Kudo, the modern martial art, enters in complex fight with drugs. Every state of rest and step back are fatal, the main rule of the Eastern sport says

Ku Hieroglyph or the Power to Go Forward

ISKRA TSENKOVA

Ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi, kyuu, juu. Fist, elbow, shoulder, pelvis, knee, foot, head – your sole weapons of a fighter standing against an opponent in a fighting pose. Each part of the body is trained methodically, the movements are dancing, light ones, worked out to perfection with only one goal – to inflict the last strike with the speed of the lighting and to remain alive.

Noisy pumping in and out of the lungs. Ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi, kyuu, juu. The group in the room warms up their bodies for the next training, when the boys and the girl will learn how to inflict and how to suffer strikes. The sport is kudo, and part of the young people in the small hall – former heroin, amphetamine, and alcohol addicts. They get together three times a week – barefooted, clad in white kimonos.

Clean. From Head to Toes

Cleanness is a cult here. If you are not clean, you have no place among the others. You step on the mat only after a test proving that there is no trace of any psychoactive stuff in your body. The drug test is free and obligatory. If you fail, you leave the group. Like Niki. He was absent for a whole month. Now he is back again in the hall together with the others. He puts on the kimono with a black hieroglyph drawn on the left side of the chest. “Ku” means free in Japanese. Such is also the philosophy underlying the modern Eastern martial art daidojuku kudo: to break with the addiction by training your body and mind for the heaviest fight – the one with yourself.

“I started with grass ten years ago”, says Niki. He is 28 today, his liver is rotten, and the chronic hepatitis diagnosis will be his life inheritance from drugs and alcohol… “I have combined everything, which could bring you to the kick just from curiosity, so that I could check what I will feel”, the boy confesses. He has been subjected to therapy in communes four times of two months each; however sometimes he happened to get high already in the first week after leaving the commune.

The quick failures of young people who otherwise have passed successfully the therapeutic programmes provoke in the clinical psychologist Kalin Petkov the idea about the Life without Drugs project. Since February this year the Ka Sport club is supported under the Youth in Action European programme of the European Youth Programmes and Initiatives National Centre with the Council of Ministers. Six months before that Kalin and Evlogi

Finance Themselves Their Idea

Their unsparing work has already yielded the first results. About ten addicts are actively taking part in the club. Each of them had had his or her fights with the drug before that. Now the girls and the boys have different success. Some of them, such as Niki, pass through their failures, they fall, they get up, for them the fight is still going and is still so difficult, and its end could not be seen. Niki has not confessed yet that besides with heroin, he still has a problem with the alcohol. When this happens, then he will have a progress and will join the group of the advanced, despite the fact that he considers himself successful now – he is training his muscles with fitness exercises, he earns his pocket money by helping in a filling station owned by a friend of Kalin now and again. Actually, he is not the only one in the group for whom Kalin and Evlogi find some, although temporary work through their personal contacts.

Kalin is the generator of the Life without Drugs project. He got this idea after a talk with Evlogi Dobrikov. Evlogi will not be putting the white kimono today. He is engaged as a clinical psychologist by Phoenix therapeutic community in Brakyovtsi village. Until recent, Kalin has also been a volunteer with the commune. He had been a leader of a group for resocialization for years. Both are former active athletes as well. Evlogy used to participate in international judo competitions. He used to be the winner or was ranked second at republican tournaments. Kalin used to practice karate, kyokushin karate, judo and kudo. He was the 2001 Sanshou World Champion from The Netherlands. He broke with the active sport five years ago, however he is still exercising.

“After I realized that the addition issue is a problem of the personal development rather than public problem, it came to my mind that martial arts could also come into the fight. The combination of their philosophy with the contemporary therapeutic approaches under the conditions of a normal supportive environment makes the success closer. This will help the boys and the girls, who had left the therapeutic communities, to achieve the full social adaptation. The martial arts train the will, discipline, self-control. Their philosophy changes the way of thinking, helps to build your characters in a new direction, they make you more self-confident and more successful in everything. Kudo is not panacea but part of the complex treatment for pulling out of the addiction,” says Kalin.

In the beginning, Kalin and Evlogi wanted to establish conditions for work for addicts, who underwent treatment in the commune in Brakyovtsi, but after that, they made the project open for everybody. For those coming back from communes in Spain, Italy, Greece and the other communes in Bulgaria. They started with a few boys and girls, motivated for success.

Both Kalin and Evlogi know well what it means to lose yourself somewhere along the road. The active sport puts Kalin in the group of the addicts. From the anabolic steroids.

You Reach to Stimulants When You Do Not Have Sufficient Power.

Thus you accumulate muscle mass, the speed of your response increases, the doses – also grow. “I have reached to terrifying amounts. Ephedrine is pure drug. Only one of its molecules is different from the ones of the amphetamines”, Kalin confesses. Evlogi is co-addict. The closeness to a person using drugs leads to a status, which also needs support and specialized help.

Until warming up on the mat, Niki is not concealing how happy he is that the sanction is already behind his back. He says that kudo helped him believe in himself; helped him get free from the accumulated aggression. Despite the fact that the group was established only a year ago, part of the boys had achieved visible success. Two girls with addiction to alcohol are among the participants of the group. The others are heroin and amphetamine addicts. Three of the young people who have gone out of the therapeutic community have had no breakouts so far. One of the boys is being currently treated with decreasing doses under a methadone programme. He has reached to half a cubic. He is attending the trainings regularly. He missed a training once, however he phoned about that. He was going to have a meeting with friends. However, Kalin is still worried about any going out with another party. “We are against the use of alcohol, which returns them to the old behaviour,” Petkov says.

The therapeutic meetings twice a week are part of the preventive work so that they do not turn to drug again. At one of the last meetings, they have discussed the states, which support addiction. “Fear, the feeling of anxiety and insecurity are the basis for that,” Kalin clarifies.

Yet, after one of the trainings in the hall, they had to carry out an urgent meeting. It became clear that one of them is on the verge to turn to heroin again. His girlfriend is also a former addict, and the group does not support such connection in the beginning. Both are emotionally instable.

If the One of Them Starts Going Down, He Drags the Other Down in the Gutter.

Their separation is terribly difficult. And Kalin hopes the philosophy of kudo to help again in this case: the strong person wins where the weak person fails. In this sport the victory against oneself is more important than superiority over the opponent, Kalin underlines.

At another therapeutic meeting these days, they have also tried to solve the problems of Nasko as well. The boy uses amphetamines. He has a problem with his family. He does not accept the new partner of his mother. Currently the group is motivating him to take his driving license, so that he could find work more easily and to continue to attend literature courses. They have concluded a positive agreement with him and his mother, which specifies the rights and obligations of each of the three parties. The agreement is signed by Kalin, Nasko and his mother. Nasko has committed to enter a psychiatric clinic, to take in regularly the prescribed medications. Not to drink alcohol during the day. To maintains his room in good order every day. To take care of the cat. Every other Sunday to make tests in Bulgarian language together with Evlogi. The obligations of Nasko’s mother are just as many as the ones of her son, 13. They include regular making of drug tests of the boy. To buy him computer, if he performs his obligations.

“If I have difficulty with any of them, I send them to individual therapy. All of them have terrific families, they are of good financial status, but with neglected family relations,” emphasizes Kalin and reports the establishment of new contacts and relations in the families as success.

Daidojuku kudo is translated as “the art of the great road”. The extended variant is “there are no doors, which take you out to the great road, everybody should open them in his heart by himself and start the road to his perfection”.

Fudo dachi! Kumi dachi!, Rossen, the other trainer of the group, commands. One of the legs goes forward, the hands are in fighting position. The main rule of the kudo is: go forward, despite your fear, every state of rest and step backwards are fatal.