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One of the Harvard scholars warned, “This is a mountain and you’ll never move it.” Kendal responded by naming his new program Moving the Mountain.

Photo by Jana G. Pruden / Edmonton Journal

“Wallis would tell you I was one of the worst drug addicts he’d ever seen,” Aimee Bellerose says. “Wallis told me if I didn’t quit what I was doing, I was going to be dead. I wouldn’t have made it.”

Aimee was 19 then, she’s 22 now. On a warm fall afternoon, she’s in the education building at the University of Alberta quietly sewing a line of tiny blue beads onto a square of felt. She usually has trouble focusing, but can concentrate on beading. She says it’s like meditating, maybe praying. It helps to settle and calm her.

She is a different person than three years ago. Almost unrecognizable, she says, even to herself.

“It’s not as hard as people say, to change. It’s like nature itself. Everything evolves and changes, and that’s the way life goes. It’s about embracing those changes and deciding what you want.”

Like Aimee, the youth in Moving the Mountain are so high risk that the term is just a euphemism. Whatever the risks may be, the 20 girls in the program, which is aimed at First Nations teens, have experienced most of them.

The teens are homeless or have been. They are traumatized from abuse and violence, dealing with drug and alcohol addictions, and lacking family or positive supports. They often have the cognitive and behavioural impairments caused by conditions such as fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. Before they start the program, most of the teens have had little to no education, and cannot read, write or do basic math.