One version of Mariel Alfaro’s life exists in foster care files scattered across the state of Kansas. The pages profile a defiant child, prone to violent outbursts and running away. The girl on paper seems destined for life in prison or a string of dead-end jobs.
She’s out of place. Broken.
But this picture is far from accurate.
Fresh from a British literature test on a Friday afternoon, the 21-year-old University of Kansas junior crosses Jayhawk Boulevard amid the noon bustle, keeping pace with the rushing crowd. Wearing a navy sweatshirt, sneakers and torn jeans with her long black hair resting on shoulders hunched beneath a backpack, the outspoken, petite Latina looks every bit the college student.
She belongs.
“If I wanted life to be sweet, it was going to be my decision and all my doing,” Mariel says. “Life is one percent what happens to you, 99 percent how you react to it.”
According to a 2006 study through Casey Family Programs in Seattle, 20,000 to 25,000 kids leave foster care programs in the United States each year, most at ages 17 or 18. The study found that only three percent of these children go on to complete college by age 24, compared with 28 percent of children from traditional-family homes.
“While many of these foster care alumni wanted to enroll in college and, in fact, did so, their drop-out rates were tremendously high,” said Peter Pecora, senior director of research services at Casey Family Programs.
Pecora cited education gaps from too many school changes, untreated depression and lack of financial resources as reasons why college is tougher for children raised in foster homes.
For Mariel, the lack of emotional support is the most difficult.
“I don’t have anyone I can count on for motivation to do this, and that’s been a hard realization,” she says.
Mariel recounts her life from inside her black 2004 Dodge Dakota. Revealing the details around too many strangers is worrisome. Shameful. She wipes away tears with the sides of her knuckles, slowly catching the drops and brushing them from her face, shielding the black liner rimming her dark brown eyes. Even misty, her eyes are piercing -- wide and fearless.
She tells her story.
Her father came to the United States from Cuba in the early 1980s. A drug trafficker, he found his way to Kansas City, Kan. where he began a relationship with Mariel’s mother, a young Hispanic drug-addict.
Child Protective Services put Mariel in the foster care system shortly after she was born. She lived with more families than she can remember throughout Kansas City and in Edgerton, Garden City and Wamego. At 8 she was put in the Rainbow Mental Health Facility in Kansas City, Kan. after slitting her wrists. By 12 she was the youngest resident of Oakland House, a group home in Kansas City, Mo. for troubled teenage girls. She has few memories of her childhood, save the endless shuffle of houses, schools and siblings.
“I don’t honestly know what family’s like; I don’t even understand it,” she says. “Today, when I meet people’s families, it’s an awkward feeling because I don’t understand what it’s like to devote time to something like that.”
Mariel’s longest stay in a foster home was with Junior and Julie Russell of Kansas City, Kan., whom she lived with from age nine to 16, though rebelliousness landed her in Oakland House and another group home, Thorpe House, for part of those years.
“When she was a little girl she would come home from school and be worried about someone who didn’t have enough food or someone whose family wasn’t getting along well,” Julie Russell said. “She always had a concern for the underdog, for people who are struggling.”
It was in the Russell’s home that Mariel the academic began to blossom. She and Julie made regular trips to the library, and Mariel was accepted to a math and science summer program at the University of Kansas when she was a sophomore in high school. Julie, a sociology instructor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, would bring an eager Mariel along with her to classes.
“She would come and want to answer questions I posed to the class,” Russell said. “She also loved to argue. She would argue one side and then a couple days later argue for the other side.”
Friend Alisa Reyes said Mariel’s classmates at J.C. Harmon High School knew that higher levels of education lay in Mariel’s future.
“Her nickname was ‘the smart bitch,’” Reyes said. “Everyone always knew she would go to college.”
Mariel never saw herself as smart, nor was there a precise moment when she decided that her future would include college.
“Foster kids don’t grow up with the confidence to think they can go to college,” Mariel says. “I was always loud, and people mistook that for being confident and smart, which wound up getting my foot in the door a lot of places.”
The Russells never legally adopted Mariel and Mariel, never becoming used to a structured home, moved out on her own at 16. One of her high school teachers paid for her ACT, and she graduated a year early and began taking classes at Johnson County Community College. She traveled to Russia with a humanitarian group the summer after graduation.
“It was an experience that really made me push through a lot of the hardships in my life,” she says. “We crawled through a hole in the bottom of a building where 8-year-old twins lived. They had rigged a light bulb, and I remember I hit my head on it and shocked myself because it was an open wire, but it was all they had. How do you go someplace like that and then look at your life and say, ‘poor me’?”
Mariel enrolled at the University of Kansas in fall 2004 as a biology major with her sights set on medical school. But her first semester ended tragically when her father killed himself in December, the morning he was expected to appear in federal court for conspiracy to import marijuana and methamphetamine into the Kansas City area. Mariel had little contact with him throughout her life, but still found herself grief-stricken over his death.
“I cried because of how he had to die, and how I had lost him a long time ago,” she says. “But I knew that going to prison and turning his life around -- that would have been too fairy-tale.”
Now, over two years later, after a battle with her stepmother over money her father left behind, Mariel has decided to change her focus and attend law school. She will complete her undergraduate degree in English in December 2008.
“Words are what I’m good at,” she says. “And with law, I’ve grown up in the system so it’s what I know.”
Mariel’s goal is to work for reform in the foster care system, focusing on developing government programs that support foster children who want to attend college.
“It’s a subculture of lost children,” she says. “Not every foster kid is able to do what I did. These kids are condemned just because they haven’t had the best lives. I want to use my struggles and my experiences to make a difference.”
College has allowed Mariel to explore areas of interest that would have otherwise been left untapped, such as political science and international studies. Latin American Studies instructor Laura Herlihy had Mariel in two classes, Latin American Culture & Society and Gender, Race & Sexuality in Latin America. She was impressed by Mariel’s work ethic and the way Mariel challenged her and the other students to think outside the box.
“Mariel has a raw personality,” Herlihy said. “I liked the way she would speak up and confront the whiners in the classroom -- students that whined about homework or their grades. If Mariel didn’t study, she took full responsibility for it. She moved forward, unfazed.”
For her final project in the course, Mariel produced a video about her father’s life and the lives of other Latinos in Kansas City. Herlihy said the autobiographical portrait gave faces and a voice to the struggles faced by Latin American immigrants.
“Everyone else in the class did standard semester papers,” Herlihy said. “Her video was completely refreshing.”
Last semester, Mariel had to put her education on hold and move back to Kansas City, Kan. to work. Financially independent since 16, she has done everything from answer customer service calls for Embarq Telephone Corporation to deliver Jimmy John’s sub sandwiches at all hours of the night. Now, back in school and getting by on money inherited from her father, Mariel plans to become a stripper to pay for future school expenses.
“I won’t go back to living the way I lived the last couple of years,” she says. “I didn’t have a car. I didn’t have money for school.”
To some the decision may seem unethical -- a desperate last resort. But for a young woman who has lived her life with only herself to depend upon, the choice is not a compromise of morality, but simply a step taken to achieve a goal.
“I don’t see an issue in it,” Mariel says. “I’m not going there to party. I’m going there to take my clothes off and then leave. I used to see it as womanizing, but now I just see it as using the system.”
She isn’t worried that the job will affect her career goals or the way she is treated by her professors and peers.
“I carry myself a certain way in a classroom,” Mariel says. “I’m going to put on my sweats, go to class and actually have money in my pocket. A person can be many different roles in life. That’s where people get stuck in ruts -- they don’t realize that.”
The choice she is making doesn’t seem to weigh on her as she starts her truck to head home to her apartment in Kansas City, Kan. She’s instead focused on spending the afternoon with friends and with Elliott, her golden retriever. Mariel dries her eyes one last time, the liner smudged only slightly around the edges. Her eyes still smolder.
She knows, in the end, she is all she has.
“I’ve had to find my own way out, inside of myself,” she says.
