions, things had only ever gotten worse. I was enrolled in the CYPSA Restoration Programme, began to attend services and speak with a counsellor. As I began to confess my sin, I could feel the burdens of a lifetime of sin, guilt and shame rolling off of my shoulders and I was set free from the hold that drug addiction and the devil had on my life. God came into my life and began to work. The Mission assisted me to travel to make right with my mother and father, and others who I had wronged in the past and I was then given an opportunity to work on the mission. I used the money I made to pay back all of those I had stolen from in the past and I confessed all of the crimes I had committed to the police.
Eight years later my relationship with my family has been restored. I am now in the final semester of an LLB degree (which is my second qualification since the Mission provided me with an opportunity to study for free). By God’s grace I will graduate cum laude at the end of this semester. I have the privilege of working at the aQuellé water bottling plant based on the Mission. During my time on the Mission, I have personally experienced the unceasing kindness, love, selflessness and patience of the co-workers, counsellors and elders of the mission, who surrender their lives completely to help people like myself. God continues to work in my life, to teach me and mould me and to draw me into a deeper relationship with Himself, using those whom He has chosen to guide me, discipline me and share their wisdom with me. It is my desire that God will give me His grace to continue on this path until the very end.
If it were not for the fact that I could come to the Mission for help there would have been nowhere else that I could go. Had the Mission not assisted me in the way that it has I do not believe that It is an exaggeration that I would be dead today. What has taken place in my life shows that the Mission is different to a rehabilitation centre. Wherever I went for help in the past things only got worse, and no true help was available at those places. It is my experience that the Mission is one of the very few places where a person can truly be helped with drug addiction problems.