Click here to see the Feb. 27, 2010, Neighbors section in its entirety
By Bobbie Poynter / Community Editor
Strike one . . .
A child is born into an abusive family.
Strike two. . .
His adopted father introduces him to alcohol and drugs.
Strike three . . .
The child runs away and gets lost in the system.
Lance Marzula, now 35 years old, was first removed from an abusive household as a toddler and placed into the foster care system. As a 4-year-old, Lance had no way of knowing that his new family would also fall apart. Growing up an angry problem child with tons of psychological problems, Lance ran away from home at 14 and took his chances with the thousands of other invisible kids on the mean streets of Los Angeles.
“It was pretty bad,” Lance recalls. “I think the first week I was out there I saw a guy get his throat slashed. I grew up pretty quick. I started doing drugs just to mask the pain I was in.”
Lance was on and off the streets for nearly 15 years. There would be a short period of time when he would find work, but then he would mess up and fall back into the blackness. The young man was simply never sober, and he was never off the drugs for very long.
Lance’s one saving grace is his son, who he moved from California to Corbin to live with his grandma so that the boy would not have to endure what his father was going through.
Fortunately, for every black cloud, there is a silver lining, and in Lance Marzula’s case, that silver lining came in the form of a Greyhound bus. In May 2008, while on his way to visit his son in Corbin, Lance, who was still a heroin addict at the time, got off the bus in Cincinnati and collapsed. His body was septic and yellow from a staff infection incurred from shooting up. The caring Greyhound staff called an ambulance and took the man to the University of Cincinnati Hospital, where he finally began receiving the care he so desperately needed. The hospital, in turn, sent him to a nursing home for a month for after care.
After Lance was released from the nursing home, again having nowhere and no one to turn to, the man broke down, opened up and prayed to God. He told God about his son and how he wanted to be a good father and how he was so tired of living the way he had been living for so many years.
His prayers were answered when a nurse at the nursing home recommended he contact Theresa and Phillip Marinaro at The Christian Shelter for the Homeless in London. The man who had felt beaten down for so many years, settled in at the shelter, where he began his slow, and often painful, recovery.
“It was really difficult,” said Lance. “My body was completely destroyed from drug use. I didn’t get employment for quite a while, but when I started working again, it got a little better. I backslid a few times, but the staff at the shelter were understanding and helped me through it. It took about six or eight months before I was physically back in shape.”
Lance Mancuso now has a job, but occupies his free time trying to help other people in his situation by simply talking and listening to them. It gives him great satisfaction listening to other people in trouble, realizing their stories are not so different from his. The big difference is Lance now realizes that it really is possible to get out of that situation.
“Sometimes all I can do for someone is talk and listen to them,” he explained. “I let them know there’s someone who cares. It’s not that I’m a saint or anything. It’s just that there’s always someone out there in a worse condition than you’re in.”
Besides his regular job, Lance is serving as a night manager at the shelter, where he pitches in to help others whenever and wherever he can, which might include visiting the sick in the hospital or helping someone move into a new home.
Today, Lance is enrolled in GED classes and looks forward to becoming the father he never had as a kid. Some day he would like to be a drug and alcohol counselor and use everything he’s experienced in his life to help others, especially children.
Lance has given a lot of thought to what he would say to someone who feels they have fallen through the cracks with nowhere to turn, just as he once felt.
“I’d tell him that I love him and that you have to want to change, that nobody can make you change, that’s the first step. Then I would try to inspire him into accepting the Lord into his life, cause none of us is capable of doing it ourselves. We all need a higher power to help us get through it.”
Neighbors
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Invisible
A recovering drug addict reaches out to help others
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