Editor’s note: This is the first in a two-part series about the two Oxford Houses in Baker City. The houses are open to people recovering from drug and alcohol addiction. There are also four Oxford Houses in Pendleton and four in La Grande. The second part, focusing on the Oxford House in Baker City that is open to men, will be published next week.

Sherri Fuller has been sober for two years but the craving for drugs, the terrible desire to return to a lifestyle she has tried so hard to banish, never leaves.

Not completely.

And although Fuller, 53, understands that this is so, and accepts the lifelong disease that afflicts every addict, she has never felt more confident in herself.

She relishes the simple pleasures of life.

Fuller smiles as she recalls the day, earlier this year, when she returned to the Baker City home she shares with seven other women who are also recovering from addiction.

She had just picked up her paycheck.

She paid her share of the rent.

A basic transaction, but one that was vastly more important to Fuller because she could remember when such things as shelter, or even food, were subsidiary to her addiction.

“I did a happy dance,” Fuller said. “Darion danced with me.”

Darion Grove, 29, is one of Fuller’s housemates.

“We celebrate the little victories,” Fuller said. “We’re not just staying clean, it’s learning how to live again. That’s where all these girls have helped me.”

Fuller gestures to the four other women, Grove among them, who are sitting with her at the kitchen table of the house they share.

This is one of two Oxford Houses in Baker City.

The first, which has room for seven men who are recovering from addiction, opened a little more than a year ago.

The second, for women, will celebrate its first birthday in August.

Oxford Houses are places where people recovering from addiction to drugs or alcohol can live together and support each other during their recovery.

Neither drugs nor alcohol is allowed in Oxford Houses. Residents pay rent, and those who don’t work are required to do a minimum of 20 hours per week of community service.

There are more than 250 Oxford Houses in Oregon and thousands across the country. The nonprofit organization started in 1975 in Maryland.

New Directions Northwest, the Baker City agency that runs addiction counseling and treatment programs, bought both houses with money from $1.4 million state grant for housing, said Shari Selander, New Directions CEO.

New Directions paid $255,000 for the B Street house, and $364,000 for the Grove Street home, according to Baker County Assessor’s Office records.

Fuller said that although she celebrated two years of sobriety on June 26, her life has changed dramatically since she moved into the Oxford House in March of this year.

She moved from a recovery home in La Grande (not an Oxford House). She stayed sober there, but the experience was quite different.

Fuller said she feels truly at home in the Oxford House.

She savors things as simple as tapping in the entry code to the lock on the front door, knowing that the door will open.

“I know where I’m going to sleep every night,” Fuller said. “That has kept me sober more than once.”

But the house is just a building.

It’s what waits for Fuller inside that truly matters.

“I know someone will ask how my day went,” she said. “When I go to bed it’s ‘good night, love you,’ when I leave it’s ‘love you, see you later.’ There’s lots of that.”

A family

The women who live in the Oxford House use the word “family” frequently.

For Fuller and one other resident, the word has a special meaning.

A biological meaning.

The woman sitting across the table from Fuller on a warm late June evening tempered by the cool breath issuing from a wall air conditioner, is Hannah Balthazar.

Balthazar, 31, is Fuller’s daughter.

“I feel very grateful that I get to do this with Hannah,” Fuller said.

Balthazar said she had to temporarily abandon her relationship with her mother because Fuller was the first to become sober.

Balthazar was still using drugs then.

She said she didn’t want to be responsible for bringing her mother back into the lifestyle, the repeating cycle of sickness and arrests, that they both wanted to escape.

After pleading guilty in June 2023 to fraudulent use of a credit card, second-degree theft and identity theft after using someone else’s credit card, Balthazar completed a 90-day in-patient treatment program at New Directions’ Baker House in Baker City.

But she had no home to return to.

Until she learned about the Oxford House.

Balthazar applied for an opening and was interviewed by Grove. The other residents invited Balthazar to move in this February. A month or so later, her mother joined her.

Balthazar, who was homeless in Baker City for about two years before her last arrest, said she was “terrified” when she finished the in-patient treatment.

She feared she would return to the streets, or perhaps to an apartment or house where it would have been terribly easy to resume her destructive lifestyle.

“I wouldn’t have survived,” Balthazar said.

The most important part of living in an Oxford House is the support from the other residents, she said.

“There are people who actually care about where I am and what I’m doing,” Balthazar said. “It makes a huge difference.”

Living alone, she said, the memories of addiction a constant presence, is “like carrying bricks.”

“They get heavier and heavier when you have to deal with them on your own,” she said.

But no one is alone in the Oxford House, said Robbi Brust, who moved into the home in April of this year.

Brust said that when she lived alone, “I would drink a lot.”

But as a member of a household, and a family, she feels confident as she works toward the ultimate goal, to “continue my sobriety for the rest of my life.”

“The longer I’m here the better I’ll be,” Brust said.

Fuller and Balthazar aren’t the only Oxford House residents with a genetic connection.

Grove’s 2-year-old son, Zeke, also lives in the home.

(She also has a 7-year-old daughter, Jakariah, who doesn’t live with her.)

Another resident has an eight-month-old.

Brust, who at 62 is the home’s oldest resident, said she enjoys having two children in the house.

“I love to hear the laughs,” she said.

‘Beautiful camaraderie’

Laughter breaks out often as the women talk about living in the Oxford House.

“I never knew I could laugh so much,” Balthazar said.

But this is a particular sort of laughter.

It’s nothing like chemically fueled mirth that these women remember, although probably an outsider couldn’t detect the difference between the real, healthy variety and the ersatz.

“Sober laughter — it’s the best,” Brust said.

That laughter is a product of what resident Tena Montange calls the “beautiful camaraderie that happens in this house.”

Montange, 51, moved to Oregon in 2010. She lived in John Day and La Grande and has been sober for almost three years.

She lived in a different Oxford House but it wasn’t, as she puts it, “successful” there.

The Baker City home, where she has lived since early December 2023, was “exactly what I was looking for.”

Montange, who works at Baker House, the in-patient treatment program, said finding this Oxford House, and being accepted there, was “a matter of life and death. I don’t think I knew that before.”

Camaraderie isn’t the only tie that binds these women.

“Accountability” is another word they use often.

It’s a key component to a successful Oxford House, said Grove, who was among the first residents of the Baker City home and is, Balthazar said, “a great role model” for the other residents.

The women meet at least every week to delegate chores and make other decisions about how the house will be run.

It’s a democracy, in which every resident has a say.

But the requirements are inflexible.

There is no tolerance for drugs or alcohol.

“Rules are rules here,” Fuller said. “We’re not afraid to hold people accountable. If there’s a problem it gets dealt with immediately. There’s no secrets here.”

But the atmosphere, the women emphasize, is one of mutual support and trust, not suspicion.

All eight women share the struggle to remain sober.

Each knows the warning signs that indicate another resident is having an especially difficult day.

“I can go a long ways without a craving, but when it hits you it hits you hard,” Montange said.

Fuller agreed.

“I could ruin two years (of sobriety) in less than 30 minutes,” she said. “I have had that chance. I was this close to relapsing (while living in La Grande.)”

But just thinking about her new home, and the women she shares it with, is a balm, Fuller said, the mental equivalent of pulling on a warm coat on a chilly day.

“I know if I’m feeling weak I can come home and tell the girls,” she said.

And they will understand in a way that another friend, one who hasn’t dealt with addiction, can’t.

“There’s safety in numbers,” Balthazar said. “We have a well-rounded support system here. Each of us has a different kind of wisdom, but we all know what it’s like, and how scary it can be.”

The ability to empathize, she said, is essential.

“We can only keep what we have by giving it away,” Balthazar said, a sort of mantra that the other women around the title murmur in unison when they hear the first few words.

A shared commitment to sobriety

Fuller said she used to tell herself that by abusing drugs she was only hurting herself, in a physical sense.

She was quite persuasive.

“I lied to myself a lot,” she said.

Grove said she didn’t realize, until her last arrest two and a half years ago, how much guilt and shame she had suppressed.

Both said that living in the Oxford House has given them a newfound sense of responsibility not only to maintain their own sobriety, but to help their housemates do the same.

There is a sense of pressure, Grove concedes, but it’s a positive pressure.

Because it is one they share.

“I have to answer to these women,” Grove said. “I don’t want to let down seven other women who have looked up to me and also showed the path to me, who love me unconditionally.”

Balthazar said living in the Oxford House has reminded her what it means to be have close, positive relationships with others.

“A year ago I didn’t think anybody would want to be my friend,” she said. “I didn’t want to be my friend.”

Now she has seven, including her mother.

A group that has replaced the incessant search for the artificial satisfaction of drugs or alcohol with the basic elements of a happy and fulfilling life — a paycheck, a roof that holds back the rain, a conversation while making dinner.

On this evening a topic is their planned trip to a water park.

“It’s about appreciating the simple things,” Grove said. “It’s not just really a house.

“It’s a home.”

“We celebrate the little victories. We’re not just staying clean, it’s learning how to live again.”

— Sherri Fuller, resident at the Oxford House for women in Baker City

Oxford House, a nonprofit corporation started in 1975 in Maryland, operates hundreds of homes across the U.S. There are almost 250 Oxford homes in Oregon, including four in La Grande (three for men, one for women, all opened since 2015), four in Pendleton (three for men, one for women, dating to 2016) and one, for men, in Ontario.

There are no Oxford Houses in Grant, Morrow or Wallowa counties, said Jess Wise, an outreach worker for the organization who helps oversee Oxford Houses in Eastern Oregon.

“We’re always looking to get into area we’re not in,” Wise said.

More information about Oxford Houses is available at oxfordhouse.org/.