Anne Veitch - Fostering for 19 years

Transcript

00:00I'd say do it. I have never, ever regretted doing it. It's just the amazing feeling you

00:19get with a child that you see it blossoming and you know that you're actually helping

00:24I have been fostering into my 19th year. Well my family have grown up and left home. I kept

00:33on seeing these articles in the paper about children with nowhere to go and I had such

00:39a happy childhood that I just felt I should do something. Mind you I thought about it

00:45for three years on and off. It's not a hobby. The most rewarding thing I think is probably

00:55a child that comes to you and is very withdrawn and if you can get that child to open up and

01:04smile. Some of them have been through such dreadful traumas. Getting them to smile and

01:11relax is very rewarding. I was a teenager and she was so withdrawn you couldn't get anything

01:19out of her. You couldn't get close to her. You couldn't get her to get interested in anything and

01:25she was with me a couple of times and then she just came in the kitchen one day and put her

01:31arms around me and said thank you. I didn't know what she was thanking me for but that was nice,

01:37that was good. It's lovely to see the resilience in a child that they can then get to 18, 19, get a

01:47job, go to university, move into their own accommodation. It's really great. I'm still

01:56doing it, yes. I don't want to stop doing it, no. And I have the two girls, one of them

02:03was six when she came to me, she's 15 now and they come every, they were here this weekend. I

02:09wouldn't, I wouldn't stop and leave them. I couldn't. They're like family now.