MEMPHIS, Tenn. — In front of the Salvation Army Purdue Center of Hope, Lakeisha Emery used to walk in front of the building on Jackson Avenue, but never had any idea it would one day put her on the path to a better life.
“I used to walk past this building a whole lot, but never knew awesome things were going in here,” Lakeisha said.
Lakeisha was only 12 years old and living in Chicago when she started hanging out with the wrong crowd because she said her mother had a mental illness and her father was always working.
“I started using marijuana, drinking, and got pregnant at 12 and had a baby at 13,” she said.
She was a teenaged mother who later dropped out of high school and started drinking and using marijuana before experimenting with PCP, cocaine, and crack cocaine, and that also meant finding ways to pay for her drug habit.
“I had a friend who told me about how to make easy money, soliciting, and I started doing it and started messing around with older men who would give me money,” Lakeisha said.
Lakeisha turned to prostitution and robbery.
“I started robbing dudes, older dudes, and that’s how I started making my fast money,” she said.
The idea of making fast money is what motivated her to board a Greyhound Bus with her daughter and head to Memphis, Tennessee.
“A friend said you can make more money in Memphis and I’m like, for real?” she said.
Lakeisha says many days, she walked up and down Lamar Avenue, and the courts eventually took away her daughter because of solicitation.
As her personal life worsened, so did her drug use, along with witnessing a murder, and then came what she called the darkest point in her life.
“I was doing X pills, powder cocaine, and so, a dude tried to rape me in East Memphis and a dude tried to push me in the bushes,” Lakeisha said.
She finally cried out for help.
“I got tired of walking the streets and laying with different dudes. I was like, I need some help,” she said.
At this point in her life, Lekeisha had several children.
She went to MIFA, which recommended the Salvation Army’s Renewal Place program for chemically addicted women and their children.
“I found I’m not the only one and found out there are women who can overcome this addiction, disease,” Lakeisha said.
Lakeisha said her children feel as if they now have a home because Renewal Place allows families to stay up to two years as mothers work toward sobriety, employment, and positive parenting.
“My children get so much love here,” Lakeisha said.
For more than eight months, Lakeisha said she’s been drug and alcohol free. She said her youngest son was born since she’s been at the Renewal Place, and there are no drugs in his system.
Lakeisha said gets inspiration from her children and from the words written in a letter next her door. The words come from the daughter of one of her neighbors at Renewal Place.
“Just trust in the Lord and everything will be alright. It was so emotional,” Lakeisha said.
It’s emotional for Lakeisha, a woman overcoming a once troubled life who used to walk past the Salvation Army Purdue Center of Hope and eventually found hope through the Renewal Place program.
“It’s just a blessing, a big blessing for this program to be here and the people that work in here. They love you so much,” she said.
