LINCOLN — Mother’s Day passed with gratitude from a woman who has fostered and adopted dozens of children from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation suffering from varying degrees of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD).
Nora Boesem, who now cares for 14 children and adults she has adopted, said she cried after seeing the outpouring of generosity for her dire financial situation caused by a divorce, an accident with an uninsured driver and piles of medical bills for her adoptees living with disabilities.
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As of Sunday, donations to a GoFundMe account started by a friend neared $20,000, allowing Boesem – when she gets the funds – to catch up on mortgage payments, retrieve a repaired family SUV from a body shop and pay off some of the family’s medical bills. The plight of Boesem and her family – former residents of western South Dakota – was detailed in an Examiner story a week ago, when donations were just over $1,300.
“I am just honestly speechless,” she said in a telephone interview. “It’s really a blessing.”
Boesem’s income is too high to qualify for some government aid programs, and there have been cutbacks in caregiver assistance payments that had helped her hire in-home caretakers.
Boesem and her family, now living in Houston, helped boost the momentum of local, statewide and national efforts to close down the beer stores in Whiteclay, Nebraska, which were dispensing more than 3 million cans of beer a year, mostly to residents of the adjacent Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, where alcohol possession and sales are banned.
Almost all of the children Boesem has fostered and later adopted have been from the South Dakota reservation, where alcoholism is endemic and an estimated one in four children is born with fetal alcohol syndrome. Their mothers could have obtained beer from Whiteclay.
During an interview Saturday evening, Boesem was dispensing prescriptions to her family while expressing hope that her oldest adoptee, 24-year-old Dontae Standing Bear — who grew up on the Pine Ridge — would be able to be released from the hospital in Houston.
Dontae – who was born with blood that contained twice the legal limit for driving – has a severe case of FASD, one that causes him to suffer seizures more than 40% of the time. He has the cognitive development of a 5-year-old, another symptom of fetal alcohol syndrome, according to Boesem, a former nurse who has been active in public education efforts about FASD.
Boesem, who works as an online counselor and teaches at a local college, said she moved to Houston in large part to get Dontae care at the University of Texas Health Science Center. He had been at the center since April 27 for evaluation about what kind of brain implant might be most effective at quelling the seizures. He was supposed to be released May 1.
Dontae was finally sent home from the hospital on Sunday, and Boesem said the GoFundMe will help the family “not be underwater” when Dontae gets surgery.
She said she recognized only a few of the names of the people who donated, which was amazing. She said she would use the money to pay the $11,000 bill to repair the family SUV, catch up with mortgage payments and create an account to pay off some of the family’s medical bills, which total about $43,000.
She says they’ve had more than one incident while living in a rough section of Houston, including having the family dog stolen, having one child stabbed and witnessing a shooting at a nearby store.
The donations, Boesem said, will end a lot of worries and help her start paying off other debts and prepare to move away.
“I’ll just try to get everything here arranged so I can get the kids out of here,” she said.
She said they might head back to South Dakota or somewhere else.
“I’m not sure,” Boesem said. “But it’s not going to be Houston.”
This story is provided by States Newsroom, a nonprofit state news network and Blox Digital content partner.
