Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
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FEBRUARY 4-10, 2015 UCW 5 WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM One of my oldest friends — I will call her Carole — is a foster mother. There are many like her throughout our state. They do what I can only describe as God's work. For a decade and a half, Carole has taken in preschoolers and elementary school children who, for reasons entirely beyond their own control, find themselves living away from their families. In many cases, they are removed suddenly after some sort of traumatic incident and excruciating family turmoil. They are separated from parents, grandparents, other relatives who have been caretakers and sometimes from their own siblings. They are handed over by social workers, who may be strangers, to other strangers like Carole. Kind as all those strangers may be, they are still unfamiliar faces and places to the young ones who often have little comprehension of what is happening in their lives and to those they love. First Carole settles these scared, confused and distressed children into her home. She must then secure the appropriate records for these children in flux, find daycare if necessary or enroll them in new schools in her school district. She ferries them to and from various counseling and medical sessions, oversees homework and does all the other jobs their own parents are not doing. Children in foster care often come from living situations without schedules, rules or adult supervision. Televisions play at all hours with no adult concern about the content spewing from them. Food is available sporadically. Personal hygiene is not a priority; nor is schoolwork. Bedtime stories are unheard of and there may be nothing to read at all. Their own experiences understandably make arriving in Carole's ordered household a serious shock. Homework is done in the afternoon. Dinner is served at a regular hour and television and electronics are regulated and supervised. Stories are read, and bedtime is not negotiable. Carole says the reaction of most new arrivals is "You're kidding!" Quickly, though, they adapt and come to enjoy household structure, a concept so novel to some foster children, they simply have never experienced it. Two little girls blossomed so under Carole's care and feeding that when the court eventually returned them to their birth family, they asked Carole to be their godmother, "just in case." One little boy who had not one birth family member willing to take him in was adopted from Carole's dedicated care by a family with one other son, and is living happily in another North Carolina town. I believe the foster children who land in Carole's care are lucky, and, blessedly, so are many others who find "Caroles" of their own. Sadly, not all foster children are. Nearly 10,000 children are in North Carolina's foster care system. Last year, not quite 1,200 of them were adopted, and about 500 simply aged out. That means they turned 18-years-old, reaching legal adulthood and were sent out in the world on their own without familial support. Enter the State Employees Credit Union, which has 254 branch offices with at least one in each of North Carolina's 100 counties. An exhibit called the Heart Gallery will rotate through those branches from now through July, featuring photographs of, and information about, children in our state's foster care system. The hope is that some of us who visit credit union offices will be moved to adopt one of the featured children or another in the foster care system. The Heart Gallery is not a new idea. It has been around for a decade with displays in all sorts of places, including libraries, churches, hospitals, malls and others. Hard evidence is sketchy, but Jamie Bazemore, adoption services manager for the N.C. Division of Social Services, says children have found permanent families through them and that there will be more careful measurements of effectiveness of the galleries in coming months. In addition to the Heart Gallery displays in State Employee Credit Union offices, the N.C. Kids Program can be reached at www.adoptnckids.org and 877-625-4371. I have both admiration and respect for foster parents and for families that decide to bring children in through legal adoption. Both are selfless acts of kindness to children who desperately need stability, structure, care and — yes, love, and the bonus is often a deep enrichment in one's own life. At the same time, foster parenting and adoption are not for the faint of heart, and most of us probably know which camp we are in. That being said, I am keeping my fingers and toes crossed that children in the Heart Gallery displays will find life-long families, and I look forward to hearing stories with happy endings. Carole had one of those herself. A decade ago, she adopted an 11-year-old who had been in her home on and off since she was 4 I think of that as the ultimate gift. THIS WEEK WITH MARGARET Serving Fayetteville For Over 50 Years! 484-0261 1304 Morganton Rd. Mon-Sat: 6am-10pm Sun: 7am-3pm Celebrate Valentine's Day With Us! Valentine's Day Special Surf-n-Turf for Two $39.95 Reservations Accepted Contest&RequestLine: 910-764-1073 www.christian107.com KeepingtheMainThing...theMainThing. visitusonline FocusontheFamily 20Countdown Magazine Adventures in Odyssey MARGARET DICKSON, Contributing Writer, COMMENTS? Editor@upandcom- ingweekly.com.. 910.484.6200. The Milk of Human Kindness by MARGARET DICKSON The N.C. State Employees Credit Union will welcome the Heart Gallery to bring at- tention to the thousands of children who are in the state's foster system.