Sweet Almita: ROSE Community Member
By Jodi Stemler
If you’ve spent any time at all on the ROSE Facebook community, you have certainly seen a comment by Almita Reeves. Alma (Almita is a diminutive of her given name which means “soul” in Spanish) is truly the heart and soul of the community, offering motivation, encouragement, love, wisdom, and humor to everyone in the group.
It’s been this way from the very beginning—Alma and her husband Roger are SIG people so when the ROSE program was announced she knew it was for her and for Valentine’s Day Roger gave her an empty box with rose stickers on it, promising to get her the gun when it became available. It was Roger who told her about the ROSE community, and she immediately joined. As a firearms instructor for women and a survivor of trauma through much of her early life, Alma has a lot to offer the community.
It was her very active engagement on the forum that brought her an invitation from SIG to participate in the first ROSE Retreat held in Nashville, Tennessee in late March. From the first night of the retreat, it was evident that Alma’s depth of soul was meant to reach out and touch women to help support them on their journey, the journey that for so many is now starting with ROSE.
But to understand where the depth of this loving kindness comes from, it’s important to understand the journey that Alma herself has taken. It is a journey, unfortunately like so many women, that took her through pain and fear. It is a journey where Alma chose empowerment through knowledge and skill in firearms to help pull her out from the emotional trauma.
Years of Trauma
Alma grew up in a turbulent family moving back and forth between two separate households in Texas and Michigan. She was sexually mistreated by three different adult men who were family members and other people in trust throughout her childhood. She faced physical and emotional abuse in a family that was unstable, fighting aggressively and violently at times, including altercations with a younger brother that continued until the day he was big enough to beat her.
She searched for someone who would bring peace to all the turmoil and thought she found that in the man she married at a young age. They met in church, and he didn’t use drugs or alcohol, which she thought were the root causes of the violence she had endured. However, almost immediately he began to assert his dominance, and because she was tired of being bullied in her youth, she would fight back and the verbal altercations would escalate quickly to physical violence. She believed she was the problem and tried therapy as the relationship would ebb and flow. After 10 years, she broke.
“I believed that if I didn’t disagree with him, there would be no problem,” Alma recalls. “I became a mousy, timid thing and I still always thought that I was the problem. In reality, my marriage did not feel like it was a partnership. There was a boss, and I was the subordinate, and it was a line I was afraid to cross.”
Crossing the Line
This went on for years until the environment in the marriage became very toxic. One evening, her husband frightened one of her children to distraction, and Alma filed for divorce the next day. She waited until a court order for parenting time was established and then she left.
She was broke and broken, but she had found the strength to escape to a tiny apartment in the Detroit area that she could barely afford. She and her children used boxes as furniture until she could buy or salvage actual furniture. After three years, she was on her feet and felt safe in her peaceful apartment – until the day she came home and found that she had been robbed.
“It’s cliché but I felt violated,” she says. “I put my youngest son to bed that night and thought about what would have happened if we’d been home. I had a bat, that was it, and they definitely would have overpowered me had I attempted to defend myself with it.”
During her marriage, she’d asked some friends in the Detroit police department to teach her to shoot, not because of her husband but because they lived in a bad area and she wanted to protect herself. But they all declined and one told her to get a taser instead. After the robbery, she knew she needed to be self-sufficient, so the very next day she went to Cabela’s and bought her first gun.
“It took a while,” Alma laughs. “It was big and powerful, and frankly the gun they sold me wasn’t really a good fit for me. But after about a year I felt bigger than the gun – I told it what to do. Soon after, I called my first instructor, Rick Ector, and said that I wanted to teach, too. I became an instructor in 2016 because I wanted to be able to help other women like me, to help them get over their fear of firearms and help them to not be afraid. I’ll never achieve as much as someone who has shot for a lifetime, but there are degrees of achievement. I’m hoping that I can be the best fit and help teach other women who might have a similar story to mine.”
Roger and ROSE
Alma married the love of her life in September 2020, a gentle, kind man who had never shot before. But her passion became his passion and together they spend hours at the range. It was Roger who learned about the ROSE program when he bought himself a P365-XL SPECTRE COMP. She immediately saw the difference the compensator made in reducing recoil and she realized the level of thought that went into building the P365-XL COMP ROSE.
“Coming from a mom whose interest is to protect my kids at all costs, the ROSE program immediately spoke to me,” Alma says. “I needed to be safe and get better at shooting and SIG offered lessons with the 8-time world champion Lena Miculek (who also happens to be a woman). I also needed to know where I should put my gun so my children don’t gain access to it. The ROSE program gives you a safe to make sure you can store your gun safely. I also need to shoot more to get better and with ROSE, we get extra magazines and snapcaps to help you become more proficient.”
“SIG covered all the bases with ROSE,” Alma continues. “They are speaking to the woman I was when I left my husband. A core part of me is that woman who had to leave after 20 years so I could protect myself and provide my kids with a peaceful environment. They won my loyalty with that packaging and their design choices. They were seeing me, but not just me, the hundreds or even millions of women who are alone, not knowing what to do, and needing help. ROSE gives these women the tools they need to be self-sufficient and to become strong. When you strengthen women, you strengthen the family and when you strengthen the family, you strengthen our nation.”
The Soul of the Community
Alma jumped in with both feet when the ROSE Community was launched. “I wanted to open my heart, to help these women who were new and needed someone who may be just like them,” she says. “Something brave comes out from deep within when you need to take action to protect yourself. That warrior is there, you just need someone to encourage you, to believe in you, to see the warrior in you, that protector and defender of self and family. Then, if the day comes that you need to use those skills, you will be ready, and you and your loved ones will be safe.”
The ROSE Retreat in Nashville was a true gift for Alma. She left feeling like she was invited to become part of a family, and the ROSE community continues to be the platform where she keeps giving.
“Before ROSE, I was starting to think that maybe teaching wasn’t for me, but the ROSE Community reignited my interest in empowering women,” she concludes. “Women who want to learn have been coming out of the woodwork. This program is truly speaking to a much bigger group than I think anyone expected. I love helping and I love talking to people. The community gives all of us a way to connect with like-minded women, to not feel embarrassed if we don’t know the answer to something and to have a cheering section as we get better at shooting.”
Alma’s journey to self-protection didn’t start with ROSE but the lessons of that journey are ones she can share openly. Like a rose that climbs its way toward the light, sweet Almita’s positive soul is intertwining with so many other women through this brave new community.
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