PubMed2000
Intrigued by a newspaper ad in the Argus Leader, placed by The Sioux Falls Children's Home Society in their hope of reuniting adults formerly institutionalized there as children, I wondered what we might learn from the experiences of people having grown up as "orphans." After exploration, I was invited to attend their reunion to facilitate some of the discussion of former residents who were "welcomed home" from various parts of the country. The participants expressed a wide range of emotions as they rediscovered one another--sometimes from childhood memory, sometimes contrasting childhood faces in old photos with the faces of people now present in middle or old age. As the group reminisced, one man told of his calling out the home's upper-story window each evening to his older sister who lived a floor below. He recalled his sadness on the day when there was silence in response, as she had been sent to a foster home. A woman "alumni" sang word for word, with others joining in, an old Christian hymn that they had sung decades before. And, an elderly woman described how the church across the street from the original children's home facility on tenth street, had a large stain glass window depicting the outstretched arms of God. She told how every night, when it was time for her to go to bed, the window would be lit up. Movingly, she related how she would lie in her bed and look through the window of her room, feeling "held" until she fell asleep. Over the many months that followed, men and women who had been institutionalized there throughout childhood entrusted to me their life stories. This article is a summary of their narratives. In general, it seemed that the participants were set apart by the enormity of the poverty of their early years, the enduring quality of their losses, and by a certain tenacity, decency, and striving for restoration.