Orphans need homes
McCarthy, Abigail
OF SEVERAL MINDS Abigail McCarthy ORPHANS NEED HONES BRING BACK THE ORPHANAGE Pia McKay teaches at a community college and volunteers in her spare time to help with the "boarder babies" at...
...We had discipline, but it was good discipline," recalled Elizabeth Harich Keiser...
...As Pia McKay notes, "Some of them have never been outdoors, never seen the sky...
...What to do with these babies is a problem for the hospital and the city...
...They have known no mother...
...As the Depression eased and times were less bleak, townspeople provided outings and Christmas parties...
...The children "farmed out" were isolated and alone...
...The comments of former residents, when interviewed by the Wabasha County Herald-Standard, were strikingly similar to those of orphans who had lived in the German Home...
...The care given at Junior Village, it is true, was probably indifferent at best and as the years went by the institution lost the support of the community...
...Their graduates often speak well of them...
...The home was closed in 1979 because of the move to foster care or adoption...
...Joseph's Orphanage, the orphanage in my small home town, also now closed, held a reunion...
...I can still see the nuns, their habits kilted up, working in the long rows of vegetables-admittedly accompanied by the older and possibly reluctant orphans-but still selfless in their labor...
...Some orphanages were huge cold institutions, improperly staffed by inadequate personnel...
...Two years ago the alumni of St...
...Pia McKay wonders about that solution: "My own experience teaches me that, by design, a foster home is a truck-stop existence...
...Perhaps a county worker checked on their well-being from time to time...
...We were raised right, with good manners...
...Many orphanages were small and caring places...
...As I look back now, I remember good things about the orphanage...
...Most of the "boarder babies" have been abandoned by drug-addicted mothers, too addled and irresponsible to make provision for their babies or to relinquish them to those who can...
...They remembered the companionship, the security, the shared experiences...
...All over America there are large and empty convents, unused school buildings, over-sized and under-used rectories...
...Never mind that they waged a ceaseless, polite struggle with the nuns who tended to prefer over-modest covering and long-wearing serviceability to attractiveness in girls' clothing...
...In 1988, for example, those who had lived in the German Orphan Home, an orphanage formerly in southeast Washington, held a reunion...
...I remember, too, the happy din in the playrooms when we visited our orphan friends on Sunday afternoons...
...The children at St...
...Little children need help now...
...With their tiny hands they reach out-often only to meet the empty air...
...Every week women of the town like my grandmother and aunts went there to sew for the orphans...
...Almost anyone who lost one parent or the other, or whose family was in straitened circumstances, might end up there...
...Joseph's were nuns, German-born or first generation German-Americans-but they felt cared for...
...They get bored, frustrated, and, crudest of all, lonely...
...OF SEVERAL MINDS Abigail McCarthy ORPHANS NEED HONES BRING BACK THE ORPHANAGE Pia McKay teaches at a community college and volunteers in her spare time to help with the "boarder babies" at the city hospital here in Washington...
...She quotes Elizabeth O'Connor's book, Our Many Selves: "When the heavens are deaf to the cries of children, man asks an age old question, 'Does God Live?'"tion, 'Does God Live...
...Will they be parked, as I was, like some inanimate, unfeeling thing in one foster home after the other...
...Joseph's had its own elementary school but the orphans went to our high school...
...In theory, foster care sounds sensible, but I have never heard a foster child speak well of it...
...The rejection of that institution as a solution to the problem of children was based on an idealistic goal of providing a place in a stable family for each and every child-a goal which has proved impossible to attain...
...The alternative to the foster home, if adoption is not feasible, is a return to the orphanage...
...I only knew that one of my fourth-grade classmates so placed died because of the neglect of an infection...
...They had sorrowed at being parted from their parents, but their memories of the Home seem to have been positive ones...
...We were living in this grand house with other orphans-and to us, it was better than being left on the street as some others were...
...A year or two of neglect in early childhood can mark for life...
...When I first came to Washington, volunteer effort was directed to Junior Village, a city facility for children...
...We developed friendships-rather tentative ones, to be sure, because teenagers, then as now, are uneasy with differences...
...Joseph's had the care of the sister nurses in the hospital adjacent to their home...
...We were happy there...
...The community was involved with the orphanage...
...It was situated on a hill overlooking the river and surrounded by wooded pastures and a few fields which the sisters used to provide good, plenteous food for their charges...
...It was an exciting time for us," said one...
...One hundred and thirty former residents came from as far as California and Florida...
...The administrators adopted school uniforms so that they would not feel out of place...
...But even those were hardly the Dickensian horrors of our imagination...
...Indeed, one well-intentioned group, For the Love of Children, had as its avowed aim the emptying of Junior Village...
...The history of the disappearance of Home after Home (as the orphanage was often euphemistically called) is murky...
...They conceded that the discipline was strict-the sponsors of St...
...Will they shift from school to school, constantly losing friends until they lose the knack of friendship...
...If one Lutheran congregation could support a Home for over a hundred years, cannot coalitions of affluent churches do so now...
...The time is short, the need is urgent...
...But we also knew that those who lived there were in far better circumstances than our classmates who had been "farmed out" to rural families by that faceless, threatening entity-the County...
...she asks...
...The children of Wabasha thought of the orphanage as a vague threat in the years of the Depression...
...That orphan home was supported by the congregation of only one church-the Evangelical Lutheran Concordia Church of Washington, whose members wanted to give shelter, food, and clothing to children of all nationalities...
...I remember them, too, in the pitiless heat of Mississippi Valley summers escorting groups to the sand bars along the rivers and sitting there in their folds of wool serge under black umbrellas while the orphans splashed and swam...
...Playground equipment was donated by businessmen and church groups...
...After complicated, long-drawn-out legal proceedings some of them may eventually be transferred to foster homes...
...Pia McKay, herself an orphan, ponders their future...
Vol. 117 • January 1990 • No. 2
