Cassandra: What strikes me most about my experience bouncing my way through foster care in the late 1990’s is the infrastructure of the system. It is a sprawling, multi-faceted system. For example:
·
Each home may have preferences about the types
of children they are willing to accept.
·
They may have more preferences about what types
of children they will accept on an emergency basis.
·
Each group home has a maximum capacity.
·
The
families housing foster kids still go on vacation. (The new foster children mostly do not- they
cannot be transported across state boundaries, and probably have a court date
to attend soon anyways- if they were welcome in the first place.)
These
are all examples of why I called my experience “bouncing.” The system is placing children sometimes on a
day-to-day basis. The problem is so big
and so time consuming, sometimes all the system is hoping for is each child in
a bed by bedtime. |
| Cassandra Rayburn |
Now my story is compiled of a
mish-mash of problems, odd situations, and oversights from county health
offices, which were just doing what they needed to do to get through their
workload. My story is not the run-of
–the-mill kid in foster care story. The
thing about my story is that I
understood it.
On one occasion when I was being
transported from home, I kindly told the worker to wait 30 minutes so I could
properly gather my belongings. I had a
travel bag full of outfits; I grabbed my popular-brands of perfume and other
not-so essentials, and tossed a couple of my wrapped Christmas presents in
there for good measure. I had it all
figured out, and had been dealing with these kinds of moves for many
years. My story didn’t happen out of
nowhere. Or in the middle of the
night. But so many children’s stories
do.
Imagine being swooped up from
wherever you are, doing whatever children do, having your belongings stuffed in
a store brand, garbage bag, and sent to a place where nothing is familiar, and
that bag will probably tear before you get there. (That is, if you are lucky enough to have
someone be able to gather some of your belongings. If not, you may have a small allowance that
can buy a few outfits at a discount merchant, outfits that you will still stuff in a garbage bag). Now, not
only is your situation unfamiliar, but remember, you’re a child. You probably
have no idea why you are there anyways.
So what’s the big deal about the
garbage bag? It’s cheap, it’s sort-of efficient, and it’s the best they can do
in that chaos of displacement.
But it comes at a high cost for the
foster kid, whose life is about to change. Again. The garbage bag signifies
that nothing is normal. Do you ever take
a garbage bag full of clothes to Grandma’s?
What about on summer vacation, or a sleepover? It’s shocking enough to be transplanted,
sometimes several times in a month, to foster homes or group homes. A suitcase is symbolic of family trips and
holidays. A suitcase brings faith to a
child that his or her unfamiliar situation is just temporary. It is not as scary and open-ended as a torn,
stuffed trash bag.
A suitcase will be less likely to get mixed up
with someone else’s black trash bag. It
is definitely less likely to be mistaken for trash. If the only reminders a child can carry with
them can be mistaken for trash, isn’t that heartbreaking?
Please consider contributing suitcases and duffel bags to this very personal drive. We have currently collected 80 suitcases - that's 80 kids who no longer have to feel like everything they own is little better than trash. And that's amazing.
All of our stores are accepting donations at this time.
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