By Shari Shapiro
There is a fence at the Farmhouse that a boy painted a long time ago.
I don’t know exactly which summer it was. He came because his parents made him. They wanted him doing something useful, learning what it felt like to give to people he’d never meet, so they sent him with a brush and a can of paint and the mild resentment of a teenager who would rather have been anywhere else but an Emergency Children’s Shelter on a Saturday. He painted the fence. And it became a distant memory.
Kids In Crisis opened its doors on July 7, 1978, forty-eight years ago this month. The shelter we call The Farmhouse has been standing longer than most of the families it’s helped. That’s long enough for a teenager who painted a fence one summer to grow up, raise a family here in Greenwich, and find his way back.
And he did come back, this spring, sitting at one of our Breakfast at the Farmhouse meetings with a cup of coffee, telling the room what that summer had quietly done to him. He said it was the first time he understood that a place like this existed. That it had stayed with him all these years.
We hold those breakfasts every month. Supporters come in early, before the day gets going, and we tell them what’s new and what’s hard and what we’re trying to do next. Most mornings there’s a story or two. This one had two men in it, and their story is worth sharing.
Because there was another man sitting quietly there that morning. But he hadn’t painted the fence. He had been living behind it.
He was a resident here, years ago, when he was young, and his family was coming apart the way families sometimes do. He stayed with us for a while. And then he grew up, went on to build a life, and became a donor of ours. This spring, he was invited to a Breakfast at the Farmhouse meeting, where he sat at the same table and heard that we were still doing the same thing.
One boy painted the fence. One boy lived behind it. Neither knew the other. And yet, here they both were, all these years later, in the same room, drinking the same coffee.
That’s the thing about this work that most people don’t understand. You think it goes one direction. A child needs help. There is a phone call at two in the morning; sometimes it’s a kid with nowhere safe to sleep, and we are the one place in the state that will take them, newborn to eighteen, no questions asked about who they are or where they came from. We help, the child leaves, and you think that’s the end of it… But people come back.
And it isn’t only the ones who were helped.
There was a group from a local company, too. They’d come out to do yard work, raking and hauling and cleaning up around that same fence. One of them told me it did something for their office that no retreat ever had. They’d worked beside each other for years without really knowing each other. A day of yard work at the Farmhouse and something changed in their office.
I was amazed at the people around the table. The man who had lived here as a boy. The man who had painted the fence, the donors, the people who had given their Saturday to rake leaves. What struck me was that it no longer sorted them into the “helped” and the “helpers.” They were all just people this place had gotten a hold of and hadn’t let go.
That’s what I’d want you to know about a place like ours. We are here for the child in the worst night of their life, and that’s the center of everything we do. But we have also been an important part of Greenwich for forty-eight years. We hold onto people. And they hold onto us, in both directions, longer than anyone would guess.
The fence is still there. It could honestly use another coat of paint. Some weekend soon, another kid will probably come out with a brush who would rather be anywhere else.
I hope he does. And I hope he comes back in twenty years and tells us what it did.
If your family is struggling, or you just don’t know where else to turn, our helpline is here every hour of every day at 203661-1911. You can call or text. Someone is always there.
Shari L. Shapiro is the Executive Director of Kids In Crisis, located in Cos Cob, CT.
