"It's the end," she sighed while gazing at the pale face before her in the mirror. She remembered how she'd been a year ago, turned her back on the mirror and cried. Laila, who then tried, but failed, to commit suicide, shamefully admitted in a phone call to a TV programme that she was a drug addict. "I'm telling you my problem so that other people won't fall into the same trap as I did. If only I could turn the clock back 12 months, I'd never have taken drugs," explained Laila, who has now been cured. "If only there were a U-turn," is not just a phrase uttered by drivers who go too far, but also by people who go the wrong way in their lives and dearly wish to make a U-turn, just like Laila. As a radio presenter, Amany el-Tunisi, who established a radio station called ‘Banat we Bas' (Girls Only) in 2009, faced another problem like Laila's on one of her programmes. "A girl phoned in and told me she was an addict. I wanted to help her and tell other girls about her case," she said. Amany, who is also a writer and women's rights activist, was at first astonished by the call she got. "I thought of setting up a centre for addicted girls. I met with Dr Mohamed Helal, a psychiatrist, and we went ahead and opened the centre," she told the Mail over the phone. Amany's project, called ‘U-Turn', is mainly concerned about curing females of their addictions. "I choose to call it U-Turn because it offers hope, giving girls a second chance in life. We don't just cure drug addicts, but also girls who are addicted to sex, the Internet and other things," she explained. As for Dr Mohamed Helal, who has some female assistants working with him in the centre located in the Maadi district of southern Cairo, he says that the first stage for curing a girl requires gaining her trust. "This is the most important and toughest stage of all. She must trust me to let me understand her problem, so I can then plan how to cure her. "If a girl trusts me, she will tell me her deepest secrets which even her family don't know about, and that's the first step on the way to recovery. "Of course, the cure is part medical and part psychological," explained Dr Helal, adding that it's easy to distinguish between one girl who really is an addict another who's just a ‘temporary' patient. "If the girl does everything she can to stop what she's doing but fails, then she knows that she's an addict, and that's where we step in. “But she must help us by sticking to our programme," stressed the doctor, explaining that it's only the girl's will which will lead her through these dark moments into a new life full of light.
