WHY DO WE FOSTER?

 How do people discover fostering? What do people who wonder if fostering might be for them, do next?

It's a question I need to start asking fellow foster parents, strangely I don't think I ever have. Yet.

So at the moment I've only got my own experience.

Way back I saw a TV programme, I was about 14 years old. A family were talking about their having a foster child. I'd never heard of "fostering" before. The family seemed pleasant and happy. I maybe made a mental note.

When I left school I was a bit aimless. Normal.

I caught a small ad in a newspaper inviting volunteers to go to the USA and work with kids in their Summer Camps. I applied, was accepted, and suddenly there I was on a Boeing jet heading for New York. 

The plane was full of students, all about to be dispersed to different camps, but none of us knew our ultimate destination, we were going to be told when we landed. I stayed in touch with one girl who ended up in a top-of-the-range camp where the kids did water ski-ing, horse riding and use the camp's helicopter to get to town to post cards.

I wasn't so lucky. Wait, I'm going to re-phrase that; I was even luckier. I got a charity camp.

Camp Caribou it was called. 90 miles north of New York, in the middle of proper nowhere. Forest for 100 miles in every direction.

It was owned and run by a decent, wealthy New York family who saw charity as their duty and did their bit.

The Camp cost them time and money. The money came from the father. His children and their friends did the day-to-day work, lived in the camp, never stopped smiling and supporting the kids.

The kids! 

They were all homeless one way or another. Some came from homes for "social orphans" (kids whose parents are alive but unable to function as parents). Many were living on wasteland, in disused factories, abandoned tenements, shop doorways; all that. 

The idea was to give the children a couple of weeks in the great outdoors. Each of us councillors had a wooden cabin out in the forest (yep, snakes and wolves) with 6 very basic beds; one for the councillor, the other for 5 kids. From day one, aged 18, I became a start-up "foster mum" of 5.

One of my many, many standout memories is that the entire camp sat down to eat together three times a day in the main building. Different cabins took their turn to lay the tables. The staff were really hot that every child's place had to be layed exactly right; a clean plate in the middle, cutlery exactamundo. Clean water jugs and sparkling glasses for all.

And a napkin. Each place had a neatly folded paper napkin, for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Everone had to wash first, in the open air latrines.

One of the family said to me;

"It's important we respect them and encourage them to respect themselves."

Brilliant.

Then, I guess, is maybe when the seed of fostering was sown.

Fostering is a valuable career for almost anyone. The inkling to foster might suddenly blindside a person almost when they're thinking about something else.

BTW America was a fantastic life experience for myself. I'll never forget that the older kids were respectfully frisked when their rusty old bus brought them in. Knives and drugs were collected.

The councillors returned the weapons when they left, but kept the weed.

I often wondered how they disposed of it...