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Flipping the bird

Getting the finger from an 8 year. Is that funny or fucked up? When you work with kids you learn it can be both. Sometimes it has to be. Her tiny little hand shaking in rage. […]

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One day and then another

This past week was pretty hard for me. Even after sixteen years of working with vulnerable kids, kids beaten up by poverty, cultural genocide and addiction, it is still hard to know that a kid who is talking about suicide can’t get a bed in a hospital for a night. To know that when you call for help for a kid what you’re going to get is cops with guns questioning them. Some cops are nice and some are not but everything about them: their handcuffs, their tazers, tell a kid they’re in trouble.  And after they talk to the kid they will more than likely leave them behind because they know when they get to the hospital they won’t admit them.  “I’m happy to sit in a hospital waiting room for five hours until they send her home,” the cop tells me. “But my boss is not going to like it.”  Sometimes even if the hospital takes them they release them a few hours later in a taxi alone.

It’s like a kid coming to you with a broken arm and having to tell them: It’s not broken enough.

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Quotable – “What is Sweet”

“The snow is coming down, thick and steady and the other kids seem to disappear in and out of landscape, their faces obscured by the mist of their breath and the falling snow.  Some of these […]