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 in his neck, a torn ligament between those two vertebrae, and the discovery that his diabetes and blood pressure were out-of-control diabetes Returning to work is many, many weeks away. He had no understanding of his injuries because of the language barrier. It took a 9/28 visit to doctor to clarify (See below.)
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
When I visited the family in mid-September, they had $16 remaining 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. We helped them get started with SNAP and TANF applications. This family “graduated” from our care…but now, they need it again, desperately. So we hope you will see Adam and Zee as your neighbors, and consider helping them.
We hope for SNAP and TANF to kick in for this family, but it’s taken us 2 weeks to even gather all the needed documents (15!) required to process their request. It then takes 30 days for FSSA to review the application. From our prior experience, we then know they make send a letter indicating the family needs to provide another document that we failed to provide or that they say they didn’t receive even though it was indeed submitted.
In the meantime, we need donors willing to provide a cash donation, 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.
9/28/2026 updates
I accompanied Adam to his 9/28 doctor appointment. The doctor, with the aid of an interpreter, explained Adam’s injuries and the risks of his uncontrolled blood sugar. Adam must remain in his cervical collar for another 3 weeks. Doctors will re-x-ray his neck at that time to see how fractures are healing. From there he will start PT. He is not to work until he gets clearance to do so, which will be at least 6 weeks’ time. He cannot receive unemployment insurance while he is physically unable to work, which means family has zero income until (and if) SNAP / TANF get approved. We are on a journey.
We had been helping Adam search for new job opportunities, but that effort must be suspended until he is able to work.