‘Banana creme pie and a blessing’

THANKSGIVING iN CHARLES CITY

‘Banana creme pie and a blessing’

Community helps out with Thanksgiving Day arrangements

Swarming aromas filled the Messiah Lutheran Church as people filed in to warm food and sweet pie Thursday afternoon.

Kim Watkins, a volunteer for Thursday’s event, prepared seven turkies — 144 pounds worth — four hams, 100 pounds of potatoes, 12 jumbo cans of corn and 40 pies for the event that fed more than 200 people throughout the day.

One local patron, Tyler Eggers —a fifth-grader — said he enjoyed the food, but one popped out in particular to him. “My favorite, though, above all, was the chocolate chip cookie,” Eggers said. “It was absolutely amazing.”

Anyone who could come out on the rainy Thanksgiving Day holiday was able to enjoy a meal prepared by Watkins and served by 15 volunteers.

Many, like Eggers and his family, were able to make the meal a tradition. He and his grandmother, Kathy Boge, made it their second trip in the past two years.

“It’s a blessing what they’re doing here,” Boge said. “This is what holidays are all about.”

Glenn Johlas, Boge’s friend, added that it helps where there’s extra sweetness involved.

“It’s a blessing, with a slice of banana creme pie,” Johlas said.

program manager for Adoption at Iowa KidsNet.

“We never have as many families as we need for children,” Magnison, also a foster mom, said. “It varies right around 2,500 (licensed foster) families and adoptive families.”

“There’s no such thing as a perfect family. But there’s a good match for a kid somewhere, and that’s why we need way more families.”

Growing up waiting

The search for that match started in China for the Bruenings and took a detour west as Vicki spent hours researching which agency programs they would be good matches for.

The Bruenings originally considered a one-child adoption, although as Vicki said, “our heart was for the waiting child” –– perhaps a kid who was a bit older than infant or toddler adoption, or for other reasons they wouldn’t be the first child to leave an orphanage with a family.

“We see John’s picture on our adoption agency’s website, and we both agreed. He’s great, he’s amazing, he looks wonderful. I call the adoption agency and they say, ‘that’s the wrong picture, we just found out he has two brothers,’” Vicki said. “They were saying, ‘oh, it’d be perfect, you’d be like the Brady Bunch! We can totally see your family with six kids!’” It took about a month of prayer and discussion for the family before Vicki and Matt began the paperwork process that would bring the boys, aged 5, 4 and 2 at the time, home to Iowa.

“They’re probably be the least likely to get picked, because they’re considered an older child and there’s three of them,” Vicki said.

Finding homes for older children is tough in domestic adoptions, Magnison said, because families are afraid of the trauma kids may have faced –– a perception that might not have come true. KidsNet works with children up to the age of 18, or in some cases up to 21, helping train families to face an unstable past mixed with average, all-consuming kid worries.

“Teenagers are kind of the forgotten kids in the system. Kids twelve and under are easier to adopt,” Magnison said. “Families are scared of teenagers needlessly. The majority of kids…it’s not their fault. A lot of them came in when they were little, and just got older before they were able to be adopted. For whatever reason, sometimes families see that as a little daunting.”

Magnison, who works on the adoptive side of the system, helps provide ongoing support to families until the child is 18, giving adoptive parents a resource when they don’t know what the next move is.

“Teenagers have to have homes….people that are willing to care and love and help a kid grow up,” she said. “Your first heartbreak, college applications, school…some of these kids don’t have people to go to.”

The ability to bond was an adjustment for the first few months of the Bruenings’ new life, compounded by a language barrier –– for the boys, going from their tribal language Tshiluba to English, and leaving behind a small family in poverty who surrendered them for adoption.

“The loss of everything they had known –– they had a mom and a sister, and they still have a mom and a sister,” Vicki said. “It just took time to have that adjustment.

“There would just be times when, you are taking this toy from your sister or you’re doing something that needs to be corrected, but yet we can’t speak to you, you can’t speak to us as we would try to correct that,” she added. “That part was hard.”

Supporting the family

To keep in line with both agency requirements and the Republic of Congo, a social worker visited the Bruenings three times –– one month later, six months later, one year later –– looking at what was easy, what was hard, what was ongoing for the family as they settled into their life.

“When she came at one month, we were like, ‘help us! They don’t talk to us and we don’t know how to communicate!’” Vicki said.

“There’s no such thing as a silly request for support needs,” Magnison said of her work at KidsNet. “Our job is there to support you.”

Books, blogs and other families going through the same process helped the family identify strategies to go through, Vicki and Matt said, whether the struggle was learning English –– ”being intentional on down to the car, saying hey, they can’t sit next to each other in the car, we’re going to put them between their sisters so that English is being said all the time,” Vicki said –– or learning to identify and trust their new world.

“John is the oldest, and he wanted nothing to do with us. No hugs, don’t touch me, don’t talk to me, I don’t want Grandma to touch me, nothing,” Vicki said. “At the three month point, he is just like –” “Like a lightswitch,” Matt adds.

Sometime around that point, the Bruenings said, John decided he was indeed home.

Dealing with separation

The Bruenings and Magnison agree: In a perfect world, there wouldn’t be a need to separate biological kids and parents, they say. Magnison, foster mom to a sibling set of three, said the desire to fix everything unstable is hard to reconcile when some things are out of the foster parent’s control.

“The entire goal is to help reunify a family. The goal is to always to return them home unless a judge makes a decision,” Magnison said. “They don’t know if their parents are safe, if things are going to be OK. As a foster parent, you don’t always have the right information to help those fears…You fall in love with these kids and want them to be safe and happy, and you don’t have any control over it.”

The Bruenings didn’t know their boys had left behind a birth mother before John started telling them about Congo life. Their father died of typhoid fever after Bill was born, and their mother likely gave them up to let them escape disease and poverty, Vicki said.

“For me, it was really hard to say, my goodness, they have a mom,” Vicki remembered. “She is such an important part of the story, and it’s so hard to feel like, ‘oh, I wish you could have just kept your kids!’ That’s the ideal thing.”

The experience has made the Bruenings determined to help fight poverty in their sons’ birth country, supporting nonprofits with sustainability missions. They also hope to return one day and meet the birth mother, give her an update on her sons and maybe support her if they can.

“It’s been a definite thing like guilt to work through, but the end of the day, through so much prayer I feel like God has said, nope, these boys are in your family, I put them there for a reason. He could have stopped it,” Vicki said. “I think they really are here for a reason. Until we’d actually go meet her and know her side, it’s hard to know all the pieces.”

By Stephen Koenigsfeld sportseditor@charlescitypress.com