Fostering: Joe and Rita’s family
Joe and Rita Landsell have been fostering for 33 years. She is 59 and Joe, a church administrator, is 58 As she tells me this, Rita is feeding her latest charge, an eight-month-old. The Landsells met in their teens and married when they were 22 and 21.
They did not have children but they adopted two of their charges and returned to fostering only when the children reached the ages of nine and 11.
The Landsells remain in touch with at least half the children they have fostered and, interestingly, the children keep in touch with one another.
Occasionally the couple throw huge parties to reunite them all and this summer two came back to spend the holidays so that their parents could have a break.
“We had a call recently from an ex who stayed with us for almost a year,” says Joe. “He came to us when he was four, still in nappies and barely able to walk. He was classified as uneducable.” “That makes you want to fight,” says Rita.
Joe says, “He said, ‘Uncle Joe, I got five passes, one A and one A* in my GCSEs’ and I went ‘Yessssss!’ We had been a crucial link in the chain that got him there. You just can’t buy that sort of satisfaction.”
This article was created: 13 July 2006.
This article was last edited: 14 December 2006.
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