Harvest House Shelter in Moncton is celebrating its 20th anniversary and its founder couldn’t be happier.
The shelter opened in 1997 with just a few mattresses on the floor. Now it serves as a place of refuge for Moncton’s homeless and people living with additions.
“Who would ever have thought that a guy in Dorchester prison could come out and now (have) judges sends people to a program that we have established here at Harvest House?” said Cal Maskery, who started the Harvest House program a few years after he himself was released from prison.
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Maskery said no one ever expected that he would be someone who could find faith in humanity. His father raised him to be a part of a life of drug addiction, crime and prison.
“I grew up around that system visiting him, trained by him to smuggle drugs into the prison. We were a father and son team but not a normal father and son team at all,” he said.
He says his father would later come to regret their earlier relationship
After serving time Dorchester prison in his early 20s, Maskery said he had a shot at changing his life and he took it. After he was released, he started the faith based Harvest House Shelter in 1997.
“We saw the power of putting the community together around someone who had no family and a few strikes in their past, with support and encouragement to move on we began to see many lives transformed”
In the last two decades, Harvest House Atlantic had grown into a 34 bed shelter and a step up housing and addiction treatment centre.
A hero for friends and customers
Maskery’s daughter, Alisha Maskery, said she is amazed by the hundreds of lost souls that have found peace through her father.
“I am blown away that he was handed zero life skills yet he was able to father and parent so well and start an organization and help people,” she said. “I think that is one of the most incredible things a daughter can ever experience.”
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Which is why she’s has written a book about her father’s life called “Like Father Life Son.”
The books she says is a love story about how her parents met behind bars and is told told through the eyes of a daughter who hopes to to inspire others right across the country.
“There has been 15,000 copies ordered and they are going to be disbursed into prisons across Canada so they can read his story,” she said.
Kevin Houde, a client at Harvest House, was recently released from prison and is hoping to set himself on the path to sobriety.
“I was a fella who stuck needles in his arms and I did not want to live that life. I aspire to be kind of like Cal. I want to give back to the community, I don’t want to be somebody who takes anymore… it’s time to start giving,” said Houde.
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