Imagine that you are a child. (It’s not that hard to do, right?)
Again, I must stress … imagine that you are a child. (Or else reading this article will not seem as real to you.)
Imagine that you have just been intentionally burned with a cigarrete … for spilling your milk. “And if you spill anything again, I’ll burn you again until you learn!” This from someone who is supposed to love you and protect you.
(Note: regarding this simulation, it does not matter whether you imagine yourself as a boy or a girl, as either can suffer such similarly terrible fates in real life.)
Imagine that you have just been sexually molested by your mother’s drunk boyfriend, while your mother is mindlessly drugged up in the next room. You don’t even know how to describe what keeps happening to you. All you know is that it leaves you shaking and ashamed, in both your body and your soul.
Imagine that your little stomach is in knots from hunger so ravaging that you cannot fall asleep. Food is available there where you live. You are just not allowed to eat it. If you try, you will be mercilessly beaten with the sharp buckle end of a belt. “You’re on punishment!” you are told, though you are not quite sure what for. You know you have school the next day … and you will be in trouble there for falling asleep in the only place your feel safe. But even if you are banished to “a silent lunch” from a teacher for not paying attention in class, you will at least still get food to eat. Finally … far into the night … you fall asleep … and dream of a safe place that does not exist.
Or does it?
Enter Isaiah 117 House.
When children are taken from their home (due to abuse or neglect from their caretakers) they now have a safe place to go until foster care is implemented.
Isaiah 117 House greatly reduces the trauma of transition by providing a home-like environment, clean clothes, food, and emotional support for local kids entering the foster system.
(Isaiah 117 House gets its calling directly from a verse found in the Old Testament Book of Isaiah, one which instructs us to: “Do right. Seek justice. Defend the oppressed.”)
The children served by Isaiah 117 House have been through enough trauma to last a lifetime. Suddenly they find a safe place. There they receive unconditional love, decent food, clothes, shelter, and toys (basic things that all children everywhere should have).
Your new hero or heroine (someone called a social worker) is finding you a new place to live called a foster home - a place where you will be cared for and loved, and no longer violenty abused and neglected. In the meantime, you feel safe (a feeling you have not known in a very long time, if ever).
The place you await for foster care is not a child welfare office, a hospital, or a police station (which are often common options in lieu of an Isaiah 117 House). It is a comfortable loving home. Indeed, it is a house … a house filled with loving people and all the comforts of a good “normal” home (a safe place of temporary transition where you feel unconditionally loved until you enter your new foster home).
This past Friday, I played in a fundraiser golf tournament on behalf of Isaiah 117 House at Clear Creek Golf Course, in Bristol VA. I got to meet the new support coordinator of this House, Logan Grace Hastie . I am pictured with Logan below.
Once upon a time I taught Logan as a little girl in elementary school. People like Logan are the angels that connect children who’ve suffered at the hands of a literal hell on earth to at least a touch of heaven - a place of unconditional love and safety.
A new Isaiah 117 House is slated to open in Bristol VA and Washington County soon. I understand one is already up and open in Bristol TN. I also understand, and am grateful, that there are currently over 60 such houses in our region.
Yet … unfortunately, the need is still there. It is hard to build enough of these safe sanctuaries to meet the actual unimaginably dire and horribly graphic reality that exists for so many children living right here in our midst.
Something can be done.
Something is being done.
You too can help.
If interested in providing foster care in Virginia: https://www.dss.virginia.gov/supporting.../foster-care/
If interested in providing foster care in Tennessee:
https://www.tn.gov/dcs/program-areas/foster-care.html
Everyone please visit:
https://isaiah117house.com/
Please consider a donation to this most noble of causes. If you’d like to donate specifically to the new Isaiah 117 House in Bristol VA/Washington County, please state your wish on the site.
Imagine again being a child … and imagine the wave of relief feeling that you will never have to be beaten, burned, molested, neglected, or starved. Ever again.