Foster Care Scammer (Part One)

Recently I discovered a Face Book page called "Foster Care Kids Need Love Too" (FCKNLT) supposedly dedicated to improving the lives of children in Foster Care. The description they posted covers just about everything:

"Foster Care Kids Need love Too® provides community education, public policy/advocacy and direct services for children and youth who have been removed from the care of their parents to the supervision of the state. The organization recruits and sustains volunteers who serve in public and private agencies or work on projects designed to enhance the lives of foster, homeless, transitional and incarcerated children and youth."

As someone who once was one of those children, I'm a firm believer that they need all the help they can get. As I read through the articles and posts I came across this:  

"We make sure to provide them with the best quality of education for their mental growth; we provide the best food to our children to give them a healthy lifestyle; we provide them with the best medical facilities; and all this very rightly so, they are our children after all who will take the mantel of running this nation tomorrow, all this is their right and all of this will be provided by any parent worth their salt."

I'm not even a parent and this pissed me off. I absolutely agree that children are our most precious resource and they deserve all of this. However, in a country where so many are struggling financially (where the long term unemployment rate was essentially unchanged at 4.1 million in November 2013) and that has turned healthcare into a for-profit business I think this is an inaccurate generalization. 

But it gets worse.. Their attempt to guilt people into donating: 

"Think for a moment that just because they did not have a person in their life to guide them, these young minds which could have been put to great use of the civilization have gone rotten at the cruel hands of the unforgiving society."

By any accepted definition of the word it is offensive.
rot·ten

 [rot-n]  Show IPA

adjective, rot·ten·er, rot·ten·est.

1. decomposing or decaying; putrid; tainted, foul, or bad-smelling.

2. corrupt or morally offensive.

3. wretchedly bad, unpleasant, or unsatisfactory; miserable: a rotten piece of work; a rotten day at the office.

4. contemptible; despicable: a rotten little liar; a rotten trick.

5. (of soil, rocks, etc.) soft, yielding, or friable as the result of decomposition.

 My mind has not "gone rotten" as a result of my experiences and to perpetuate this idea is not only hurtful to those of us who have survived but potentially damaging to the kids still going through foster care without anyone to guide them.  The closer I looked the more circumspect this site was. I looked through their many "articles" on facebook as well as on their webpage and they all appeared to be copied and pasted from other legitimate articles, without any credit to the author.

I'm a member of several FB groups for "Former Fosters" or "Alumni" (as we call ourselves) and I posted in there to find out if anyone actually knew the organization or the person behind it.  No one had ever met him or could list a single thing he/the organization has EVER done for foster kids.  So I dug a little deeper. The address is in Tallahassee, FL but it is a residential apartment building. On their Twitter page  they state they are a non profit organization, but there is no listing of them under exempt organizations with the IRS or the even the Florida Corporation Commission.  I was just looking under the organizations name and his personal name but just to be sure I asked for more info and got this reply:

"We do have a tax exempt EIN number our number is 46-2257215 thank you and god bless. Also you can call the IRS for any information you have 'Drawing Success'"

However, this number isn't listed with the IRS or FCC either. Here are the pages I have found so far by Adam Purnell, who listed himself as the Founder of FCKNLT:

https://www.facebook.com/KontentOfKharacter

https://www.facebook.com/fostercarekidsneedlovetoo

https://www.facebook.com/fostercarekids.../friends

https://www.facebook.com/purnell.titan?fref=pb...

Foster Care Kids Need Love Too

Then someone posted that another Alumni DID know Adam so I contacted the 3rd party directly and had quite the interesting conversation...

Ghosts of Christmas Past...

By the time I was 11 so much hatred had boiled up inside of me because of the abuse and neglect, that my mother and I fought constantly. During one such fight, she was hanging up the Christmas lights on the house and bitching about how if my father hadn’t left us then she wouldn’t have to be doing this. “It was his job after all!” to take care of his wife and kids, etc, etc. It had rained recently and was going to rain again so I think this contributed to her need to rush. So, me arguing with and yelling at her while she was on a ten-foot ladder probably wasn’t helpful. After a particularly heated exchange I went back inside and slammed the door. I heard something a few minutes later that caused me to go outside but I don’t remember or have blocked out what the noise was. Maybe a scream, a crack or just the ladder falling over…

The winters where I grew up were damp and it was cold that night. When combined with what I saw in front of me as I swung the heavy front door open, it  felt like being dunked in a bucket of ice water. My mother was lying on the sidewalk leading up to our front porch,, the ladder toppled over in the wet garden bed and the Christmas lights dangling unfinished. She was conscious but not moving, she told me to go get our neighbor Helen, a very sweet woman who lived next door. Helen called 911 from our kitchen phone. I think I was the one who called my brother; he was out with my sister and one of our cousins and they all came over.

The ambulance and fire-truck lights soon filled the empty space of the dark night sky as the neighbors started appearing, gathering around our house and it seemed like our yard was full of people. The paramedics were asking my mom questions as I stood silently with my siblings. I can still hear her feisty answers: “Ma’am, how old are you?” “Too damn old!” “How much do you weigh?” “Too damn much!”

I was told to ride in the ambulance because my brothers car was full, but I wanted to get a book first because I figured we would be at the hospital a while and reading was the only “coping” skill I had. I ran to my room and stood in front of my pink and purple bookshelf unable to decide which book, since someone had said “just ONE!”. I don’t know how long it was before someone came in my room - and told me the ambulance was waiting on me. It was an awkward ride to the hospital, sitting in the front seat in silence.

The paramedic who was driving turned on the overhead light for me so I could read on the drive.  I mumbled a "thank you" and stared into my blurry book the rest of the way as my tears overflowed onto the page.  I wasn’t at the hospital for that long, I spent the night with my brother & his wife and they drove me to school the next morning. My mother was in the hospital for 3 days, she had fallen about 10 feet, landing on her head first, and when she came home she was different. Her vision was damaged temporarily, she lost some long-term memory and became an evangelical Christian…

A return to writing...

I've had a lot to write about lately, but have been held back for a variety of reasons. I'm hoping that blogging will help me move beyond my inner critic/perfectionist. Aaaaand, away we go!

Well, I'm still here. Still breathing, though not so much with the kicking....My recovery from four herniated discs in my lower back is not progressing as well as I had hoped. The spinal specialists said I needed to have 3 of them replaced with artificial discs and eventually the fourth herniated one as well. I've had so many surgeries at this point that I really want to avoid another if possible. It is seeming less likely that I will be able to function without some kind of further intervention.

I was in constant jaw pain for decades prior to this and the addition of back pain is really wearing me down. Lack of insurance (and therefore lack of Dr's visits) certainly hasn't helped. Thankfully,  I do qualify for health care on the reservation from Indian Health, unfortunately it is a 45 minute drive and I don't have a car, so that poses a challenge.  The buses don't even go there. A friend (SM) has generously agreed to take vacation time from work (since they only offer appointments during  the work-week) to drive me out there on December 6th. Eleven days to go until I can at least get back on prescriptions to help.

On the bright side, I have been in my own place since March. My only roommates are the furry kind - my cat Glitch and my dog Charly. Although, considering they don't perform housework or prepare their own food, they are closer to kids than roommates, I suppose. At least, most roommates that I've had.

I've had a tremendous amount of help from  friends during my recovery. I was already injured when I moved into this place so I wasn't really able to contribute. Accepting help is getting easier, but asking for help is still quite a challenge and not something I enjoy. SM also came over yesterday with food and Dr Pepper, even walked Charly for  me. She's so sweet and so willing to help and yet I cringed when I asked her to hang my shower rod again since it collapsed on me during my last shower. In my physical condition, I couldn't have put it back up. The amount of things that I can't do at this point is a long one and It gets discouraging. The Dr's said I am not suppose to lift more than 5 pounds. As a frame of reference,  a gallon of milk weighs 8.6 pounds. So, I live alone and have a unopened gallon of milk, (the main ingredient in my mostly liquid diet due to the jaw issues) what am I to do? Adapt. I use my rollie office chair to navigate the kitchen and move heavy (5 pounds or more means heavy in this case) items onto my lap and roll. Which is still painful and more than is medically advised, but I haven't managed to teach Charly how to retrieve food. She can find it and eat it with extraordinary skill, though! Recently she used my rollie chair to reach the butter dish on the counter when I was out, and proceeded to eat the whole thing...She is smart, persistent and loves butter...just like me.