Profile: Bev

So much for the people sketches I was so eager to do! Well, here’s the next in the series.

She was a little nicer than Alice—ok, so that might be an understatement—and a little easier to get a long with. Bev had a pretty face, round and spotted with freckles, always wearing a smile. She had a hearty laugh and always seemed to enjoy cooking. I remember the first time I ever had “Indian Tacos” was when she made them at the group home.

She was one of the few kids that took interest in my background of living in Thailand. She asked me all sorts of questions, but had a terrible sense of geography. [Way to go American education right? What I have to remind myself is that these kids are moved from place to place to place and it is just a bit short of amazing that these kids even continue going to school. With the trauma and abuse they’ve been through, sometimes I wonder how they make themselves sit through class. It’s tough to tell yourself that when you’re frustrated that they refuse to go to school or call to come home everyday. They have seen and experienced more than anyone should ever have to, let alone as a child. Sorry, tangent.] She seemed fascinated by the idea of being from one culture (USA), living in another (Thailand), then returning to culture A.

I don’t know that she would have ever been able to articulate it, but it seemed that she identified with my experiences. Not in traveling overseas, but in being torn between two cultures, two lives. I felt for this girl. Her Native American heritage entitled her to an absurd amount of money upon turning 18 and even more if she graduated from high school. She could have had the option of staying with us so that we could help her get her high school diploma, but the temptation of said money was too much. She left on good terms, with all of us shaking our heads wondering what we would do, what she would do with the 10 grand a month that her tribe was giving her. It kind of felt like a prodigal son type experience, except that she would not return.

I remember that she always had a good relationship with staff. She had the cell phone numbers of the group home administrators whereas the other kids weren’t given that information. She had this word game with one guy where they would learn a new word and try and stump the other with it.

In the months before her departure, her smile remained, yet somehow in the smallest way you could see that it was strained. Her estranged father, who at some point had been entitled to the same kind of money started calling, demanding that she pay up. I remember my co-worker having to take her cell phone from her after listening to her scream into it for hours one morning, then moving his car out of sight for fear she would want to express her rage by causing physical damage. Her words always said that she was so excited to leave and take her money with her, but you could see it in her eyes. The fear, the unknown, the responsibility. Knowing that suddenly other random relatives were going to start calling. Ten thousand dollars a month of pressure weighed heavily on this scared child.

She kept in contact. We got calls a few weeks later, telling us that she had already blown the full month’s allotted money. Two weeks in.

Months, actually, a year later, I don’t know that she ever finished high school. When I think about Bev, I get this overwhelming sense of emptiness because I know that is what she must feel. Empty relationships, people who are only around until pockets are bare. Empty in that money buys gadgets and dune buggies but can’t fill her enough to sate her soul. Empty in that her heart asks why, why, why can’t I quite be happy, why does my life look like this. Why don’t I have the family I deserve? Why is it that I have all this money, but what I truly want I can’t buy?

It is scary when you can so clearly see the cycle. The atrocities that children today go through and the damage that they carry with them is sobering. Knowing that the odds are that they will make many of the same poor decisions that their parents made can wear one thin. But, we enter each day with the hope that we can model for these precious kids that they don’t have to be a part of the cycle and that they can aspire for anything. I am always reminded by the veteran staff that kids come back years later and it could be any random thing that you said or did that sticks and makes the difference, even if it isn’t in the moment that they realize it. All we have is hope, and I hope out of that shimmers truths of life, love, grace.