The Foster Kids: The Next Installment

Emir brought our the best in people. Neighbors brought food for him because he was so skinny (starved). A bike showed up. Before I could buy him stuff, he had a CD player, cool sunglasses and so on. I think he had an invisible sign on him saying “mother me.” Not so with Francisco. He was small, troubled, and had a dark cloud around him at all times. He would sit with the kids on the deck at night, while the boys were telling and retelling their stories, but he didn't offer much of anything.

From what I heard from the social worker, Francisco was from Nicaragua. His family had been with the Sandanistas during the revolution. When Reagan started his horrible, illegal, immoral, ugly, stupid, Contra War, which Congress refused to fund, Francisco was taken forcibly by the Contras, trained in horrible ways to kill, forced to fight against his own family, and ended up with a head wound and left to die in a pile of dead bodies. He was a child of 13 at the time. Somehow he survived. Somehow he managed to walk to the USA (strange choice when it was the US president who had harmed him), and ended up being found by the Lutherans and sent to us. But he had had no choice except to disappear. He had no other options, being an enemy of both sides.

He went to school and stated to learn English. He was terrified when the police came answering a report from neighbors in Marblehead that Spanish was being spoken late at night on my deck. ( A crime!) And he was petrified when he was stopped by the police while walking home from school and questioned about what he was doing in the neighborhood. And he really didn't like it when my kids and their friends were home from college.

He was acting peculiar, but things got really weird when my daughter's boy friend and his dog stayed with us. Francisco didn't like B. He reported to his social worker that B. was trying to kill him (Not so. If anything was a crime it was that B. hardly noticed that Francisco existed.) Between the time Francisco made the complaint and the time it was to be investigated, all hell broke loose. One night I was cooking dinner and the news was on the TV in the living room. About 7 kids were home. The news on TV was about the Kennedy kid in Florida who had been on trial for rape.

I was checking the news and checking the food, when I heard a silence in the living room. Francisco was holding a knife and telling B. that he was going to kill him. I slipped upstairs and found my youngest daughter and told her to get out of the house and call the police. (phone was visible from the living room). She went from the roof, making no sound. (an activity not alien to her). I returned to the living room and engaged Francisco in an idiotic conversation considering he had a knife to B. throat and a cold, deadly, vacant look in his eyes. (PTSD?) “how was your day at school? Don't you want some food (before you kill B.)?”

Within minutes, soundlessly, through the deck and the upstairs, the police entered the living room and disarmed Francisco before he comprehended that they were there. He went to a psych unit where they determined that he had had a psychotic break. Poor kid , he never did have a fair chance at life.

Then came to social workers investigating whether B. had, in fact, been trying to kill Francisco. Close the barn door after the horse was out kind of activity. Francisco's complaint had been that B. was cutting up pennies with a knife, into tiny pieces, and putting the chips into his food and that the food was killing him by ripping apart his intestines.

Funny thing: there was some reason behind the madness. B. was selling very expensive knife kits and in the scissors demonstration he cut a penny in half to show how sharp it was. We had a parade of investigators come through and question everyone about whether B. had been trying to kill Francisco with the penny chips in his food. Not one person ever investigated the safety of my kids around F. when I had said he was wigging out. He never came back and we never heard from him. Poor kid. Child soldiers are another crime on Reagan's back.