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Health & Fitness

The Comfort of Home

The Comfort of Home
CoesterVMS teams up with The National Center for Children and Families (NCCF) to help children in foster care


The trash bag Amaya arrived with was white with red handles. Not that it matters what the trash bag looked like. A trash bag is a trash bag. But Amaya’s father remembers those colors—they stuck with him. The little girl was standing in the doorway of her third foster home carrying her whole life in a white trash bag with red handles.

“She was really quiet. My partner, Reece, walked her upstairs to her bedroom while I carried her brother, Makai,” says Rob Chasteen-Scheer, a former NCCF foster parent who adopted Amaya and Makai two years ago. “She walked into the room and started smiling, falling on the bed, hugging the bear we had waiting for her.”

All four of Chasteen-Scheer’s children—Amaya, 9, Makai, 6, Greyson, 6, and Tristan, 4—were dropped off at his house with nothing but trash bags. They were removed from their Northwest DC homes because of abuse and neglect. When they left, that’s all they had with them. “Everything in their bags seemed like it had been worn a thousand times,” says Chasteen-Scheer.

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That’s why the Comfort Case Drive is so important, he says. Because children in the system often go from place to place without a suitcase, stuffed animal, or cozy PJs. He wants infants, children, and adolescents in foster care to travel with some of the comforts of home, anything to make them feel a little more secure in the midst of chaos.

“We took the kids out shopping the first night and Amaya, who was four, picked out a Cinderella nightgown,” says Chasteen-Scheer, Senior Vice President of CoesterVMS in Rockville. “Her face lit up when she tried it on. It was new–and it was hers.”

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Amaya, Rob, Reece and Makai on a family vacation. Rob and Reece adopted the siblings two years ago.

Chasteen-Scheer understands the loneliness that comes with being in foster care. He lost both of his parents when he was ten years old. He carried a trash bag with him as he traveled to foster homes in Northern Virginia. “I went to several homes within a couple weeks,” he says. “More than 30 years later, I remember my foster parents taking me to buy clothes for church because I only had tattered pants and stained T-shirts.”

With support from the community, Chasteen-Scheer and his colleagues at Coester hope to have 1,000 Comfort Cases by mid-December. Volunteers will fill them with everything from soap and toothpaste to blankets, pajama sets, and stuffed animals. “Amaya still has the bear we got for her five years ago,” he says. “It’s still on her bed.”

For more information about the Comfort Case Drive,
visit NCCF’s events page or http://comfortcases.org/



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