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Ernie Shearer talks with pro-life protesters who upstaged a foster parent group's interview with a local TV station at the Statehouse. The protesters refused to move for several minutes.
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Ernie Shearer talks with pro-life protesters who upstaged a foster parent group's interview with a local TV station at the Statehouse. The protesters refused to move for several minutes.
Toys line the Evans’ front porch just after sunset. Though Greg and Kristy plan to cut back on fostering once the three girls they have now are officially adopted, they haven’t ruled out eventually taking in more children. “Things are really bad right now,” Kristy said. “There are so many kids that need families to love them. It's really hard, but we just to do what we can, because nobody deserves this."
Kristy and Greg try to shield their girls from the horrors of the epidemic they were born into, but there’s only so much they can do for two of the three girls, who are both already showing signs of damage from being born addicted to opiates. So, they try their best to head off the damage caused by a broken family and drug-riddled pregnancies. They read to the girls and help them with their numbers, they lay on the floor and color together, and they pray all three will grow up to be normal. But because the girls are still so young, there’s no telling the extent to which they’ve already been damaged. “They say we won’t really know all the effects of the drugs until they start school,” Kristy said.
Greg sits with his youngest foster daughter while the other two play on the floor. "There's so much pink in this house," Greg said. He smiles, though, and says he wouldn't change a thing. Many of the children the Evans have taken in over the years have come to them broken and scarred, unaware of what it means to be a child. Kristy says they try to give these kids back some of their innocence.
Most flat surfaces in the Evans house are covered with piles of newspapers and bills, diapers and groceries. But, for Kristy and Greg, it’s hard for housework to be a priority. "I'm sorry about the mess," Kristy said. "It's hard keeping up the place having three little ones around. They need so much. I just want to give them all I can."
The Evans have had one of their girls since the day she was born, despite spending the first three weeks of her life in withdrawal from being born with an opiate addiction. The now-two-year-old wailed and shrieked for weeks, but when a pediatrician suggested Kristy bring the child back to the hospital so she could be placed on a morphine drip, Kristy couldn’t stand the thought of leaving the baby alone in a hospital crib. So, Kristy held her throughout each night and drove her to the pediatrician every day for treatment.
The opioid crisis consuming Indiana has put a strain on an unlikely suspect: Foster parents. The number of kids in Indiana’s foster care system is at an all-time high, with more than 19,000 kids under the care of the Department of Child Services. In the four years Kristy and Greg Evans have been licensed foster parents, they’ve taken in 14 children – 10 of whom were pulled from drug-ridden homes. Now, they’re in the process of adopting three of those kids, but they still field calls from caseworkers all the time asking them to take in just one more.
When DCS steps in to remove a child from their home, it first look to see if any relatives are willing to take them in. If there aren’t, DCS is under the gun to find a foster home with an opening. More than once, the Evans have made the drive from their Mitchell, Indiana, home to IU Health Bloomington Hospital with an empty car seat in the back of their van. “It can be hard, you know, because you never know what these kids have gone through or what lies ahead,” Kristy said. “All you can do is love them as much as you can.”
Greg and Kristy have seen dozens of caseworkers leave DCS and go into private care when the stress of the job and inefficiencies of the system get to be too much. Greg and Kristy agree the opioid epidemic has made things harder, but when they look at their girls, like this 2-year-old pictured playing with the light Greg uses at work, it never occurs to them to give up. Despite leaving the house at 3 a.m. six days a week to work in a quarry near Louisville, Kentucky, Greg says there's no room for him to be tired when he gets home. "You can't think about yourself," he said. "You just have to keep going because these kids need you.”
Ahead of her testimony in the Senate chambers, Kristi Cundiff, center, talks with other foster parents, many of whom have driven hours to the Indiana Statehouse in support of the foster parents Bill of Rights.
The Indiana State Department of Health reported in May 2017 that emergency rooms around the state have seen a 60 percent increase in visits for non-fatal drug overdoses since 2011. At the same time, deadly overdoses were increasing by 3.5 percent annually. The youngest of the three foster girls in the Evans' home was born addicted to opiates and spent the first 37 days of her life in the hospital, detoxing from heroin.
Kristi Cundiff stands outside the Indiana Statehouse's Senate chambers on a January morning following her testimony at a hearing on Senate Bill 233, the proposed foster care Bill of Rights. Cundiff has worked closely with legislators to spearhead the bill in hopes that it will give Indiana foster parents a greater voice with DCS and the state.
Nationally, the number of kids in foster care has been decreasing for years, but in states like Indiana where the opioid crisis hits hardest, the numbers continue to climb. Kristy and Greg used to be licensed to take in as many as four newborns, but they dropped to three when they got too busy with the three girls they were already fostering. Still, because there’s such a need for foster homes, Kristy says it’s hard to say no when they get calls asking them to take in just one more.
Duha Lababidi fixes her daughter Sara, 7, an afternoon snack. The Lababidi family has been living in Indianapolis since December after being resettled from Syria by way of Jordan.
The Lababidi daughters, Remas, 3; Samira, 10; and Sara, 7, relax in the living room of the family's two-bedroom Indianapolis apartment. Samira and Sara have been attending public school despite speaking very limited English.
Mohamed Lababidi teases daughter Remas about her afternoon ice cream snack. A house painter in Syria, Mohamed is now struggling to find a job that doesn't require a lot of English.
Duha Lababidi scoops ice cream for her youngest daughter, Remas. Duha and her family waited nine months to hear whether they'd be able to join her brother in the United States. Following the recent immigration ban, she has little hope that her father will be resettled with them.