Hadi went inside before COVID and came out after. He didn't recognise the world. Two years drug-free, married, raising stepchildren — he is living, working proof that the cycle can break.
Hadi has been to prison three times. The first sentence, in his early twenties, was only two months — short enough that he came out not really understanding what had just happened. He couldn't find stable work. He fell in with the wrong company. Drugs followed. Then a longer sentence. Then a trafficking charge that put him away through the entirety of COVID-19.
When he was finally released, the world had changed and nobody had told him. On his first bus ride out, he was scolded by a driver for not wearing a mask. In a shopping mall, a security guard chased him for several minutes for the same reason. He didn't know. He had been wearing a prison-issued cloth mask in his bag. Whole industries had reorganised themselves. The future had moved on without him.
The subtle stigma
Some stigma is loud. Most of it is quiet. Hadi has experienced the quiet kind — the colleague who, when an ex-offender underperforms, whispers, “Maybe he's back on drugs.” He has watched it happen to others. He has lived under its weight without it ever being said to his face. Yellow Ribbon placed him in a hotel front desk role. There was no structured training. Many of his peers from that placement relapsed.
Hadi didn't. He told us why: family.
What his wife sees
His wife is also an ex-offender. They met through their previous incarceration. They are raising two stepchildren whose lives, Hadi observed, have had fewer of the experiences he himself enjoyed growing up — the family trips, the small luxuries, the ordinary memories. He wants to give them those things. He wants to take them to Universal Studios. He wants to take them overseas. He wants them to remember the man he chose to become rather than the man he used to be.
That ambition — the ambition to make ordinary, dignified family memories — has carried him through two years of sobriety.
Why he stayed
At our cafe he found something he'd never quite had in a workplace before: a manager who explained the why behind each step rather than letting him learn by watching. Mentorship, he said, is the thing that fills the gaps no job description can list. Under that mentorship he learned how to manage difficult personalities, how to process invoices, how to think like a leader rather than only a staff member.
He'll tell you it's hard to put into words what these months have meant. He doesn't need to. We can see it in his shoulders.
A mentor fills in the crucial gaps — the small but important details that might otherwise be missed. That is what changed it for me.— Hadi, age 30
Soli Deo Gloria — to God alone be the glory.