By
Ayse Guner
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Foster children see their pasts in books made by UA
Nine-year-old Noel is taking a journey through her past.
Turning the pages of her Life Book, she recalls where she attended school, the church she prayed in, her favorite playground and the steps she has taken to get where she is today.
The Life Book she cautiously keeps in her aunt's room carries every detail of Noel's life - from her baby footprints to photos from her bout with chicken pox.
This cross between a baby book, family photo album and life story would not exist if it wasn't for Lisa Archibald, a UA sociology senior.
Archibald worked for five months to compile Noel's life into a large binder while volunteering at Aviva Children's Services. This Tucson based, non-profit organization provides a variety of services for neglected, abused or abandoned children that are in Child Protective Services' custody.
When Archibald began volunteering at Aviva, she discovered the Life Book Project. She already had similar experiences with this type of project last year, when she helped her grandmother record her life into a book.
Archibald said helping her grandmother inspired her to pursue these types of projects.
The project is dedicated to providing a book that chronicles a child's history along with a narrative of the events corresponding with pictures. The book is sometimes the only record foster care children have of their childhood that can show them the bits and pieces of information they miss, usually because they frequently move from one foster home to another, Archibald said.
The children in foster care often blame themselves for being put into their situation, said Chris Hannum, Aviva's volunteer coordinator.
"Kids blame themselves because they are the ones who lose and get scared," Hannum said. "So, the goal is to point out that it was poor decisions on the part of the parents that carried the child to be in foster care and wasn't the child's fault."
However, achieving that is not an easy task.
The Life Book volunteers go through a number of processes to piece together the puzzle of a child's story.
In the case of Noel, Archibald started off with 18 hours of training, learning about CPS' services, the judicial parts of dealing with children and handling a visit to a child's biological parents. Then, she read two phonebook-size case files that provided Noel's medical information, court documents, police reports, psychologist work and contact numbers.
For months, Archibald drove to various schools that Noel attended, talked to her teachers and gathered information and photographs showing Noel with her friends.
As she started writing the narrative, she had to be careful to use language that would not offend a child but tell the truth reflecting the reasons of her being away from her parents, she said.
"You are just a child, and you need to be protected," is Archibald's message to Noel throughout the book, she said.
As the time approached to deliver the book to Noel, Archibald was so attached to her months of work that she was hesitant to give it away, she said. Yet she knew the book would mean a lot to Noel as she sat down with her to look at the book for the first time together, she added.
"I remember I got in the car and cried," she said about her reaction after she gave the book to Noel.
That day, Noel's pink binder became Tucson's 89th Life Book since the project began. At least 1,200 children in Pima County live in foster care, and most of them need this book to show that "there is nothing they could have done about it" and that their life is significant, Hannum said.
Aviva needs more volunteers, especially college students, who have a "fresh" perspective on volunteering and creative talents, from doing detective work to computer skills, Hannum said.
"This experience shows a world that is different than the world college students grew up in most cases," Hannum added. "They recognize how important what they have is and how sad (they are) when they don't."
Currently, Aviva has only three volunteers in the Life Book Project, one of whom is Danielle Lock, a management information systems senior.
Lock has been going through five volumes of case files for a six-year-old boy she will compile a book for, but has never met.
"Children need a strong sense of who they are, obviously, because they are going to have a lot of questions about 'who am I?'" Lock said.
Noel's favorite section in her book is the one about Britney Spears, where she keeps the popular teen singer's photos filed and attached in plastic sleeves.
And the book itself is under her close protection, she said.
"I usually save it because they are going to watch my life, and when I am a teenager, we'll write more stuff in it," Noel said.
Ayse Guner can be reached at Ayse.Guner@wildcat.arizona.edu.
