A stacked crisis
Family posing last December during a visit. Mom is not yet pregnant. 5-year old holds a picture of his school-aged brother. Life was going well for the family. Family’s faces are blurred for their privacy.
Zee and Adam arrived here from Sudan in 2022. Their third child was born a few months after their arrival.
Adam found work. Zee worked on her English until she spoke well enough to be accepted at The Excel School. By late December 2025, she was eyeing a possible graduation as early as November 2026.
Stacked crises have hit the family
Just when Adam and Zee thought things were getting easier, a series of crises hit the family in the span of a few months’ time.
Zee got pregnant with a fourth child. The pregnancy was not planned. She and Adam struggled to accept the idea that they would soon have four children and not three to feed, clothe, and house. Zee worried about what this would mean about her schooling. Severe sickness early in her pregnancy meant she had to reduce her school load. Pre-term labor mid-pregnancy added to her stress.
Adam lost his stable job. The warehouse where he earned $17.50/hour was closing. All 800 workers would be laid off in August.
Adam was in a car accident that totaled his car. The insurance payout would not be enough to enable him to buy a car. He and Zee would be sharing a car as they managed her school schedule, a new baby, the three older boys, and a job for him.
While riding as a passenger in someone else’s car, Adam was seriously injured in an accident — a week prior to a scheduled interview for a new job. He was hospitalized in intensive care for a week. He came home with two fractured vertebrae, a torn ligament in his cervical spine, and the discovery that his diabetes and blood pressure were out-of-control diabetes Returning to work is many, many weeks away.
These events = Category 5 hurricane
The family will need monumental financial and social support to weather these crises and emerge stable once again. Worse, there IS no local family to help weather this life storm.
The ability to GET stabilized is now significantly harder with Indiana’s passage of SB1 in March of this year. It’s harder for the family to apply for the SNAP/TANF benefits they are entitled to because they have to go through an extra step of proving legal status. In prior efforts to gain SNAP, the family has been denied for “failing to prove legal status” despite submitting the required documentation (copies of Green Cards). The system is designed to delay and deny until a family gives up.
$16 separates this family from nothing
The family has $16 in their checking account. There is no savings account. FSTN has paid their rent for August and September. We have provided food cards. We paid their utility bills for September. However, we are not set up to provide an unlimited number of families with this level of ongoing financial assistance. This family “graduated” from our care…but now, they need it again, desperately.
And so, we need donors willing to share cash donations, food cards, or in-kind donations of baby clothing, a car seat, a stroller, and baby supplies. (It’s a girl, which Zee and Adam are both thrilled to find out.)
Please help if you can. 100% of what you give will go to this family.