This is not a happy-go-lucky New Year's Day email.
If that’s what you’re looking for, you might want to wait for next week’s missive.
It is kind of a success story, but right now the happy ending is pending.
As we go into the New Year, I am struggling to find that sense of everything is “new again” that is supposed to come with the dropping of the ball in Times Square.
It’s because of Shasta. Rather, it is because of the mess of life that is wrapped around Shasta.
Shasta is one of our younger children at Dakota Boys and Girls Ranch. She has the biggest, bluest eyes ever—which seem even bigger as they are set off by her pale complexion. The smattering of freckles across her nose and cheeks are heartbreakers. She is so darn precious.
She’s been with us a long time, nearly a year now. For a small person, she has incredible strength, and she used it every day when she joined us. She bit, fought, threw things, and swore like a longshoreman. She broke everything she had access to and wriggled her way to get her hands on more. We had to have two care specialists with her at all times, just so everyone, including her, was safe.
When you know her whole story, you wonder why she doesn’t have even more issues. She was sexually abused from infancy and her food was restricted. She was witness to drug use, domestic violence, and pornography. Hygiene practices were nonexistent. Homes were transitory with intermittent homelessness. All of it happening while her brain was in the most developmental period of her lifetime.
Such horrible injuries to the psyche and soul take a long time to heal.
Over her time at the Ranch, Shasta slowly started to trust people… a little bit. She is a smart child, and she is wary, but she reached the point where she could eat in the nutrition center with the other children without incident. She began riding bike with a staff person as her “wing man.” She loved the therapy dogs on campus and saved her most gentle self for them… always patient and kind with the four-legged helpers. She worked up to calmly doing schoolwork.
With lots of patience, therapy, spiritual life mentoring, and good health care, she has gotten better. She’ll need support for her entire life. Hurt like this always lives inside a person, but she progressed to a place where she and those around her were safe, and she was working, each day, to be her best self.
Somewhere along the timeline of care, a family member was identified by social services as a possible place for her to live when she left us. It was exciting. God had led us. She had worked hard. We had worked hard. The social service people had worked hard. A discharge day was chosen.
Two days before discharge, that family member went to jail.
Shasta is still at the Ranch. We will keep her safe and love her and do all we can with the Holy Spirit to give her hope. We will laugh and cry. We will work with social services as they try to find a new option for a home.
But, the start of the New Year is just another day for Shasta. It’s another day where the world just doesn’t seem fair. Because, sometimes it isn’t.
Please keep the children and staff of Dakota Boys and Girls Ranch in your prayers. Their struggles are so very real.
I wish for you a New Year filled with His kindness and much peace. I wish that for Shasta, too.
In His love,
Joy Ryan, President/CEO
Dakota Boys and Girls Ranch
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