Shivering in the raw January wind, the exhausted young woman scurried away from the smiling strangers toward her flimsy refuge \u2014 a tattered tent between the railroad tracks and the Lackawanna River.<\/p>\n
They came bearing food and blankets, but the strangers were men, and in the young woman\u2019s hard-earned experience, men didn\u2019t offer help without expecting something in return.<\/p>\n
It was the day after Bianca W.\u2019s 34th birthday and Brian Kerrigan and his crew from Junken Monkeys Hauling Company came bearing greater gifts than pizza and Gatorade.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey were my birthday present,\u201d Bianca told me. \u201cBrian pulled up in the car and said, \u2018Hey, if you\u2019re hungry, there\u2019s food back there.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cThey had the box truck, and Brian said, \u2018My guys are in the back of the truck.\u2019 Those words kind of made me take off for my tent because I thought I was going to be kidnapped.\u201d<\/p>\n
Instead, Brian and his crew were offering a chance at escape from the bondage of addiction and the hopelessness of homelessness. Convinced by the strangers\u2019 earnest, easygoing approach, Bianca stepped out of her hiding place and into a new life of recovery and redemption.<\/p>\n
Today, Bianca is 35, sober, and a star employee of Junken Monkeys. The business, which repurposes depreciated people willing to work for a second chance, recently branched out into construction and pest control and is in the process of creating the nonprofit Purple Monkey Group Recovery Foundation. Most of Brian\u2019s employees are addicts in recovery, just like the boss.<\/p>\n
Brian, Bianca and I met for coffee and conversation last week, three recovering addicts grateful for an opportunity to share our experience, strength and hope. We come from different backgrounds, but we\u2019ve been to many of the same dark places. Brian promised me Bianca\u2019s story offered invaluable insights into the extra hurdles homeless, addicted women must clear to recover.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you hear what this remarkable young woman has lived through, you\u2019ll understand why she\u2019s so special to us,\u201d Brian said. Turns out he was underselling her story.<\/p>\n
Bianca was born in the city and educated in Scranton schools. She\u2019s the mother of five kids ages 4 through 15 and has been employed in a variety of physically demanding jobs most of her life. She lost her apartment when the property was sold at sheriff\u2019s sale over the landlord\u2019s unpaid taxes and lost custody of the kids soon after.<\/p>\n
Homeless and devastated by the absence of her children, Bianca turned to methamphetamine to cope and stay awake through long, cold nights endured alone.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was afraid to sleep,\u201d she said. \u201cThere are a lot of creepy people out there. Living outside is about surviving. You learn to stay away from people.\u201d<\/p>\n
And to sleep in the most secure space you can find.<\/p>\n
\u201cI slept in a port-a-potty a few times, because I could lock the door and it at least blocked the wind,\u201d Bianca said. \u201cSome people would sleep in vacant houses, which I did once, but one, it\u2019s illegal, and two, there\u2019s always weird people going in and out and there\u2019s needles all over the place. To me, the port-a-potty was cleaner and safer.\u201d<\/p>\n
The tent by the river was an upgrade. Bianca once worked as a roofer, and hit up a former co-worker for insulation tiles to fortify the tent walls against the cold. On her 34th birthday, a stranger slashed the side of Bianca\u2019s tent. Brian and his crew rolled into her life the next morning.<\/p>\n
Bianca took the job Brian offered and his help getting into treatment. She completed treatment and worked with the Lackawanna County Office of Youth and Family Services to get her kids back. The Catherine McCauley Center helped her get an apartment and she now has shared custody of the children.<\/p>\n
For Brian, Bianca\u2019s story is another vindication of his use of recovery as a business model. He invests in people who\u2019ve been written off as bad bets by employers who\u2019ve been burned by addicts in business or family life or both. Brian\u2019s been burned, too, but he knows the transaction from both sides. Later this month, Brian, 59, will celebrate 28 years of sobriety.<\/p>\n
Junken Monkeys will soon close on a property that will serve as a headquarters for the business and the nonprofit foundation. Bianca has \u201cmore than proved herself as hard-working and tough as any of the guys,\u201d Brian said, but the plan is to transition her into a key role as an ambassador for the foundation.<\/p>\n
\u201cBianca is simply the perfect ambassador, because there\u2019s no substitute for experience,\u201d he said. \u201cShe\u2019s been there and done that. She\u2019s gone through hell and lived to tell about it. The day I met her, she looked old and tired, like she\u2019d given up. Look at her now. She\u2019s just got a glow about her.\u201d<\/p>\n
I saw it, too. The Bianca I met bore no resemblance to the homeless, hopeless young woman terrified of strangers that she and Brian described. Both noted how comfortable she was sharing her story with me.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf this was a year ago, I probably would have run out the door,\u201d she said with a winning grin. \u201cBack then, I was in survival mode. There\u2019s a big difference between just surviving and living. I\u2019m living now.\u201d<\/p>\n
On Saturday, Bianca took her kids to a movie. Then home.<\/p>\n
CHRIS KELLY, the Times-Tribune columnist, recently celebrated 7 years in recovery. Contact the writer: ckelly@scrantontimes.com; @cjkink on X; Chris Kelly, The Times-Tribune on Facebook; and @chriskellyink on Blue Sky Social.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Shivering in the raw January wind, the exhausted young woman scurried away from the smiling strangers toward her…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":80619,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[1590,182,139,1559,1560,178,180,179],"class_list":{"0":"post-119348","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-scranton","8":"tag-chris-kelly","9":"tag-local-news","10":"tag-news","11":"tag-opinion","12":"tag-opinion-columnists","13":"tag-scranton","14":"tag-scranton-headlines","15":"tag-scranton-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119348"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119348\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/80619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}