> 24-year-old IU student recounts what it's like to grow up in foster care
24-year-old IU student recounts what it's like to grow up in foster care
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Description
Turning the key that unlocks the door to her Indianapolis apartment is a simple act that takes seconds. For 24-year-old Donesha Washington, though, that simple act represents so much more.
"This is my space. No one can come in here and take this from me," Washington said.
She knows what it's like to feel like she doesn't quite belong anywhere. Washington spent much of her life in Indiana's foster care system.
"I was a child, taken the day I was born, because we had drugs in our system," Washington explained, speaking about her mom's addiction to heroin.
It set Washington on a lifelong course of moving between foster homes and residential facilities, sometimes being allowed to go back to live with her mom, when her mom was clean and sober.
MORE: https://www.wthr.com/article/news/local/aging-out-indiana-foster-care-system-dcs-children-teens-kids-addiction-donesha-washington-maggie-stevens-foster-success-adoption-reunion-overdose/531-02a37e76-c324-4294-9222-a225a8594979