NORTHRIDGE : Residents of Rehab Center Tour CSUN

For 40-year-old Joseph Hunter, it’s been a week of firsts.

Hunter, an ex-convict and recovering cocaine and heroin addict, said he had never seen even the inside of a high school before.

But this week, he went for the first time to register for classes at College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita. And on Wednesday, he joined a group of fellow residents of the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services Acton Rehabilitation Center during a tour of the Cal State Northridge campus.

“It’s been fantastic,” said Hunter, one of a dozen residents and former residents of the drug rehabilitation center who are also volunteers with the U. S. service program VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America). Hunter said he had spent most of his life in and out of county jails and state prisons for drug-related offenses. He learned to read in jail at age 29, stopped taking drugs 18 months ago, and now teaches literacy. He aims to be a motivational speaker, he said.

Richard Rioux, director of the rehabilitation center and its counterpart in Warm Springs, said the purpose of the morning visit was to allow the volunteers, who work as individual literacy tutors at the center, to learn about college life and meet CSUN President Blenda J. Wilson.

The group is part of an unusual branch of the VISTA program, which is often described as the domestic version of the U. S. Peace Corps. Rioux recruits the volunteers from the ranks of recovering drug addicts. The volunteers then become tutors and counselors for other residents in the rehabilitation center, he said.

Wilson discussed the idea of having the group meet with CSUN students to train literacy tutors, adding that as recovering addicts, the group provided a glimpse into a world that “I don’t think ‘educated’ people understand.”