A story of courage, compassion and a brand new family
He wasn’t looking for a kid. He was a 28-year-old single guy with a dog and a job that requires him to travel. Then one day this spring, he came across a boy lying in a cardboard box. He was there, among the bushes behind a northwest Phoenix clothing store where the man was working that day.
The boy was dirty, hungry and terribly alone. He had no jacket and only one shoe.
“I went up to him and said, ‘Hey, Buddy, are you OK?’ ” the man told me. “He wasn’t breathing very well and had been crying. He just kind of looked at me, and I knew right there and then I had to help him somehow, some way. He’s a kid. He’s a 12-yearold kid. Who would just ignore that?”
As it turns out, the Department of Child Safety might. The boy has been in the system since he was six months old, the man would later learn. He was removed from his mother as an infant and later from his father, but he was always sent back.
After a meal, a shower, some clean clothes and a place to stay for the night, the boy began opening up to the man. He’d run away from an abusive father and had been on his own for a week. Eventually, the boy would show the man the scars crisscrossing his back — the ones put there by someone wielding a car antenna. And he would tell him of the other scars, the ones that don’t leave an outward mark.
The man says he called DCS several times to report that he’d found the boy but nobody ever got back to him.
“No one came out,” he said. “No one responded. No one called me back.”
It would take months, he says, before DCS got involved.
And so the 28-year-old single guy with the dog became a dad of sorts. Or as the boy would see him, a savior.
One who needed help to help this child.
Enter Arizona Helping Hands. The Scottsdale-based non-profit was formed in 1998 with a simple mission: Do at least one good deed every day.
Eighteen years later, the organization is a godsend to foster families — aunts and uncles, sisters and brothers and grandparents and family friends who suddenly find themselves taking care of children, many of whom arrive with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
The organization gets much of its funding from Arizona Foster Care Tax Credit donations. (A married couple can give $1,000 and take it off their state income tax.) It is also supported by the newspaper’s Season for Sharing program.
“Anything we can do to make life a little bit easier for the foster families,” Dan Shufelt, CEO of Arizona Helping Hands, told me. “That’s what we’re all about.”
Arizona Helping Hands offers vital support: beds, clothes, diapers, toys, whatever might help. By the end of this week, the non-profit will have touched about 3,200 kids in foster care this year. It will have given birthday presents to 881 children and handed
out 2,000 beds.
One of them to a 12-year-old boy who was sleeping in a cardboard box.
Shufelt saw the 28-year-old man sitting in the waiting room at Arizona Helping Hands in August. By then, DCS was involved but offered little in the way of actual help, the man says.
Meanwhile, the air mattress the boy had been sleeping on had busted and he was already outgrowing his new clothes and the boy’s birthday was coming up and it was all more than a 28-year-old single guy with a dog could handle. Without help, that is. Shufelt not only provided the man with a bed and clothes but with information on what’s out there to help foster families and how to find it.
“They made it so much easier for someone like me to make that decision to hang on,” the man told me. “It’s been so expensive to take him on. Making the decision to take on a kid mentally and continually was scary. I didn’t want to volunteer and then fail him because I can’t afford it or didn’t have the resources.”
When it comes to kids who so desperately need help, failure is simply not an option. Or, it shouldn’t be.
The now 29-year-old single guy with a dog and a kid is working to get licensed as a foster parent. He’s hoping to adopt the boy or at least become his permanent guardian.
“It is a beautiful thing to watch him grow and have an opportunity to live as he never had the chance to live,” the man told me. “It’s worth everything just to see him smile.”
As for the boy, he’s now in therapy and his night terrors are easing. He’s enrolled in a new school where he’s making good grades and friends and he made the 7th grade basketball team.
More importantly, he’s found someone to care about him, and that is no small thing in a state where 18,000 children are living in foster homes, group homes or shelters.
Recently, the boy wrote a letter to Santa.
“I have been a good kid this year, because even though I’ve had a hard and tough life, I pushed forward and broke the chain,” he wrote. “I met someone who cares about me and who loves me. I’m so grateful for the life I have now. I have good grades and have been good at school. I don’t want presents — I just want to be with my foster dad. What I want — LOVE, that is all.”
Note: The man asked me not to use his name as he wants to adopt the boy and doesn’t want to jeopardize his chances. I got independent verification from someone involved in the case that the story is true.