On the top floor of one of the downtown New Orleans
skyscrapers lies a small office with a big view and an even bigger vision. CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates), a
well-established national organization, fulfills society’s fundamental
obligations to protect children from neglect and abuse. They do it all on limited means, as do all
nonprofits, but the New Orleans chapter has to work with the added caveat of a lack of infrastructure in the
aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
One
thing that CASA does is stay connected to the child
and check in on them to make sure their new environment remains a safe
place. It’s the CASA advocate who goes to the home
and finds out that the brother who was incarcerated for raping one of
his little sisters is out of jail and now living in the same house as
one of his other
little sisters. The CASA advocate
motions to remove the child from that situation.
Our penthouse views of downtown give a candid
picture of how much was lost. Entire 20+
story office buildings have been abandoned and remain unfinished. What this means for CASA is that data,
documents, and files have been lost. Just
papers. But I’m realizing that papers sometimes
represent people. At CASA, the papers
that were lost are children we have no way of contacting. The majority of the children that are brought
to CASA are those without an adequate support system. Children whose parents are addicted to
crack/cocaine, incarcerated, who have mental illnesses, or otherwise unable to
care for their child.
Our team (Mehreen, Liz, Stephanie, Anthony, and I)
has been rummaging through boxes of papers, and while the sheer numbers of
files we’ve had to sift through are impressive, the dates only go back so
far. There is not the infrastructure yet
to find out what happened to all the children.
But I guess that’s the purpose for our being at CASA. We’re helping build the infrastructure they
need so that next time, we can keep the promises that we made to protect the
children.
Kimberly Shin
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