 |
||
|
||
|
She
still has sleep in her eyes. She's just gotten up from her nap in a
bedroom where the walls are painted with pictures of happy children
at play. She wants her juice, and when she sees me, she hides her
sleepy eyes behind a plump hand. Slowly, she's coaxed to say "hi." Slowly, she responds to the soft, cooing voice I save for little girls just up from their naps. "Can you show me around," I ask her, after which she finally marches over and takes my hand. She ushers me through every single room - this one painted like a garden, that one featuring creatures of the sea - never tiring of giving tours of what is now her home. I get the strong impression that if she had her way, she'd never let go - that her little hand would forever stay secure inside my big hand. It doesn't matter that she doesn't even know my name. She does know something important, though: She knows that even though I'm a stranger, I'm safe. I won't hurt her. I won't make her cry. Because I'm here, in this special space, I'm to be trusted. I can feel her neediness through her little fingers, and when I think about why she's here - why all these children are here in this bright, clean home in Central Phoenix - I wonder how anyone could ever think of hurting these angels. How in the world could anyone neglect this little darling or let her go hungry? But that's the life she had before; before she came to Marcus House and learned that "home" doesn't have to be a hurtful place; before she got to feeling safe and secure and open enough to take the hand of a stranger who didn't want to let go, either. When we think about the needs of abused and neglected children, it's easy to get overwhelmed. There are so many children who need help - Arizona has some 7,000 children in foster care, every domestic violence shelter is overcrowded with needy mothers and children, and each year, thousands of calls of concern for children never even get answered. In that overwhelming need, you might think there's nothing you could do to help - nothing grand enough to make a difference. So you need to know about Marcus House, because it isn't huge and it isn't grand, but in its own little way, it does something very important. Marcus House is the only five-bed shelter in Arizona, and it's limited to the youngest of the state's abused and abandoned children. Just five children at a time. Never six or seven. Never the hundreds or thousands who could use this safe environment where there's juice after a nap, and clean beds and baths every night. This is the first stop on a long road that will probably mean a foster home or two or three; a road that may well lead to adoption by a new family; a road that sometimes means reunification with the original family, if mom or dad can get it together. Children arrive here in dirty blankets and with welts. They come from filthy apartments or from the street, where they lived wherever. They come drug-addicted and starving. They come - babies to 5 years old - already veterans of the worst of human behavior. That they have this place to come to is due to one woman, who long ago saw that these little survivors needed a special place. Bonnie Cohn was a caseworker for Child Protective Services (CPS) a decade ago when she decided Arizona needed a Marcus House. "I was a case manager and I'd take children from terrible, scary situations - abused, abandoned, molested - and when I dropped them off at a shelter, these little ones just added to the chaos and trauma. There'd be a room with a television and minimal toys, and it was more like warehousing than a home. I thought they needed a home." She also knew, from professional experience, that children with problems weren't well received in regular foster homes, and so many of the babies and toddlers she dealt with had special problems. "That meant the kids stayed in shelters longer, but they weren't doing much to nurture or teach them or let them heal," she recalls. She was adamant that she didn't want a large home: "There shouldn't be more than five human beings in crisis in any one place in the world at any time." Cohn talked to her coworkers at CPS and got their support. She quit her job and used her almost-paid-off home as collateral on a loan to buy an old house built in 1946. She opened the doors of Marcus House, named for a friend's son, on July 1, 1995. The very first day, the state sent her five 2-year-olds. "I just had a skeleton staff, and so I did a lot of shifts myself," Cohn remembers. "I quickly understood the necessity and importance of gates." Today, she's in a newer and bigger home purchased with the help of her active volunteers and fund-raisers, and has a staff of 11, working around-the-clock shifts. Two members of her staff recently had children of their own, so their experiences here are particularly poignant. "For many of these kids, there are definitely no limits," notes Lori Henley. "They're so used to taking care of themselves, they don't want to listen." "Some kids don't want you to hold them because they've never been held," adds Carrie Thoms. "Some have a hearing loss because of ear infections, and a lot of the kids have never had vaccinations." "They don't know about sitting down to have a meal," Henley says. "Some don't know how to eat because they haven't been fed for so long." Cohn then adds this harsh reality: "Some take 40 or 50 minutes to eat, taking the tiniest bites, others inhale food until they vomit. We've had kids hide pudding cups under their pillows because they're afraid it will be their last meal." She adds that the words coming out of those little mouths can sometimes be startling. "You'd just be shocked by the way they've been talked to," Cohn says. She's now used to the children who arrive and try to destroy everything. She knows that in a lot of cases, she'll be the first person to introduce one of these children to books. "They do know about biting and hitting, because those are the things they used in order to survive," she adds. Right away, Cohn and her staff start working on self-esteem. "They feel impor-tant here because they are important," she says. Every child has his or her picture taken and posted on the board - often the first time the child has seen a self-image. In what was once the dining nook of this home is now a crafts room, and the walls are filled with the paintings and drawings of the children. Most importantly, Cohn stresses, they can be children here. "We had a 4-year-old who had been in charge of younger siblings at home, and we had to keep telling him, 'In here, you just be the kid. We're the grown-ups; we'll take care of you.' You could just see him bloom." "You see how the children change, what a little bit of love can do," Thoms adds. "Oh, do they love their schedule," she says. "They wake up and have breakfast, then have their hair fixed and get dressed. From 9:30 a.m. to 10 a.m. there's a snack…." At that moment, one of the children begs her to play, and so the rest of the schedule goes unsaid. But what's obvious is that the major part of every day's schedule is adults giving positive reinforcement to children. This, they all agree, is the easy part - the part where you watch wary children become loving, afraid children become secure, abused children start to heal. But there are also lots of hard parts. Cohn says the pattern that most breaks her heart is when children leave Marcus House and go back to parents who have supposedly gotten it together, but it doesn't work, and the kids come back, or they go to foster care, and that doesn't work, and they come back. She can tell you about children that by the age of 4 have had six different temporary "homes" or placements. The saddest part, Henley says, is the children who were close to their parents before things went bad. "They have great separation anxiety and are grieving - even the ones who have been abused." By now, Cohn and her staff can pretty well predict which families will actually clean up their acts enough to get their children back permanently. "If there's mental illness and drugs… these are the biggest issues that bring children into care, and they're continuing problems," Cohn says. Marcus House cares for children from overnight to about 10 months - the normal stay is around three months. "We're often the ones who see their first steps and hear their first words and watch them get their first teeth," Thoms says. "You have to set your guard up, you really can't be as involved as you want to be, because it's just too hard when they leave." But watch any of these staff members with these children for an afternoon and try to catch them holding back their love. They know, and you know, they're fooling themselves, and if you push, they'll admit to the tears they cry when the children leave - children that feel so much like their own. "If you didn't have a heart, you wouldn't do a good job here," Cohn says. There's been a little media coverage on Marcus House, but mostly, it's been through word of mouth that this home has attracted such ardent supporters. Every 18 months, Blue Cross-Blue Shield gives them 10,000 pairs of rubber gloves. Every Christmas, nearby schools do canned-food drives. Two groups sponsor golf tournaments every year. Synagogues and churches have been regular donors, Make-A-Difference takes care of the yard, a Girl Scouts Brownie troop stages car washes to buy toys and books for the home. The Creative Women of Pinnacle Peak donates money so the staff can take the kids out on "field trips," which means everything from going to a burger joint for lunch to going to the zoo. For nine years, Cohn religiously saved money until she could buy a new van for these outings, which also include story hour at a public library, and various parks to feed the ducks. When they found the newer house, Rosie Romero of KTAR Radio came over with his workers to do all the fix-up that was needed. The furniture and mattresses were donated; Kristen Hustead painted the murals on the bedroom walls; "fairy grandfather" Jim Lanker hung the bulletin board, and he's on constant call to fix anything that needs to be fixed. The little girl who is clutching my hand shows me all of this with such pride, you'd think this was her home. And for now, it is. When it's time for me to leave, I have to negotiate with her to let go of my hand. She makes sure I say goodbye to every single child. I think about her for a long time after I drive away. And I know Bonnie Cohn is right when she says, "I feel like what I'm doing makes a difference." It really does. |
Jana Bommersbach © 2003 - 2008
Email:
jana@janabommersbach.com
web design:
Web-Writer, Inc.