Christine Elias wears an enormous pair of musical, red and green elf slippers-the kind where the toes curl up. They are an apt metaphor for the 49-year-old’s spirits lately-playful and elevated.

That may not sound unusual during this festive season but for Christine it’s world’s apart from where she found herself the first day she walked into the Salvation Army’s Centre of Hope on March 31.
“When I first walked through these doors asking for help,” she says referring to the Centre’s 9th Ave. S.E. building, “I felt one-inch tall.” says the 5-ft.-8 hairstylist.

Until the last couple of years, Christine led a pretty normal life. She worked hard as a hairdresser, raised a son, paid the rent -- the regular stuff.

It was back when she fell in love with a man she met while living in Halifax that her life started to unravel.

The couple decided to move to Calgary and her “ex” - an alcoholic with a preference for Jack Daniel’s whiskey-tried crack cocaine just once and was hooked.

“He went from Jack to crack,” says Christine.

“I thought I could change him,” she admits. But instead of changing him, he changed her circumstances by constantly stealing from her. She left him many times but then he’d call and tell her he’d quit doing drugs but that never lasted.

Eventually, after he smoked their rent money, they were evicted from their apartment.

On March 30, a suicidal Christine got extremely drunk and was arrested for driving under the influence in Cochrane - with more than twice the legal limit of alcohol in her blood.

“I had just spent a night in jail. My car was seized, I was homeless, I had nothing. I couldn’t even think.

“I was in Olympic Park completely devastated. I saw two bicycle cops. I stopped one of them and I just broke down. I started bawling. The cop advised me to come to the Centre of Hope.”

Her first night at the Centre of Hope, did what the name suggests.

“Some corporation put on a free roast beef dinner with ice cream. I remember feeling so grateful for that - a real sense of relief. It was like a warm fuzzy blanket.

“These people and this place transforms people," says Christine, sipping a tea in the common area on the seventh floor where 23 other women are being given hope and help by the army of saints that populate the Sally Ann.

“The people here are so kind. You’re treated as a human being -- as someone worthy who belongs and has a purpose.

Now Christine, who is also receiving therapy and is growing spiritually, has her own private room at the centre which she pays $300 rent for and is working full-time as a manager and hair stylist at Creative Profiles Hollywood Salon.

She hopes to find her own apartment soon once she builds up enough of a clientele at work where she says her boss, Linda, has been “an angel”.

“The day I got arrested was the end of my old life and the day I walked through here, was the beginning of my new life.

“I’d be nowhere without this place and these people,” she says giving Karin Hart, a Sally Ann client services worker a squeeze.

Christine is just one of hundreds of people who have been helped to turn their lives around by the Salvation Army - a truly great organization that feeds the hungry, houses the homeless and provides hope to the hopeless.

“If it wasn’t for the Sally Ann I don’t know where I’d be now, maybe dead. I don’t know. Now, thanks to them, things are looking up.” And she’s not talking about the toes on her slippers.

by Licia Corbella

Reprinted with permission from The Calgary Sun