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Friday, March 16, 2012
Ballam
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The Agassiz Y Harrison Y Hope
Furniture Gallery A FAMILY TRADITION FOR 50 YEARS
& NOTARIES PUBLIC
Real Estate Transfers
2-12 JB10
45921 Wellington Avenue 604.793.7966 www.ballamfurniture.com
604.796.2925
office: 604.796.4300
ahobserver.com
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classifieds: 604.796.4300
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newsline: 604.796.4302
HEMLOCK EXPANSION Berezan inks deal with Sts’ailes council
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MOUNTAINS AND MUSIC Songwriter Buckman Coe finds ways to keep evolving
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JESSICA PETERS / OBSERVER
Gerri Healey emerges from a tub of water at Harrison Gospel Church last June, as part of her road to redemption after a long life of drug abuse. Healey has now been clean and sober for two years.
mailbag . . . . . . . . . . . 7
A miracle in the making
community . . . . . . . 12
Forty years of hard drug use washed away in emotional baptism
INSIDE opinion . . . . . . . . . . . 6
entertainment . . . . . 15
Jessica Peters THE OBSERVER
classifieds . . . . . . . . 17
326 Wallace Street Hope, BC
604.869.5651
Gerri Healey has a lifetime of sins behind her, and it’s come time to wash them away. She sits beside her pastor, Brian Cool, at the Harrison Gospel Chapel on an early Friday morning. In two days, she will be baptized here. She’s nervous about what’s to come, and looking for guidance. She looks to the young cleric seated beside her, asking him questions of a higher nature – questions of God, and of rebirth. Healey wasn’t raised in a church-going family, so even at the age of 52, the idea of redemption
is new to her. “I know I’ve done wrong in my life and I want it to go away,” she explains, then turning to Cool to ask: “Is that okay?” Of course it is, he assures her. Baptism, he tells her, is a symbolic gesture of a Christian’s love for Jesus – “an outward sign of an inward reality.” What shows on Healey’s outside isn’t the typical churchgoer image, but one of a hard drug user, a vagabond. On the outside, Healey is a streethardened woman who has watched good friends die. Her skin is mottled leather and her body is bound by
its erratic twitching. Drug use has left her with the effects of a stroke, a diabetic and epileptic. Her voice is thick like three-day-old coffee, with the scratch of loose gravel rolling over concrete. She knows that when strangers see her, that’s all they see. And when she takes her walks around the Harrison Lake lagoon, thinking about the last 40 years of her life, she knows why some people pass her by, not returning her sunny smiles and “good mornings!” And she understands. "Maybe it's not a good morning for them," she jokes. Healey has been drug-free for more
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MARCO D. CEDRONE PERSONAL INJURY LAWYER ICBC (MVA’S) • SLIP & FALLS • DOG BITES • PERSONAL INJURY - HOWEVER CAUSED
7070 Pioneer Ave., Agassiz BC | 604-796-0415 | www.cascadelaw.com com
than two years. She's been alcohol free. She hasn’t touched so much as a cigarette. Devil's playthings are a thing of the past, she says. She's moved on, and now she wants the world to know why. More than anything, she wants her story shared with the world. “I’ve wasted so much of my life,” she says. Tears start to form as she delves into her story, tracing back from her hard beginnings to this new road to redemption. She doesn’t candy coat a thing. And when she gets to the difficult parts, she lovingly pets Squeak, a small mutt of a dog she adopted from the streets of CONTINUED ON 3