Well, it’s over.
Five months. 33 events. 71 hours of class time.
I joined the team for “Foster/Kinship Care Education” through our local
Victor Valley Community College in January, after being recommended to
the program by my dad. I went to the first meeting, got to know the
staff well, and soon thereafter was assigned my first “real” duty.
Tuesday and Wednesday nights I was going to be volunteering to take
care of all the children while Foster/Kinship care classes took place
for their parents.
It was interesting. Several complications made me nervous. For
instance, we had no classroom. We met in a storage closet. It was about
10’ x 12’, and we crammed upwards of 15 people in there on some nights.
Also, Tuesday night classes were in Spanish. Therefore, the children of
the spanish-speaking folks from the Tuesday night classes also spoke
primarily spanish. I speak almost no spanish, with the exception of,
“no habla espanol”. I was a little nervous about that. The final, and
perhaps most disturbing, fact was that the doors to the place did not
close. Well, they closed, but they did not latch closed. With 15
children who, by turns, wanted to leave the room, and all at
unpredictable times, I often had to just sit down in front of the doors
and do whatever I could from my “post” there.
We certainly had our interesting times. One night we had 15 children,
and almost none of them spoke English. 7 of them were sick. We had no
tissues. Since I did childcare all year alone (excepting 5 instances
throughout the semester when someone came to help me for a class), it
got interesting to do such simple things as “bathroom breaks”. Rounding
up and transporting a dozen toddlers who don’t speak, and who don’t
understand you when you speak can be difficult. Not to mention the fact
that, throughout the year, many of the little girls were totally
terrified of using the restrooms, which were dark and, I’ll admit,
pretty scary-looking for little girls. They would take to a collective
screaming exercise, which would usually take me several minutes to calm
them down from.
Also, we had no water available. Keeping little kids happy in a room
for 2 hours with no water is like hauling the children of Israel around
in the desert of Sinai—it can be done, but a lot of complaining takes
place along the way. One night we had kids who couldn’t stand it
anymore. They were “too” thirsty. I had no clue what to do. I could see
that they really needed water. So I took a deep breath, walked into
that big ‘ol kitchen at the catholic church (where our meetings were
held, because they had a big facility), grabbed a bunch of communion
cups and filled them up with tap water. I got a system going with the
kids; they were to drink their (tiny) cup full of water, and, if they
wanted more, to get back into line to have it refilled. After about 15
minutes, they had all been satisfied fully. I’m glad no one from the
actual church walked in on us. That could have been hard to explain. 
I took on the duty wanting to help the children. For those of you who remember the article I had published last year, Nicole’s Eleven, you’ll remember its line that has since come to be tickling;
Would God dump eleven children on a 17-year-old for five hours at a time?
Ironically,
you’ll remember that I thought such a concept was unimaginable then,
and that I had concluded that, until I was thoroughly caught up in it,
I didn’t know that I was capable of it. I said, “God has a sense of
humor. He threw me headlong into something I thought I didn’t know how
to do—and then He showed me that it really wasn’t that hard after all.”
That irony has repeated itself. At the beginning of this semester, if
you had told me about the children, and about some of the experiences I
would be going through, I probably would have stepped down before I
ever started. But being in the middle of it, and having only the Lord’s
presence to “cheer and to guide”, I discovered that it wasn’t all that
hard, and that it was possible, and, indeed, unavoidable to have lots
of fun along the way.
Looking
back, now, I see God’s hand in every class. The class where the tables
began to fall—heavy tables—and when there were 10 children in their
way. People always speak of adrenaline and how it hits at the right
times, but I never knew that I had it in me quite to that degree. I
shoved all those massive tables—and then managed to hold them up until
the kids could get out of the way. The class where I had one little
girl screaming at me in spanish, and having three other children
provide me translations—all of which were different from eachother, and
never actually finding out what the girl wanted. The classes when we
didn’t have a room, and had to go outside for our class. The class when
we were rained on, and one little girl was terrified, because she truly
believed that rain was poison. The class where we were stuck in a
little foyer, and then kicked out halfway through due to a scheduling
error. What experiences! I laugh when I remember them, and when I
remember how God managed to tweak the situations to my eventual
benefit, and the children’s good. When I think of the difficult nights
that I had, and the problem children, I think, I’m glad that I had them, and that they were not somewhere else.
And
the faces. They return to me, teaching me, encouraging me, at the
oddest of times. I have so many more children—over 70 different
children through the course of these five months—to pray for. I have
learned so much from these children. I set out to teach them. They
ended up teaching me. Over these last five months we have been through
so much together.
One
little boy, three years old, astute, calm, and a solemn helper, big
eyes and even bigger glasses, came every week, and I marveled at his
ability to adapt. I would overhear his mother talking to the
counselors; she had fallen into drugs, wanted to be a good mommy, a
good wife, and kept falling. I wondered, as he behaved perfectly for me
week after week—what happened at home?
“Frankie”. Frankie was our nameless boy. His mother never signed him
in, and he refused to share his first name. He was four years old, and
he understood the concept perfectly, but he didn’t want us to know what
his name was. We finally dubbed him, “Frankie” (somewhat indirectly
after the movie, Dear Frankie). He stayed “Frankie” throughout the whole class, and responded exclusively to it.
One little girl looked exactly like Amanda, the one little girl who
brought about the whole torrent of my desire to help foster children.
Their personalities were similar, too. The withdrawal, the reclusion,
and then the unbounded affection. It took us five or six weeks to
actually get close, but, once we were, she was “mine”. It was the same
with most of the little girls. It took patience. A hand on their
shoulder one week, a hug the next, and pretty soon the realization that
they no longer shrunk from your touch as they had before.
Corrine proved to be one of my greatest challenges. She at five years
old, had been adopted by a 70-year-old pessimistic mother, who found
fault in everything and whose greatest desire was to shelter her
daughter from the things that she most needed—a little bit of
roughhousing and interaction with other people. The mom would bring
Corrine bundled up in a heavy jacket when you didn’t even need long
sleeves, and our first few weeks together were trying, at best. She
obviously was exploring the freedoms that came from being apart from
her adoptive mother, and they confused her. She was unsure what to do
with herself. The first week we were together, she went from crying
spells to happiness, to showering me with kisses, to hitting, smacking,
and trying to choke or suffocate me. I knew that she was a full-time
project in and of herself. I began bringing her into our classes and
letting her run around. In fact, she couldn’t sit down and be that
perfect little woman her foster mother had demanded that she be…until
she had run around a bit. I learned that she used her perfection to
manipulate those in authority over her. So I wrecked her
pseudo-perfection by taking my demands to a new level. She was fit to
be tied. My next challenge was in getting her to interact with others.
Especially men. Her foster mom was unmarried, and I think both of them
shared a general distaste for men. The perfect boy to set her up with
was an eleven-year-old, sweet, rough-and-tumble boy named Diangelo. Oh,
of course I never told Corrine what was happening. All she knew was
that I secretly threw—yes, threw—a bean bag at her, making it look like
Diangelo had thrown it at her. She was so roused by anger at him, that
she picked up a bean bag and indignantly returned fire. He, astounded
by this little girl pitching bean bags at him, threw one back. I then
retreated to another corner of the room, where she could not run to
tattle if he hit her too hard. And, yes, he did. I could see them
playing, and a couple of times I grimaced at the intensity with which
these two were trading bean bags. And yet, I looked over at her—and she
was laughing. She was laughing—running around, being with a boy, and
getting beat up! You have no idea how proud I felt in that moment. She
had laid aside some unhealthy preconditioning that men were yucky and
that only by pouty pampering did a girl become a sinless saint. Her
mother, not knowing what had happened, told the class leader in those
next weeks that she felt her daughter had completely transformed, and
that she did not know what could have possibly done it. “I know that
many emotions have to do with the position of the constellations and
stars, so that is all that I can think of at this point. It must be our
lucky month.” After my refusal to pamper her, and my hard-line demands,
you’d have thought she would have become cranky, but, to the contrary,
she loved it. She flourished under the healthy boundaries. And she
thought Diangelo was one of the best kids around.
Nicchole and Marcie were sixteen and seventeen, and when they first
came I thought, Oh, God—what will I do?! I can’t care for this big of
an age range! Wrong, of course. His grace was sufficient, even when
there are a dozen people with a dozen year age gap stuffed into a
storage closet. That first night that they came, I had no idea how I
would make it through. I did. They were both intolerably “hardened”, as
it appeared. They spoke to no one, and expected no words in exchange. I
wondered what to say, and I prayed hard. Finally, I began telling them
the story of Amanda and Josh. Very casually, very nonchalantly, I told
them of the story, the book I was writing about them, the desire, and
then, eventually, the ministry as it had carried out to other foster
children. Turns out, it was just what they needed.
The one piped up, “I am a foster child!” I knew that, but they didn’t
know I knew. Both of them began talking over themselves in their haste
to tell their family history, their struggles, their joys, and, most of
all, their excitement at being with someone who didn’t necessarily look
down on them because they were not like everybody else.
Samuall was a challenge. He was defiant, and, when you have so many
other demanding children that require your attention, at first I felt
that I had no time for his nonsense, and I wished that he would just
cease from making trouble. But God had other plans, plans to stretch my
own capabilities and to cultivate a spirit of meekness in little Sammy.
Our last night of class, Samuel and I were just finishing up from a
little “discipline session”—or, the closest thing to it that foster
care providers can hand out—and he grabbed my hand willingly and we
headed back to the rest of the kids. He was free! The boundaries had
not restricted him, but had instead freed him to be a little boy. I
felt great pride in him.
The
stories are too numerous to recount. Over seventy of them. Seventy
individual little miracles, which God had placed in my way, and had
taught me through. I had desired to serve the poor and the fatherless,
as God says is pure and undefiled religion, and he had taught us all
poverty of spirit. It was a great five months. A great thirty-three
events. A great seventy-one hours. I can’t wait to do it again next
semester, with new children, new responsibilities, new miracles from a
great God who had taken my dreams of helping children and had stretched
them so far beyond what even I thought He could do.
“Dear Teacher Nicole,
I love you very much. Thank you for being a good teacher.
I love you.
Love, Jynneah”
I
treasure her card. I treasure all of the hugs, the smiles, the tears
that we’ve shared. I cherish the memories. And I thank God that when I
set out to gain rewards in heaven by helping those who could not help
themselves, He taught me that I would not lose my reward, even in this
life. They themselves are my exceeding great reward.
So, for now, yes. Class is over. But the lessons they've taught me are only yet begun.
The
names of all children written here, excepting “Frankie”, have been
changed to protect the children’s identities. Also, several details
have been changed that would possibly endanger the children.
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• May. 23, 2006 - Untitled Comment
I love you.