Growing up in a neighborhood full of crime, violence and poverty, society would expect Kisha to become just another statistic; but she's proof one can defy the odds.
In a world gone mad, where we are hard pressed to find role models who aren’t hanging off stripper poles; where people get trophies not for winning, but participating; and we’re encouraged to “do you”, even when “doing you” hurts others, it can feel like heroes are a thing of the past.
But heroes do still exist, they just aren’t getting the credit and recognition they deserve; and that’s why I’m shining the light on a modern-day super hero, Kisha Campbell. Growing up, Kisha could have easily become a statistic. On the west side of Dayton, Ohio, where Kisha grew up, one-third of its residents live below the poverty level, which puts it at the fourth highest poverty level in the U.S. for a city its size.
Driving through the area, it’s not uncommon to see abandoned houses and litter lining the streets. Crime plagues its neighborhoods, rating it in the top three percent of U.S. cities for homicide and violent crime. Not surprisingly, its schools are also failing.
Out of over 600 schools in the state, Dayton is second to last, with a neighboring city at the very bottom. Two out of 10 students do not graduate high school, and 85 percent never graduate college.
But Kisha would not only go on to defy the odds by finishing high school on the honor roll and graduating college on a basketball and academic scholarship; she did something else that even fewer people do.
She has fostered 19 kids, of which 13 she has adopted, all as a single mother. And I might mention, she does it well.
While many parents struggle to raise one or two kids in a two-parent home, Kisha has made it a priority to put all of her school aged kids into a private Christian school. Working as a full-time nurse, she still finds time to attend all the kids’ extracurricular activities and sports, and make sure they’re at church three times a week. One might wonder, where does she find the time and strength to do what she does?
“It’s a calling and when you have a calling God gives you supernatural strength to do what you need to do,” says Kisha. “All I ever wanted, was to be a mother."
(Adoption day of her most recent adoption of 5 siblings.)
But when you take care of that many kids, they sometimes may not appreciate or understand your sacrifice. However, she says, "To be able to love them is from Christ.” While God is an integral part of Kisha’s life, she says her mom and grandmother played a big role in making her who she is today. “My grandmother stayed on her knees every day praying for us.”
While her grandmother kept them covered in prayer, her mother was going to school to be an LPN, but stopped going when she got pregnant with Kisha. From then on, her mother started doing daycare in their home to provide income. “So, we always had all kinds of kids in our house,” she says.
And while her mother always worked, it wasn’t always enough to make ends meet. “We didn’t have a lot. We were on food stamps most of the time. My mother never had a license, so we took the bus everywhere, but I never felt like we went without,” says Kisha. “Overall, I had a good childhood.”
The sacrifice her mother made for her and her sister made an impact on her. While most kids are consumed with getting the latest designer shoes or clothes to fit in with the popular crowd, Kisha was spending the money she made at her summer job on kids who were neglected by their parents. “When I got money, I would buy coloring books and things for them.”
At the age of 12 Kisha would get up at 5 a.m. and ride her bike to her first job. “Because my mom didn’t have a car, she would walk me to the end of the street to make sure I got off safely,” she says. Once she got there Kisha would help prepare boxes of food for people in the community.
“The people would tip the kids for carrying boxes to their car. So, I would make about twenty or twenty-five dollars each time,” she recalls. Back then that was a good deal of money for a 12-year-old.
Watching her mother care for these kids, it only came natural for Kisha to do the same. So, when a teenage girl down the street got pregnant, and then had another baby in a few years, it was Kisha who stepped in to care for her youngest child.
When her daughter was about five, the little girl started staying at their house for days at a time. Then it turned into weeks. Eventually the mother ended up neglecting her responsibilities and she ended up staying at their house the majority of the time, until she went into high school.
Kisha, who was 16 at the time says, “I would braid her hair and buy pretty bows and ribbons to fix it with, and I would take her with me to my basketball practice and games.” To this day she still stays in touch with the girl.
But this girl would be one of only many lives that Kisha would impact by her caring heart and compassion. Another woman on their block who had seven kids had a visit from children’s services and was told due to the fact that there was no food in the house her children were going to be taken from her.
“I told children services that we would help take care of the kids if she would be allowed to keep them,” says Kisha. So, she and her struggling single mom went and bought the family food. From then on, four of the youngest kids would be at their house on a regular basis.
"We would line up the floor with sleeping bags,” she recalls.
Then at the age of 14 one of the girls of the family got pregnant. One day when Kisha went to visit, she saw that the baby didn’t have any milk and was being neglected. So, what did Kisha do? She started taking care of the girl’s baby, and continued to do so for the next several years until she left for college.
“I remember the day I left for college. I was nervous because I was the first one in my family to ever go,” says Kisha. She attributes this to her mother being the one who always helped her study for all her tests, but also a woman named Karen Fletcher, who ran a program for troubled kids called “Partners in Success.”
“She was one of my favorite memories,” she says.
“She taught us how to do reports, how to talk to people properly and to dress for success. She would take us to job locations and out to places to do community events like planting community gardens or public singing,” recalls Kisha. “She was so brilliant. She was like everyone’s mother. She saved a lot of kids’ lives.”
She was also the one who helped Kisha get her scholarship, as well as the one who fought to help her keep it when her basketball coach attempted to take away her funding.
“I remember calling my mom from school crying because the coach kept singling me out. I got along great with all my teammates, but this woman didn’t like me,” she says. “She would bench me for no reason”. But the whole team knew why. Kisha was the only black girl on the team.
So, after one day when her and the coach had got into it, Kisha wrote out the poem by Maya Angelou, “Still I Rise” and signed it with the statement, “You’ll never keep me down.” After that, the coach benched her and suspended her for several games.
To protest her unfair treatment, the team decided to boycott the next practice. That’s when the coach threatened to take away everyone’s scholarships. On the last day of the school year, Kisha was told they were revoking her scholarship.
Once Karen heard about this, she drove all the way up to her school in Pennsylvania to appeal this decision, however, they refused to let her into the school. That’s when Kisha went down to financial aid to plead for their help. “I started bawling my eyes out,” she says. “They loved me in there, and so this man started pulling strings to get me money.”
He was able to pull together enough grants, loans and other academic scholarships to allow her to finish out the rest of her schooling, where she graduated with a Bachelor’s in healthcare and administration.
Discrimination and unfair treatment like this might cause some to become embittered or build a chip on their shoulder, but that’s not Kisha’s style.
The love in her heart for people is so big it pushes out any seeds of hate or bitterness that the enemy would try to plant.
This heart made of love would definitely come in handy when she started doing foster parenting for the first time. “They brought the girl to me from a residential facility. It’s a last-ditch hope before they send them into a lockdown facility,” says Kisha. “When I picked her up, they said, ‘We’re glad you live next to Kettering Behavioral Health’, which was a center for kids with serious trauma.”
When Kisha took the 12-year-old girl with her to Lowes a few days later she would find out why they made this disparaging comment. “She had gotten mad about something. I can’t even remember what it was, but the next thing I knew she was taking paint cans and throwing them off the shelves.”
Shocked, Kisha told her to pick them up, but the girl refused. To keep things from escalating further, Kisha went ahead and picked them up and got out of the store. They were driving through a parking lot later that day when suddenly the girl jumped out of the car and ran into a Chinese restaurant.
“So, I stopped the car and went in after her. As soon as I walked in, I saw her throwing everything….. she’s throwing chairs, flipping over tables….and by now all these Chinese workers are looking at me like, ‘handle your kid.’ I said, ‘Look, this is not my child. She’s a foster kid.’”
“I was so mad. I said, ‘You pick this stuff up right now!’ I didn’t care if I got arrested that day or not, she was picking that stuff up. So, she picks everything up, but then takes off again in the parking lot. So now I’m chasing after her in my car,” exclaims Kisha. “Finally, she gets in, but then starts right back up the very next day.” Kisha was driving when the girl starts trying to kick her.
“I reach around the back and grab her leg. So, I’m driving with one hand on the wheel and one hand trying to keep her from kicking me. When I tell you the devil was in her eye,” she says.
“I went straight to the police department and told them, ‘You need to take this kid.’ They said, ‘You can’t just drop this kid off here.’”
“I said, ‘Call her crisis care. Do whatever you need to do, but this kid is not coming back with me.’ You would think that it would be a relief once you drop the kid back off, but sometimes I’ll still second guess, like should I have let her go? And this is even over 15 years ago,” she says with a tinge of sadness in her voice.
Kisha first started fostering in her 20’s, and with this being one of her first experiences, it makes you wonder how she even attempted it again, but when you have a heart of gold, it’s always looking for the best in people and trying to give them another chance.
Being in her 40’s now and having fostered up to 19 kids, there’s only been two times in which she had to send a kid back into the system. “One of the hardest things is realizing when you have a kid that you can’t help. I always think I can help anybody, but when you realize this kid needs more than I can give them, you have to keep from feeling defeated, like I failed them,” she reflects.
“You think, it’s not even this kid’s fault that they’re like this, but you can’t keep them because they’re either going to hurt you, hurt themselves or hurt someone else,” says Kisha. She said one of the most difficult things about fostering is that the system gives too many chances to parents that have proven time and again that they are neglectful and abusive. It’s also one of the main deterrents, she says, to people continuing in foster care.
A foster parent finally gets a child settled into their home with a routine, rules and discipline and then the children’s services will come and rip the kid out of the home and say they’re placing them back with the parents. Kisha says she’s had this happen a number of times.
Then when they bring the child back, as they often do, because the parent is right back to the same old stuff; the foster parent has either received another placement and doesn’t have room for the kid or they bring them back and have to start all over again, with getting the kid used to the rules and discipline.
This type of back and forth can also cause division between the foster child and the foster parent. Many of these parents love and treat these kids as their own, however, a child can feel as if they’re betraying their biological parent by showing love or calling the parent ‘mom’ or ‘dad’, even after they’ve been adopted.
One would think that after all the abuse or neglect they’ve endured at the hands of their biological parents; they would have no desire to ever return to their abusers. And yet, studies have shown that many times kids desire just that.
These feelings can be confusing to the child who doesn’t understand this innate nature, and it can be hurtful to the foster or adoptive parent. Kisha has experienced it all.
“You put your heart out there over and over again, but you know it has the potential to get trampled on over and over again. I’m seasoned, and I understand it better, but it still hurts,” she says.
Kisha says she’s not against reunification of kids with their parents. In fact, she’s a big supporter of it, but only when the parents have gotten their lives together and it’s a healthy environment for the kids.
Raising up 13 kids as a single mother certainly hasn’t come without its struggles, like the year she was finishing up nursing school and got diagnosed with Lupus, an autoimmune disease that can cause severe inflammation and joint pain.
At the time she had seven kids under the age of 10. During that period the pain was so bad, she says she would sometimes have to crawl up the stairs. “But I would wait until the kids would go to bed, so they wouldn’t see me,” she says. “Another time the pain was so crippling I got stuck in the bathtub until three in the morning. I was crying out to God for help.”
But even in these moments, her faith always pushed her through. “One time I was at school and my feet froze up. I couldn’t get up,” she recalls. So, they called a friend to come get her. However, once her friend got there, she told her, “You have to help me get in my car because if I let the devil do this, he’ll have me crippled for life.’”
Fortunately, with faith, prayer and medication Kisha’s health has improved. However, that doesn’t mean the sacrifices have ended. With two degrees, Kisha certainly isn’t underqualified in the job market, but that doesn’t mean she’s always taking the highest paying jobs.
“I’ve taken jobs making four times less than what I was qualified for, because I needed to be there for my kids,” she exclaims. Another sacrifice is dating, which can certainly be a challenge. Finding the time to date with 13 kids can be next to impossible, but even with a beautiful and educated woman like Kisha, once they find out she has 13 kids it can scare them away.
They say dirt is cheap because it’s everywhere, but diamonds are expensive because they’re rare. It may take a little longer for the right man to match Kisha’s big heart and unusual strength, but once he does, he will have found a rare treasure.
But even with all the obstacles that come with fostering and raising 13 kids, she says it’s totally worth it when “you see that lightbulb go off in their eyes, once they realize God loves them and they have that spiritual encounter. It’s definitely the most rewarding thing when you see them beating the odds of what society expects of them.”
And not only are her kids beating the odds, but Kisha Campbell is one woman who has definitely beat the odds of what society would expect of her. She’s quick to point out she couldn’t do it without the help of others – her sister, mother, family and friends.
But nevertheless, Kisha is a diamond in a world full of dirt and a modern-day hero for women.
Shine on Kisha. Shine on.
- Written by Julie Nicole; Dayton, OH
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