Victoria leaves home at 4:30 in the morning and returns about 9 at night. She is holding down two jobs, trying to save her money. She doesn’t want for the baby girl she is expecting in December to grow up in the way she did.
Victoria never had a permanent place to rest her head. She lived from shelter to shelter, project to project, house trailer to house trailer. Meals were rare, sometimes scrounged from a garbage can.
At the age of 9, Victoria and her siblings were removed from their birth mother’s care, split up and placed in foster homes.
Again she moved around. She lived in one foster home for several years, but was removed when authorities realized the foster parents were heavily medicating the children. “We were like zombies,” Victoria said. After that, she kept running away from foster homes, five in all.
Eventually she found herself pregnant with no place to go. In stepped Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Baton Rouge.
To read more, click here to read the full article in the Catholic Commentator.
