Word: homer
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...Homer Bennett's birth family was far from perfect. His mom and dad paid the bills by peddling heroin and cocaine from the living room couch of their three-bedroom home on Chicago's South Side. The parents had a sense of decorum. In front of Homer and his brother Frankie, they would refer to the two drugs as "boy" and "girl." Homer and Frankie never learned which was which, though they knew it was dope. Once, when the police came by, the brothers hid underneath a bed, emerging to beg the cops not to take their...
Their kidnappers were supposed to be the "good guys," rescuing Homer and his brother from drug-induced squalor and neglect. Instead of entering the realm of Ninja Turtles and Popsicles, however, Homer went through a childhood of dependency-court hearings, social workers and frayed relationships. Nobody preserved his family unit. For the past 15 years he has been in foster care...
...told, Homer Bennett has lived in 14 different foster homes, seldom staying in one longer than a year. At one point, he did get to stay with his maternal grandmother, but she was frail, elderly and unable to care for Homer and Frankie. So the brothers went back into state care, where they were separated and placed in different homes...
...Homer was sometimes beaten with belts. "We didn't know that beatings were against the rules in foster homes," he says. "We found out from another foster child." One of his foster mothers, he says, threw a knife at him, cutting his forehead, then forcing him to say he had molested another kid. "Because of foster care," he says, "I didn't really grow up anywhere." Now he's an adult, and for the first time he's facing the prospect of living on his own--a situation for which the system has never quite prepared...
...Homer, however, may be getting some help. A few years ago, he wound up at New Directions, an independent-living program run by Hull House in Chicago. Foster kids between the ages of 16 and 21 can rent an apartment with welfare stipends. "When you are little, you don't want people to know you are in the system, that you got taken away from your mother," says Homer. "When you get your apartment, then...