“Heroin made me a different person. At some point I weighed about 45 kilos. I was constantly under influence. One day I was told I was nog longer welcome in the coffee shop I would always hang out. I was told that I scared away costumers. I was devastated. The coffee shop was the last place I was able to go and have small conversations with people. I returned to the tent I was sleeping in at the time and I grabbed my knife. I wanted to cut my wrists but I didn’t have the courage to end my life. When I woke up the next day I applied for a methadone program. I promised myself to not steal and use drugs for at least 6 weeks. It was hard. I became very sick for days but I kept on going. After 6 weeks I was still part of the program. I went to pick up my mail at my postbox. I received two letters. Both of them were offers for apartments. After 9 years of waiting and living on the street I finally had the opportunity to live in a house. It was a sign of God, rewarding me for trying to quit. I had gotten a second chance and I was more confident than ever to now screw it up. That was 20 years ago and i’m still going strong!” (4/4)

“At school I’d get bullied a lot. At the age of 12 I realized that if I was violent myself, kids in school would leave me alone. I became an extremely aggressive person. By the time I left primary school, I was hanging out with the wrong crowd of friends. They all smoked hash and soon I became addicted myself. I skipped many classes and soon I dropped out of school. I would spend most of my time smoking hash in the coffee shop. The coffee shop became the only place where I felt a sense of belonging. When I was seventeen I got kicked out of my parent’s house. I had no where to go so I went to the only place I knew, the coffeeshop. The owners of the shop had a spare room so they offered me to live there. Soon I started to deliver packages for them. I never knew what was in those packages, I didn’t ask but I knew it wasn’t legal. I was smoking so much, that it no longer had an impact on me. I wanted to experience something new so I started to look for alternatives and I bought cocaine from a prostitute in the “Red light district”. I enjoyed it so much that I started using regularly. I was making a lot of money delivering packages and I still owned a few thousand euro’s that my grandmother had saved up for me. I spent it all on drugs. When the owners of the coffee shop found out I was using cocaine, they kicked me out. I had become unreliable and they didn’t trust me anymore. I lost my house and soon I lost all my money. I was 18 years old and living on the street without a place to go..“ (2/4)

“Ever since I can remember my father would physically abuse me. My father was a dictator and there was no way my mother could interfere. One time he was beating me so hard my mother tried to stop it. While my little brother was crying, she begged my father to stop hitting me. She said: ’‘if you keep hitting him, he is going to hate you one day!”. My father had an important job at the airport with many responsibilities and together with my mother he worked in a bar at night. They would be away a lot so my grandmother took care of my brother and I. Later on my grandmother got Alzheimer and she could no longer look after us. My father hired an acquaintance to be our babysitter. He would play games with me such as strip poker. He made me take off my clothes and he sexually abused me for 3 years. I never told my parents about the abuse. I think I was too ashamed, I felt it was my own fault. I was 18 when I confronted my parents with it, they thought I was lying. That’s when my brother interrupted the conversation and said: “Michel is right.” My dad asked him how he knew for sure. My brother replied: “Because it also happened to me..” (¼)