Fundraiser to help non-profit’s mission of recovery

Her child found her on the floor passed out with a needle sticking out of her arm. To protect her privacy, she is identified here as R.

She was a young mother who friends say was maybe 80 pounds “soaking wet” and she was a heroin addict.

Her brother was desperate to get help for his sister and found hope with Kim Eskew and Our House of Restoration. Today, that young woman is clean and sober, involved in church, married to a Christian man and the mother of a new baby.

R is just one of many success stories that has come from this Newton County non-profit transitional home for women in need of spiritual healing and recovery from substance abuse and other forms of addiction. For seven years, Our House of Restoration has offered help and hope to women in difficult situations.

Woman’s Club to host fundraiser

As a way to help Our House of Restoration, the Heartland Woman’s Club is hosting a fundraiser called “Bougie Bingo” on Sept. 13 at The First Presbyterian Church on Clark Street in Covington.

The event is open to everyone and tickets are $40 and include a bingo card and refreshments. There will also be a chance to win a designer bag. Additional bingo cards and raffle tickets will also be available.

The Heartland Woman’s Club is part of the Georgia Federation of Woman’s Clubs, which has more than 60,000 members in more than 12 countries. For more information on the “Bougie Bingo” fundraiser, call 404-626-9912 or 404-402-1867. Doors open at 2:30 p.m. with bingo starting promptly at 3 p.m.

Eskew, of Butts County, said she is grateful to the members of the Heartland Woman’s Club.

“I’m so excited about how this club just took us in,” Eskew said. “One of the members and her husband actually built us a storage cabinet for one of the houses and filled the cabinet. They’ve gone above and beyond. I’m so excited they’re sponsoring us this year. It has meant so much. Linda Jesky has just been a jewel. ‘Bougie Bingo’ is going to be so much fun. It’s going to be over the top.”

Jesky, a member of the Heartland Woman’s Club, first met Eskew years ago, but they had not been in touch for many years when Eskew said Jesky called her “out of the blue.” She told Eskew that the Lord had put her on her mind and she felt like the club needed to help Our House of Restoration.

Much has happened since Eskew opened the house seven years ago and much more is on the horizon. This being the seventh year, she calls it her “jubilee year” and exciting events are underway. On Aug. 24, Eskew will open a second location.

Our House of Restoration for Men will open its doors in Newton County, joining Our House of Restoration for Women in helping adults suffering with addictions. Both are called “safe houses,” so their addresses are not publicized.

“I’m doing what God wants me to do and all he wants me to do is plant the seed,” she said. “If I plant the seed, whether I see them come to flourish or not, I’ve planted the seed.”

Eskew and her staff at House of Restoration have indeed planted those seeds and she enjoys talking about seeing so many lives that have changed.

She tells about one young woman who came there, another heroin addict who was a self-proclaimed atheist.

Eskew said the girl wanted help and worked hard to complete the program. She graduated, took training to become a counselor and started a job where she is helping others in need. There was also a change in her heart, Eskew said. She was no longer an atheist and recently served as a panelist at a symposium on faith.

“God just comes in and turns your life around,” Eskew said. The founder of Our House of Restoration knows all about that. She is a success story in her own right.

‘I had to change’

Born in DeKalb County, Eskew grew up in Decatur, graduated from Towers High School and was married at 17.

“I got married for no reason but stupidity,” she said. “I wasn’t pregnant. And then I married the same man in three different bodies.” Conversation with Eskew is peppered with humor, self-deprecating wit and matter-of-fact experiences.

“I’ve been married to my fourth husband for 22 years,” she said. “I had to change something about me. I had to figure out that I couldn’t save them, change them and my love would never change them. It took three to figure it out that they were in the same mold. I’m a hard learner.”

She married Lee Eskew in 2004.

“God chose him for me,” she said. “He’s been the best thing that’s ever happened to me...God knew what he was doing. I still had children growing up. His were grown. He took me on and my four children.” Her children ranged in age from 4 to 13.

Four years after they married, Eskew was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a double mastectomy. She was in her 40s and said the cancer was caught early.

“Lee took care of me and took care of my children,” she said. “He’s my rock.”

Eskew said her husband told her early on that he would help her in Our House of Restoration, but only in the background. Through the years, she has pulled him out of the background and he has helped with many duties of the ministry from driving to serving as a superintendent and director and now he is involved with the new Our House of Restoration for Men, which will be headed up by Henry Sneed. Eskew said through the years, when there were tough times and she thought about giving up, her husband encouraged her and told her she couldn’t “quit God.”

Helping others

For most of her life, Eskew has volunteered to help others.

She has volunteered in the local jails for more than two decades.

She worked in the jail ministry at her church and one year, she and the other volunteers baptized 42 women in the Rockdale County Jail. They took a portable baptismal pool, had music and celebrated with the women. Through her volunteer work at the jails, she taught life skills, “did church” and served communion.

She also taught the 12-step programs for Narcotics and Alcoholics Anonymous.

“I figured out that was my passion,” she said. Her professional job was as a typesetter for a big corporation, but in 2008, the same year she was diagnosed with breast cancer, her company cut back during the recession and Eskew was laid off from work.

She calls herself a “Jill of all trades” and went to school at Athens Tech become an x-ray technician. She worked at Eagle’s Landing Family Practice.

Around 2012, Capt. Dennis Pass, now retired from Rockdale, called to ask her to become the education specialist for the residential substance abuse treatment (RSAT) program at the Rockdale County Jail.

She saodshe turned him down twice, but through the encouragement of her husband and faith that God had a plan, she told him yes the third time he asked.

She stayed there three years and then helped start the Newton County RSAT program, where she worked for another three years. Because of the job, Eskew became a full-fledged deputy at both jails.

She said she had to take training, was pepper sprayed and Tased. Meanwhile, she was also going to school to become a certified addiction counselor.

‘God prepared the house’

A friend told her the Ocmulgee Judicial Circuit was looking for a treatment provider and five years ago, Eskew went there to work, where she remains on staff today.

She became certified in many evidence-based programs and uses her skills in her job and to teach at her church and Our House of Restoration.

She is also involved with many other local boards and organizations, including 4Sarah, Entirely Ready, Heart of Newton with Haley Sherlock and other such nonprofits that serve the community. Eskew said she had helped many other organizations, but never had the confidence to start a program of her own.

She and her family had moved to another house and were trying to sell the house they were leaving.

“Houses were selling like hotcakes, but this house wouldn’t sell for anything,” she said. “So, the Lord just kept talking to us.” She said another nonprofit group wanted to rent it out and use it for a transitional home. That group went in and renovated the house, but three months later, they came back to Eskew and said they were giving it up.

“So there I was with the house,” Eskew said. “God prepared the house. Got it ready. And said, ‘Here you go.’ I didn’t have any women in the house. Matt Crowe, who owns Covington Ford believed in me and wrote me my first check, my first donation ever to keep the house running until I got some women in it. He has since donated to us two vans and is still helping us to this day. Last year, Kellye Stellman with Kelly’s Personal Fitness in Covington decided she wanted to partner with us and now we go to her gym — all the ladies go for free…She even got everybody to bring workout stuff or tennis shoes for them. It’s part of the program.”

Eskew also praises others who have helped the ministry, including Lisa and Karlee Rosser, who do social media for Our House of Restoration; Jeff Worley of Damascus Road who helps her with food; Amy Eskew, whom she calls her bonus daughter, who is the program’s certified life coach; Bonnie Fielsman, a certified art therapist; Shereena Holmes, a Christian therapist and assistant Jessica Wills.

As she works with the women at the transitional home, Eskew shares the story of her own life and how much it has changed.

The youngest of four children, Eskew said her parents took their older children to church, but by the time she was born, she said she thinks “they were tired.”

She would often get on a church bus and go to church and when she was older, she walked there. She was raised Baptist and said she believes there was always a pull on her to go to church. But, Eskew said when she was in high school, she experimented with drugs and married the young man who had introduced her to them.

“I got my recovery and healing through the church,” she said, adding that it was her third husband who took her to the church she and Lee now attend. She has gone to Faith Church on Ralph Road in Conyers for 36 years.

“When I say our church is a big part of what we do — many people who have come through our program, our church has loved them back to life,” Eskew said. “They had no clue what God could do for them.”

‘I just made horrible choices’

Eskew is eager to share what God has done for her. She said she had a wonderful childhood and her father was the epitome of a gentleman who would have never hit her mother.

“I just made horrible choices,” she said. “I got pregnant five years after we got married. We partied every weekend and all the time. But when I got pregnant, I decided my child did not deserve that. It was abusive and not good. Why I stayed?...They get to your mind before they ever hit you.”

Eskew said they were living with his family members and it was “party city” there until she got pregnant and said she wasn’t doing that anymore.

At the end of her pregnancy, she told him she was moving out with or without him. He went with her and after their daughter was born, Eskew said she started using drugs again. She said she was miserable and had finally quit using completely again when he came in one night, got a gun and threatened to shoot her and their infant daughter. As the next morning came, Eskew said she packed her bags and left and “never looked back.”

She said she married again and it was to another man who was abusive and drank all the time.

“Because of these trials and tribulations I put myself through, they are part of my testimony,” Eskew said. “I’ll talk about this, but it doesn’t hold anything over me any more. God took it all away. I’m not sitting here crying. He took the pain. One died of an overdose; one is still not straightened out, but look what God did for me. My third husband took me to the church where I am now. God had a plan all along.”

She had actually been friends with Lee Eskew’s wife and in fact, they all went to church together. Lee and his wife got divorced and had been divorced about eight years. Kim had been divorced about two years when the two of them began dating.

“I ended up having four beautiful children,” she said. “I have four wonderful, beautiful grown children, two bonus children who were grown when I married my husband, four beautiful grandchildren from my bonus children and five beautiful grandchildren from my children and two great-grandchildren. I love who they are. They are all awesome.”

Eskew said her husband is her partner in Our House of Restoration and she is grateful for his encouragement, as well as the support and encouragement from her late bishop, Dr. Jerry Patterson and his grandson, Michael Patterson, who is also mayor of Porterdale and now senior pastor of Faith Church.

‘God called me to do this’

Our House of Restoration is a one-year working program, which means the women come in, pay an entry fee and a weekly fee, which help run the house.

They get acclimated to the program and the staff helps them find jobs. They work during the daytime and attend programs at night. It is a faith-based, Christ-centered program and Eskew said they take a holistic approach and work on the mind, body and soul.

Some of the women in the house are mandated into the program by the courts and the first women who moved in were from a women’s prison

. Eskew said they take evidence-based classes, receive moral recognition therapy, grief recovery, coping skills and other such instruction. She says it all works together to help the residents become the “women God intended them to be.”

“God called me to do this and I have to give God all the glory,” Eskew said. “...I’ll be honest. I’m not worthy to run this program, but with God, he says you can do all things through Christ Jesus.”

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For more information about Our House of Restoration, visit https://www.ourhouseofrestoration.com/ or https://www.facebook.com/Our HouseofRestoration.