About me
I have had a passion for children since I was a child myself. I know decisions made by children can be powerful. Important choices I made as a child included, deciding to become a teacher as a first-grader, to deciding to adopt after completing my first big research paper on adoption, as a fifteen-year-old. In their innocence, children’s intentions and potential can be as powerful and lasting as a redwood seed.
Growing up as a military brat exposed me to the exciting world of cultures in the diversity of my neighborhoods in base housing. I was one of the excited children who ran to count how many new kids I got to have in my class the day the secretary posted the class lists on the glass windows before school began. It was through my experience as an initially shy child growing up in a military family that made me sensitive to others who might feel out of place or new to a group. I learned to be adaptable and grew to love change and moving.
Volunteer opportunities as a teen abroad brought my value of family into focus. I got to help build a daycare for an orphanage in Mixco, Guatemala and talk to homeless children in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, about going to school. After graduating with the teaching degree I had dreamt of for so long, I honored the pleas from my mother, to, “Please, consider teaching in the United States,” when I took a job in an isolated Yup’ik village in Alaska. Kotlik is a village of about six hundred people on the Bering Sea. There are no roads in the village, and my future husband at the time, had to go home to chop ice from the river, so his mom could do the dishes when we were dating. I taught and mentored 1st-12th graders in Kotlik for ten years.
I fell in love with the generous, respectful Yup’ik culture in that village. I also saw up close how a person who loves his or her children could struggle to meet their children’s needs when they are struggling themselves. This is where the desire to help struggling children and families was born, ultimately leading my husband Jerry and me to foster.
Through fostering, I still get to experience different cultures and wonder what lasting decisions these innocent children might be making. My prayer is that they not be broken by their storms. May my home be a shelter where children are tended lovingly and allowed to grow so the winds of life will strengthen them. I want to restore their faith in love so that they can dream from a place of confidence and safety.