Fotini Leobilla was sleeping in cardboard boxes in Omonia Square in 1997. Today, at 58, she teaches at the University of...

Fotini Leobilla was sleeping in cardboard boxes in Omonia Square in 1997. Today, at 58, she teaches at the University of Athens. The road between those two points took 18 years of addiction, a prison sentence, the death of her husband, and more than a decade without contact with her own children. Leobilla has spoken openly about how her drug use consumed nearly two decades of her life, pulling her through unstable relationships, homelessness, and eventually a drug trafficking arrest that landed her in Korydallos Prison for 11 months. It was inside that prison that she learned her husband had died from an overdose. Prison, by her own account, became the moment things started to change. She committed to getting clean and, at 37, sat the Greek university entrance examinations. She was accepted into the Sociology department at Panteion University, went on to postgraduate study, and eventually secured a position teaching at the University of Athens. One of the defining moments of that journey came when her daughter sat in the audience at her graduation. For 11 years, Leobilla had no contact with her children at all, missing birthdays, school milestones, everything. From 2008 onward, she began slowly rebuilding those relationships. Her work did not stop at the lecture hall. She has served as an adviser to the Municipality of Athens on drug policy and as vice-president of KETHEA, Greece's main addiction treatment and rehabilitation organization. The woman who once slept rough in central Athens now trains the next generation of sociologists and helps shape how Greece responds to the addiction crisis she once lived inside. #Greece #Recovery #Athens