From our Files

Neve Michael Childrens Home

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TOUCHING LIVES

A short Story from Our Records

He was brought to our gate long after midnight. The guard who received him still recalls the starkness of that awful moment. The child was only three years old, though he looked like one who had already caught a glimpse of hell. His skeletal frame told a tale of undernourishment and neglect; his ill-fitting clothes were soiled and tattered; big, brown, bloodshot eyes mirrored an alarming reflection of confusion and horror.

A woman from the Welfare Department who held his tiny hand and a uniformed old policeman delivered him to our doorstep. They told the guard at the gatehouse that the neighbors had heard him crying. He had been crying for some time. Three days, non-stop, the neighbors said. The guard looked him over as the cop filled out a form. “What’s your name, son?” the guard asked him, though the name was already written on the form.

No reply came. There would be no reactions that night from the disoriented child who had been brought to our 24-hr Crisis Center at the Neve Michael Children’s Village.

Then, two days later, came that first, imperceptible peep from his mouth. It was uttered most unsurely to the resident psychologist at our Children’s Home. “Tal,” the child stammered, nearly choking on the sound of his own name. Then, with gentle prodding, “My name is Tal.”

By then, the case history of Tal was a much reviewed subject at Neve Michael. His mother, an incurable alcoholic, had died when he was two years old. His father, who was well on the way to a similar fate, had been found in an alley, out cold in a bottled dream – some time after they found his only son weeping alone in a one-room hole that passed for a home.

During those first few months, Tal was a sullen figure in our Children’s Village. Though he was adopted by a couple in one of our family units, it would take some time before he would acclimatise to a normal household. While a familiar cast of guardians, psychologists and kindergarten teachers filled his landscape, his shattered confidence was slow to mend. For the most part, this frightened, withdrawn child would stare vacantly ahead and avoid eye contact with all those caring people who were trying to salvage what was left of his ruined childhood.

Now, some five years after that bleak night when Tal was brought to our safe haven, it is plain to see that his childhood has been restored. Tal no longer keeps to himself. He has come to accept that, at Neve Michael, he is but one of many children who have had a similar experience, and these same children are now his classmates and friends. When Tal plays with his friends, the simple pleasures of childhood are marked now by the red in his cheeks. When Tal is asked a question by an adult, he allows the adult to enter his world, and the look in those big brown eyes – once so vacant and devoid of hope – now convey a sense of childlike expectation.

Behind that look, there remains a lingering trace of the trauma that Tal survived, but can never forget. For our psycho-therapists, Tal's case remains, and will remain for some time, an open file. In the classroom, Tal suffers from attention deficit disorder, and his scholastic orientation will require further close attention on the part of our professional staff. It will take years of therapy, guidance, love and care, and no small measure of patience, to ensure that Tal can develop like a normal child with a strong home–school support system.

At Neve Michael, he is most surely in the right place.