A Banana To Carry

Last week I was talking to a good friend.  I told her I was having trouble deciding whether to take in the most recent banana we were called about. This one has some significant special needs and would be with us longer than usual, during a time J will not be able to help me much. It seemed like a lot to take on.
We talked about foster care in general, and she asked me if it is hard to hear the stories about how the kids ended up in care.  As a social worker, she said that there were times she almost wished for the blissful ignorance she had before entering the field, because the stories can be so horrendous and hard to bear.  I know what she means. 
I remembered again that summer in New York. 
That was the summer that my ignorant bliss was really shattered. 
I was the nurse at a summer camp for kids from the foster care and shelter systems of inner city NYC.  The first night the kids arrived, they poured off the bus into the dining hall for dinner.  I was in the clinic, busily preparing for the intake exams that would begin after dessert.  I was excited and nervous.  I didn't know what to expect, but I didn't expect to get my first patient before dinner was even over.
I was called down to the hall for a boy that wasn't feeling well.  He was a skinny thing with a big head; he looked up at me with eyes so sad he reminded me a little of a basset hound.  He promptly threw up all over my shoes.
I got him back to the clinic, cleaned us up, and was just starting to try and figure out what was the matter with him, when another child walked in.  Another.  And they kept coming, all sick to their stomachs.
At first I thought- it's an epidemic! It's the spaghetti! Food poisoning!  But I stuck to my training and asked all the routine questions.  One of which is- what and when did you eat last?
I soon realized that they all had something in common, and it wasn't just the spaghetti.
It was that, before that dinner, it had been a long, long time since they had eaten anything.  Some of them couldn't even remember the last time they'd had a meal.
Then they had arrived at a table overflowing with pasta and salad and bread, and gorged themselves.  Their starved little bodies had been shocked and couldn't keep the food down.
It wasn't the only problem that night.
Not knowing or trusting there would be more coming from the kitchen when the pasta bowl ran out, fights broke out over noodles and garlic bread. That night I treated lacerations on little kids who had seriously tried to shank each other with plastic picnic wear.  I iced black eyes.  My office was a melee of children in various states of illness and injury; there was crying, groaning, shouting, cursing that made me do a double-take (did that seriously just come out of that little six year old?!)
That was before the intake exams.
Where I saw the three brothers who at first glance seemed to have a pox of some kind.  But no, they were covered head to toe in cigarette burns.  Where I tried to speak to glazed over stares and discovered children drugged with psychotropic medicines that came with them in unmarked bottles.  Where I noticed the healing scars on the girl who had been dipped in boiling water.  The untreated infections that had been ravaging little bodies for weeks, months, maybe years.  Where I heard the stories about far worse wounds, the kind I could not see.
That was just the first day.
I remember being ashamed by my ignorance; knowing that there was something wrong about the fact that I felt so surprised.  That I'd had no idea, really, that these things were happening here, right here, right in my own country/city/neighborhood.  These kids weren't on some Save The Children commercial, so far removed they might not be real.  They were living pain and poverty right here; just a few subways stops from fifth avenue. And there were so. many.
When I finished camp I was still a college student unsure of what my future would be, but I knew what I was looking for.  I wanted to look into the shadows, and see who else was there.  I wanted to learn about that reality, and be a part of it in some way.  I felt then that, sure, I couldn't change the world or Fix It.  But it seemed very, very important to at least acknowledge the truth.  To do all I could not to be so blissfully ignorant anymore.
I'm sure I still am, unaware of many things.  But I've been a few dark places since then.
It's true that there are times it has seemed like too much.  There have been things that have made it hard not to lose hope- hope for anything.  I've realized that a child's pain isn't something I can turn away from, forget, or get over.  It's something I just have to carry around.  But that's ok. It's a lighter burden than they carry, and yet they do.  Surely I can be strong enough to share just a little of it.
I told my friend that, yes, it is astounding, horrifying what happens.  So often and so close to home.  That the way I personally handle knowing about the nightmares that are out there is to be a part of them. I can't erase what's happened to these kids.  Or fix it.  But I can show them that they are not invisible. I can care.  I can always care. Foster care helps me carry what I know.
As I said it to my friend, I knew I had my answer.
I pick up our new banana on Tuesday.