From the Director

Deborah & I took in our first neighborhood kid less than a year after we were married.  Julia was 14 and already a mother when her and her daughter came to live with us.  The father, 19, was in jail. Julia dropped out of school in her sophomore year and had three children by the time she was 20.

Jennifer came to live with us when she was 17.  She had already served one year in Juvenile Corrections and had been addicted to alcohol since the age of 14.  Jennifer left our home shortly after her 18th birthday, without a diploma or G.E.D. We haven’t heard from her in nearly seven years.

Our third “stray” was Sam, who came to live with us after 13 previous foster placements.  Two months before he was scheduled to graduate, he received a “Minor in Possession” charge & dropped out of school. 

When faced with these three circumstances, what solutions might we have offered?  We could create a comprehensive treatment plan for each one to address their separate addiction and behavior issues.  We could also work more closely with the public school system to ensure that each of these children were getting the customized education that they needed. Finally, we could recruit an army of counselors, social workers, educators, and correction officials to intervene at appropriate times in these children’s lives.

The problem is, we did all that and more.  Jennifer, for example, had no fewer than ten people in her life who were paid to assist her (not including teachers or clergy).  These interventions didn’t work because 1) we were trying to treat symptoms more than the core causes of the issues, and 2) so much of what we were telling these kids was unintelligible when translated through their own understanding of the world.

It’s like this- if I asked you to meet me for lunch at 45.771696 ° N, 108.501° W around noon tomorrow, you’d laugh and ask for real directions. You wouldn’t be able to meet me because we would not have a mutual understanding of the destination or how to get there.  Essentially, we would be talking two different languages.  Until we were able to understand each other, we would be at an impasse and you would miss lunch.

So often we try to serve the poor without the relationship (read- mutual understanding) necessary to communicate with same language.  Instead, we who spend our days in service try to treat symptoms in a language those that we are serving just don’t understand. 

This is why Friendship House is throwing its efforts into relationally serving families of at-risk youth.  Through new initiatives like our Route 21: Families on a Journey program (see pg. 2), we are attempting to dig into the messy soil of broken lives to uproot the causes of addiction, teenage pregnancy, and high drop-out rates.  Our passion is to struggle alongside of families in order to understand their worldview and provide counsel in the same language.

And what’s more, each staff member here at Friendship House could share stories with you of how children in our care are improving, changing, and developing.  And in those stories lies a great hope- the very hope that keeps us moving forward- real change is indeed possible when people invest in people.

In Service,

Jeromy Emerling