People

A little boy named John sits on a bench near his garden, a narrow strip of earth on the grounds of the Arizona Children's Home, and rolls a radish gently between his fingers. The radish belongs to him. He had planted it, tended it, watched it grow, and plucked it, fat and red, from the damp ground. Shaking off the loose dirt, he lifts it to his lips and begins to eat. He does not put it all into his mouth at once. He takes small bites, making the taste and the feel of the radish on his fingers last while he talks to a visitor. He eats and talks and squirms it is an effort for him to sit still and this is the story he tells: John is 11 years old. He has not seen his mother for more than two years. He does not like to talk about her, but he will say that he misses his little brother and sister, who live now in a care facility for younger children. Since he last saw his mother, John has lived in 10 different places, foster homes or shelters, mostly. He figures he will go to yet another foster home sometime soon. But he likes it at the Arizona Children's Home. He wishes he could stay here forever, or at least long enough to grow into the military pilot or football player he someday wants to be. John's visitor listens carefully, along with Evvie, another resident of the children's home. Evvie is 10 years old, a slender girlwith a radiant smile. Her parents were unable to care for her, so she spent the first years of her life in an orphanage. When she was four years old, she went to an adoptive home, but that did not work out, and she was placed in foster care. She loved her foster family, but they were unable to adopt her, and now she, too, lives at the Arizona Children's Home. Someday, she says, she will be a singer, a dancer, a teacher, and a comedian. And a mother. She will have three children, and she will take very good care of them. John and Evvie tell their stories in fragments, leaving out the things that are too confusing or too sad to describe. They are young, but already their lives are enormously complicated. They have learned, in their own quiet way, to roll with the punches, to draw on hidden reserves of hope and resilience. To survive. The Arizona Children's Home in Tucson has been a safety net for children like John and Evvie for more than 75 years. The State of Arizona was only a few months old when the Arizona Children's Home Association - a group of women who were concerned about the fate of the state's poor or orphaned youngsters was founded in 1912. Until then, such children were gathered up by the California Children's Home Society and taken there to live and be offered for adoption. But the Arizona women were determined that their new state would care for its own children. On June 1, 1915, after three years of planning and fund-raising, the home opened in a rented building in a residential section of Tucson, with two children in residence.

Many homeless youngsters who lead lives of quiet desperation find help at the Arizona Children's Home

Today, the walls of the cheery pink-and-turquoise building that is the home's hub of activity (it was erected in 1921 at a cost of about $35,000) are crowded with photographs: black-and-white images of the hundreds of youngsters who have come and gone since the home opened its doors. Each looks happy, clean, and well-fed, safe and secure amid a makeshift family of other homeless children. It is easy to imagine that the problems of those children were simpler than the ones John and Evvie face today. But that, say members of the home's staff, is not always true. "The world has changed since 1912," says Richard A. Rikkers, executive director of the Arizona Children's Home for seven years before he retired recently. "Our understanding about kids has changed, about how we interact with them and what they need for a good start in life. In the early days, they knew kids needed a stable place to live; they needed to learn to take care of themselves; and they needed discipline. No one worried about the emotional implications of behavior. We do now. "But beyond that, it's still pretty much the same: kids need stability and permanence, caretakers who provide continuity. That's what the Arizona Children's Home did in 1912, in 1920, and in 1930. And that's what we do today."

CHILDREN

Even in the early days, it did not take long for youngsters to arrive. In 1917 the home offered shelter to 111 children, with 20 of them being placed in adoptive homes (many were left temporarily by parents who could not care for them; they stayed until their families came to retrieve them). The work was rewarding but often sad. In August of that year, a member of the association wrote to a friend: "The burdens and problems of this work pile up from day to day. Not alone the problems of finding homes for the children and feeding those we have but the knowledge that comes to one in this work from those with sad and tragic stories.

"Mr. just left, and he has left me with another story of sin, wreck, and injustice to the innocent."

Today, the children's home is no longer an orphanage. It is an agency that provides help to children and families in need. It offers programs in special education, older-child adoption or foster care, family therapy, teenage parenthood, and infant adoption.

It is best known for its residential treatment program that offers help to emotionally disturbed youngsters. Between 50 and 60 such children, ranging in age from six to 13, live there at any one time. About 40 percent of them come from the Phoenix area and the rest from Tucson or the state's rural communities and Indian reservations.

By and large, they are normal children whose lives have been all but destroyed by the environments they were born into. Most have been physically and mentally abused. They have been through unsuccessful attempts at adoption, foster care, or treatment through other agencies.

Many are wards of the state for whom the children's home is a last resort, after being shuffled through the court system and from one agency to another. By the time they arrive, says Rikkers, they are truly "nobody's children."

"These kids come from situations of chaos," says DeeAnn Barber, the home's assistant director and acting executive director since Richard Rikkers' retirement. "They've been in psychiatric hospitals, in treatment, in counseling. It's unusual for us to accept a child when those other things haven't been tried.

"A lot of the kids we get are aggressive, defiant; they have learning problems.

Some have been bounced from one foster family to another and have been in 10 schools in one year."

The youngsters in the residential treat-ment program stay at the children's home for an average of 13 months until they are ready to return to their families or move on to transitional, foster, or adoptive homes. (Children in a day-treatment pro-gram after school live at home with their families.) In the meantime, their lives revolve around a rigid schedule of chores, school, planned activities, and therapy.

There also is a firm set of rules. Good behavior will earn for a child the right to sleep in one of the nicer dormitory rooms, or to plant a garden on a small plot of ground assigned just to him or her. Such rewards, to a neglected or abused child, are profoundly important.

"Pretty simply, we give them what adequate parents would provide," says Barber. "Medical care, nutrition, clothing, nurturance, a feeling of safety and security. Their days here are structured from the

ADOPTION Not Like the Old Days

If Marcie Velen could say anything to the people who read this story, it would be this: adoption is not what it used to be. "Look at this," she says, taking a sheet of paper from her desk and waving it in the air. It is a letter to some adoptive parents from the birth mother of their baby. "Dear Mom and Dad," Velen reads. ""Please send more pictures. I just want to show her off. .' Hey, I'm a regular mailman, here. We have letters going back and forth all the time. Women can pick the families who adopt their babies. They can stay in touch. They don't have to give up everything. "When this agency was an orphanage, it was a sin to be an illegitimate child. The birth parents had no control over the adoption. The adoptive parents were given no information on the child's background. Everything was done in secrecy. It was an incredibly inhumane way to handle it, for all the good intentions at the time."

Velen directs the infant-adoption program and the teen/unwed-parent program at the Arizona Children's Home. She is on the front line in the battle to make the home and other agencies of its kind obsolete. Children in crisis are products of parents in crisis. It is Velen's job to anticipate the problems and to solve them before they reach the most innocent victims.

Each year, a handful of girls and women - they range in age from 13 to the late 30s comes to the children's home seeking help with unplanned pregnancies.

"We've had every kind of situation you can imagine," Velen says. "The commonality is that they're in crisis; they didn't plan on having a baby, and they're not sure what they're going to do about it,"

Nearly 95 percent of unwed pregnant teenagers decide to keep their babies.

"At that age, it's hard for them to see their child's needs as different from their own," says Velen. "We focus our efforts on providing services, on getting her onto a nutrition program, keeping her in school, taking her to doctor appointments, giv-ing her some parenting education - just plugging in all the support so that maybe she'll be successful. If there's no way a girl is going to do anything but take care of the baby herself, we're going to make sure she can give the baby a good start.

(ABOVE) Teenage mothers like Dana learn parenting skills at the children's home. This kind of support is vital today, since the vast majority of unwed pregnant teens do not give up their babies for adoption.

"And we'll be there if she comes to the conclusion that it's not good for her or the child."

It is Velen's goal to be as supportive as possible. "A woman has to rethink her decision after the baby is born," she says. "It's her baby, and it's her plan. And as long as it's legal and ethical, we'll help her do it however she wants to do it.

"It's the teenagers who make you wish you could perform magic. If only you could magically impose five or 10 years on them. In many cases that's all it would take to make a difference. Just a little maturity."

About half of the older women who come to Velen give up their babies for adoption. In the last half of 1989, the Arizona Children's Home placed 11 babies with families (the wait for an infant adoption is about a year and a half).

That is the joyous part of Marcie Velen's job. She knows that those children probably will never need the services of the Arizona Children's Home again. And she is looking forward to delivering the mail.

time they get up until they go to bed. That's reassuring for them. They know what happens next. And they're not on their own. There's always someone there."

In the meantime, the agency's staff works with a child's family, or with a foster or adoptive family, in an attempt to ensure that problems will not be repeated when the child leaves the facility. Each time a child moves on to a better situation, says Barber, it is a triumph for the children's home.

"You have to see and appreciate success in small steps," she says. "You might see a kid's aggressive behavior decrease. Or he might start playing with other kids. Or liking school for the first time. Those are victories. If you work here, you have to recognize that."

A victory may be large or small. It might be as simple as the sight of an 11year-old boy eating a radish that he has grown and nurtured and proudly pulled from the ground. Or it might be a visit from someone who came to the agency for help and was sent on to a better life.

Rikkers remembers a little girl who arrived at the home when she was six years old. She had been mentally and sexually abused by a member of her family. She was in the residential-treatment program for nearly two years before she was placed in foster care. Eventually, her foster parents adopted her. A year ago, she and her family returned to visit the Arizona Children's Home. "She was about 12 years old by that time," he says, smiling. "She now had a family. She now belonged. She was a whole lot different from the kid who thought the world was made up of people who did evil things to you. It was great to hear her talk about that and to see her family. Our job was done. We can't be more successful than that."