I actually didn’t think it was possible. I had tried so many times. Put my whole energy into resisting, thrown away the tools so many times, in order for just a few hours later look for them again.

The last years I didn’t want anything more than to quit, but I could not. At this point in life I had lost everything. My family had given up on me, my housing and work were an impossible equation. I was in and out of prison, and I thought that this was my place in the world. I had no faith in myself, my self-esteem was non-existent, and I believed I was a failure. I had a wish though, a wish to be just anybody, not the best, not the worst, just an ordinary guy in society, with somewhere to stay, a job, and maybe a hobby. I was longing to feel good about myself.

With this longing I came to Basta.

I didn’t know so much about Basta when I came. I knew you worked there and that there was no therapy. I was happy the planning stretched a year forward, and I didn’t need to think of anything else than just to be there.

I liked it that you were part of a work team, even if I thought it was hard with the relations to the others in the beginning. My self-esteem was not the best, and I had difficulties seeing that I could do the tasks just as good as the others.

Time passed, and I started to feel better. I got to try on more responsibility and was also praised by others for the work I was doing. I grew.

For me it was a game changer that the people who were managing Basta were the same as me. They had lived the same life as I had, been just as hopeless, and still managed to change their lives. I needed role models that had succeeded, and I found them at Basta.

Now a couple of years have passed. I am still here, and I have no plan to quit. I have, together with everybody else here, managed to create a life that is impossible to compare to the life I had before. Now I am part of something much bigger than myself, and I work together with others in order to develop Basta and to help others that want to come here.