Nepean this Week
by JULIE FORTIER NTW Staff
June 8, 2006 | Nepean author hopes to reach out to orphans JULIE FORTIER NTW Staff What happens to a child when he or she loses first a mother, then a father, then the next caregiver, and the next. Even though the child may look resilient, keep doing well in school, keep smiling, adults should not assume that the child can just “press the restart button” and get on with life. That is the idea behind Elizabeth Wiebe’s new novel Orphan: Through the Eyes of an Orphan, which is a true account of her own life. The Centrepointe resident knows what it means to experience loss. Wiebe was born in post World War Two Winnipeg, Manitoba to German- Mennonite parents who had emigrated from Russia. She lost her mother at 18 months. By the age of seven she lost her father to cancer and was separated from her siblings. Luckily, she went to live with an aunt who loved her like her own. But then when she was 16, tragedy struck again and her aunt died. Being in a close-knit Mennonite community, no one spoke to her about her feelings of grief and selfblame. “I grieved alone. As all children do I figured that since no one was talking about it, it must be bad. It must have been something that was my fault. I had this anger in me and my world fell apart,” she said. “They didn’t understand my acting out and I had to leave the community.” The story does have a happy ending. Wiebe found a job at a hospital and was taken in by a very loving woman who cared for her and encouraged her to get through school and make a life for her herself. “My guardian angel,” she said. Today she is an experienced health care professional in the pharmaceutical industry. She was laid off in 2005, and re-experiencing the feeling of abandonment, decided to write a book about her turbulent childhood. She hasn’t looked back since. “This is my new mission in life,” Wiebe said. There is great misunderstanding about children who have to suffer through loss. “There was no abuse, no war, no disease. “I wasn’t an orphan due to poverty. It was just straight grieving.” Wiebe said people focus too much on the drama of physical or sexual abuse. Thousands of books have been published, televised and produced as movies to validate the suffering of physical and sexual abuse. The attention paid to psychological trauma is so infrequent that most ignore the quiet orphaned children as they are placed into their new or temporary homes. With her book, she hopes to reach regular Canadians who think that once a child is placed in foster care, they are no longer considered orphans. “Prime Minister Harper is looking to make foreign adoption easier, but we have orphans right here waiting for homes. I want him to relax the rules right here to increase adoptions and decrease foster homes,” Wiebe said. “When you think of foster kids you think of problem children, that they already have homes so they must be ok. But there are 88,000 children in Canada in foster care and 22,000 waiting for adoption.” She said that she hopes to have her book in universities so psychology students can better understand what orphans go through. She also wants younger children to read it to understand what they themselves are going through. “I want those children to know that they’re not alone. I have seen little children begging to be adopted. That shouldn’t be happening in Canada. It’s a disgrace,” she said. The book is available at Baico Book Store, located at 102 McEwen off Richmond Road, at Chapters on line at www.chapters.indigo.ca, www.canadabooksonline. com, www.publishconsult. com, or directly from the author at orphanbook@ pobox.com. |
