St Eleanor's House - Summerside, Prince Edward Island

James S.

I'm surprised that out of all the faces that must have passed through this recovery house, I'm the first person to write a public review. Anyways I'm going to give St. Eleanors 4 stars, because the Lennon house in Charlottetown (which has 3 reviews), has an average of 3.7 stars.

In my (bias) opinion, Eleanor's should have the Lennon house beat based on location alone. Nevermind the fact that it's a mere 15 minute walk from the best and biggest multi-recreational facility in all of Canada - The Cup (for which Eleanor's offers two free passes which can be used by anyone), but the cost of living in Charlottetown has gotten crazy expensive!

As for the negatives, both houses appear to have the same perceived flaw, in that they seem to run like a church and I feel like they miss the point, or miss what I feel like should be the main objective, which is help residents become independent through getting a job. Sure, for most of us that probably means staying off alcohol, but 3 mandatory AA meetings per week!? Personally I never cared much to listen to other strangers depressing stories about their struggle with the bottle (moreso in 2022/2023 as my own alcohol use had been on the decline, and discussing it felt like talking about some previous relationship with a lover whom you've already broken up with - just forget it and move on). If you stay fixated in the past, you're stuck. This might be different for older residents, or people who are retired. And to be fair, a high percentage of residents likely have no prospects for getting a job, either through actual disability, lack of motivation or some combination of both. For sure there is a non-zero percentage of residents for which becoming more functional for the purpose of achieving a job occupation is not the point, especially since most jobs in Summerside or nearby are of the "manual labor" sort, and 90% of residents and around 50% of the staff (at least when I was there) smoked cigarettes.

Most of the staff was friendly. There was only one staff member I didn't like and one roomate (among 3) whom I didn't like, however I can't really knock Eleanor's for that since being a recovery house, you tend to get a lot of people coming out of prison who may have all sorts of issues. It's likely no different at the Lennon house either.

It would've been nice if I was asked to cook more. I had two heads on that one because on the one hand, it was a chore, but on the other it's kind of a life skill. As soon as I made some spaghetti that Travis (one of the popular residents) complained about, I wasn't put on the cooking again, even though each resident is suppose to cook dinner once per week.

If I we're running the house, any resident who managed to hold down a job would be allowed to take drugs if it made life more bearable and they could do it without compromising their capacity to hold down their job. Life's about being happy, and it's tough to motivate oneself to keep up a daily 8-12 hour grind (especially if it's manually labor and you can't even motivate yourself to go to the gym!), and especially when you don't have a wife/kids pushing you. I'd probably get rid of the staff who smoked cigarettes (maybe) or just have some of the "help" come from an AI bot such as ChatGPT which is smart enough that its replacing the functionality of a doctor and since Eleanor's doesn't have any staff who are doctor's (or who even give sound medical advice), should just get ahead of the game, and hire (aka download) an AI from the Galaxy Playstore or wherever.

Ronald