Memories : Fostering in France

[anotherbanana]

Foster parent

Perhaps this is a plea for help, or maybe simply a letting awf steem!! Anyway, I have unintentionally become a foster parent to a load of litle 'uns- just how many I am not sure as they never stay still long enough to be counted, but they are all sleeping in my big studio, sort of piled up together.

But they are so sweet, black as the ace of spades, big, white appealing eyes, just begging to be looked after. And they seem to be developing individual characters too; there is Mabel who likes being picked up, then there is that naughty Nigel who seems to be chasing all the girls, at least I think it is girls as they all look the same to me.

But this pleasant experience has brought responsibilities too; not just the changing of tiny pampers and worries about balanced diet, but the greater worry about their education and upbringing.

Should they be told that they were ripped away from their parents for their own safety because the environment was far too dangerous for them, or should we have left them there with mummy and daddy and tried to give social services support? Have I committed a major sin by bringing them into my comparatively wealthy white man's world so that they might lose their own cultural background; Will they grow up to be black in a white world, rootless misfits, doomed to a life Frith knows what, eating disorders, drugs, rejecting me and my values.

Or should I try to teach them stuff about where they came from, encourage them to go on home visits and stuff.

And then there are the practical things; how to teach the boys and girls that their bodies will change, that they will get strange protruding bits which will just seem to grow and grow.

Which will bring on strange longings and desires, so that Rufus will want to play more than tag when he takes the little girls under the vegetation, and he might even try to bring his friends? And how a good girls should not say yes too quickly, at least until the marriage contract is signed and the lobola paid.

But some of the girls are just as bad, wagging their little tails in the boys faces. It really has to stop.

This is a huge moral responsibility and I feel so alone with these youngsters. Even such things as their language needs; should I teach them English or their native Frog.

Please, how do I bring up a hundred tadpoles?

And how do I tell them that someone is going to catch them, rip off their legs and eat them?