‘Sometimes I don’t think God knows where I am’ There are many ways to help give Arizona’s foster children a better life
T By Kris Jacober
hree-year-old Sharon and five-year-old Marcella came to our home with the clothes on their backs. When they left after six months to return to the care of their mom, they had two suitcases full of clothes and a trunk full of toys. When they returned to our home five months later, they came in their underwear and T-shirts. Everything else was gone. They lived with us for another 12 months, until they went to live with a family in Tucson. One night before little Marcella left, we were saying bedtime prayers and she told me that she didn’t think that “God knew where she was.” Desiree came to our home on the day after Thanksgiving. We were already fostering her two-year-old brother and she had another brother living with a different foster family. When the police removed her from her home, they told her to bring her most important “things.” What 13-year-old Desiree brought was a can of hairspray with her hairbrush attached to it by a rubber band. She was wearing her school uniform and slippers. Most children who come into foster care come with nothing. They start down the path to a scary future where they have no voice about where or with whom they live, nor when they will find the permanency they deserve. It’s not that there aren’t foster families; kinship
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Latino Perspectives Magazine
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caregivers and group home providers care for children every day and try to give them the childhood they deserve. The problem is that the system is overloaded and there is no end in sight. There are more than 13,000 children in foster care in Arizona today. Last year at this time, there were 11,000, a number that was then considered unimaginable. In the last six months, Child Protective Services reported that 4,968 children came into foster care in Arizona for the period ending March 31, 2012. That’s an average of 27 children removed from their home every day. They are taken from the only family they may have ever known and dropped off at the homes of strangers, or at a shelter or group home.