Real Life Stories
A seven-year old girl was taken out of her home by the social worker due to severe problems in the home. Her parents could not take care of her. She was cute and quiet and settled in well. Suddenly in middle of the school year, AMIT Frisch Beit Hayeled received a complaint from her school principal, who has worked for many years with AMIT Frisch Beit Hayeled and has had many children from there at his school, that she needs to be picked up immediately. He wanted a meeting with Moti Asraf, the director of AMIT Frisch Beit Hayeled. In this meeting, he told him that he received very serious complaints from the parents of the other students in the class, that the girl started to tell their children in full detail about the horrible things she had witnessed in her biological home. She told them about what her mother does at nights, how Arab men come in and out of the house, how her father likes to "play" with her, without leaving out any details. It was agreed that she would not return to the school until she received extensive therapy, and did not feel the need to share her stories with the other children, but rather with her caregivers and therapists. She was given private lessons to stay up to her grade level, and intensive psychological and psychiatric care, including art therapy, music therapy and animal therapy. She returned to school at the beginning of the next school year, and the principal said she was like a different child.
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Four siblings, immigrants from Ethiopia, came to AMIT Frisch Beit Hayeled. Their mother died in Ethiopia and their father remarried and lives with a new wife and baby in one room in his new wife's parents' apartment. Neither of them wants contact with these four children. One child is in Kfar Blatt, and three are in AMIT Frisch Beit Hayeled. The sister, who is the oldest of the three at AMIT Frisch Beit Hayeled, is the only one of them who is really not managing to settle down. Because they have nowhere to go on Shabbatot and Chagim, they are sent to foster families (separately). She had already switched families five times, and each time it failed because she apparently was not able to understand the concept of family and normative family behaviour. AMIT Frisch Beit Hayeled decided to take an art therapist privately, in addition to the regular therapy it gives to the children, and established a special two year program for her to overcome her problems. Two years have now passed, she now has a permanent family she visits on Shabbatot and Chagim. She has settled in and looks forward to her visits.