The sun beat down on Marco Broccardo and his fellow walkers, Alex Harris and David Joyce, as they crossed the Empty Quarter, from Oman to the United Arab Emirates. They were determined to make history as the first people to walk unsupported across the Arabian Desert. They traveled light – one set of clothes for 40 days – and sweated in 51 degree Celsius heat amid silent dunes.
As he closed his eyes to feel the breeze on his skin, he remembered a time when the demons of drug addiction led him to dark places that almost ended his life.
It was downhill from the age of 13. Broccardo experimented with drugs and alcohol on the streets of Johannesburg. It wasn’t long before he was hooked. He broke into houses, stole from employers and sold off anything that wasn’t nailed down in his parents’ house.
“In my most desperate times I would’ve done anything for drugs. If you had told me to kill someone, I would’ve killed someone. I even thought of killing my own parents to get the inheritance.”
He also got tangled in drug cartels, borrowing from one to pay another.
“The Israeli mafia came to my house with guns one night when I was sleeping and my parents were downstairs. They wanted their money. So obviously my parents paid them.”
In an act of desperation he pretended he had been kidnapped, expecting his parents to pay ransom which he would use for drugs. The plan failed when his mother, who had also attempted suicide, stood firm.
“She told them, ‘its fine you can kill him. Just do me a favor, don’t bother me again.’”
Shocked at her response, Broccardo decided that he was going to show them. That night he took an overdose of painkillers. It was the first of three suicide attempts. The second was almost the last.
“I went into the bathroom and I pulled out the razor from my shaver. I was sitting in the bath, it was a quarter full with water, and I thought ‘let me just end it’.”
Broccardo stabbed his arm, ripped across and cut his femoral artery. Blood sprayed everywhere as he slowly drifted away.
All of a sudden there was a jolt to his heart as the hands of paramedics revived him. He woke up in Johannesburg General Hospital to the angry gaze of his parents. Again he lost consciousness, woke up in theater as doctors put in an artificial vein. The next stop was the psychiatric ward. Over the years he had become a master manipulator who had fooled many psychiatrists. This time the psychiatrist saw through him and sent him to Sterkfontein Psychiatric Hospital, a place for the criminally insane.
“I remember walking into the common area where the TV was and guys were arguing about the TV and what they were going to watch but the TV wasn’t working. I thought to myself, ‘gosh these guys are crazy’, and three weeks later I was arguing about the same thing.”
After six weeks in Sterkfontein, Broccardo was released for a month, for good behavior, to complete a nature conservation course.
“It was the longest I had been clean since I was 13. I didn’t think about using when I was in the bush, I was really enjoying life.”
Soon after his release, he worked at a game reserve in KwaZulu Natal and when things went south, his father got him a job on a plot outside the city. After a brief visit home, his mother gave him money for his journey back.
“I went straight to Hillbrow with the petrol money she had given me and I started using that whole afternoon. And in this process, because the car was a bit messed up, I would phone her from a ticky box (public phone) and tell her that I had gone so far and the car had broken down.”
When the drugs ran out, Broccardo was so desperate he planned to rob a petrol station with his father’s gun. Instead he exchanged the gun for $140 worth of cocaine with a drug dealer.
“As I was driving I started to feel a bit strange and I knew I normally felt that way before I had seizure. I had already had two major car accidents because of seizures. In one, I crushed my legs and was told that I would never play sport again and walk with a limp.”
Suddenly everything went black.
Broccardo woke up on the side of the road surrounded by emergency vehicles and a policeman demanding his name.
In the hospital there was no fury like that of his mother.
“She came up to me and slapped me in the face and she said to me, ‘Why can’t you just die? At least if I knew you were dead, I could bury you and I would know at least you weren’t hurting yourself or anyone else.”
His family sent him to rehab and asked him not to make contact. Broccardo vowed he wouldn’t leave until he got clean.
He spent three years at Noupoort Christian Care Center where he got clean, became a counselor, met his wife and found faith.
“For once, I could be accepted by someone who knew all the bad things I had done and still died for me on the cross… The story of redemption is what my whole life was aiming towards. It changed my life.”
Broccardo spent a few years working in sales and banking but wanted more from life. His dream was to use his story to help addicts.
At the age of 24, Broccardo started Mountain Heights, a center that counsels addicts.
“This crazy idea of climbing mountains and walking across deserts, doing things that are physically challenging and insurmountable, can be overcome. Addiction is just another mountain.”
He struggled to find sponsors, so he started Eurocom, a new media and mobile marketing company, to bankroll his dream.
With backing from Eurocom, Broccardo has climbed three of the seven summits (Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Kosciusko in Australia and Aconcagua in Argentina) and walked across the Arabian Desert though heat and sandstorms. Music, sermons and bible verses kept him going.
“It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life but [while doing] it I hated every minute of it. It was hard, it was backbreaking, it was tiring. There wasn’t a day when I wasn’t counting how many days until it was over.”
At the end of the 1208-kilometer journey, the three men reached the coast of Dubai. They dipped their feet in water and wept.
Broccardo put himself through hell on the streets of Johannesburg and survived to become an entrepreneur. Luckily for him, it didn’t kill him but only made him stronger.