Rebuilding an What do you call a 34-year-old single guy who quits his job to take care of three children who have been abused and bounced from one foster home to another?
ohana with love
A Waimanalo man
gives 3 kids a new lifeFOSTERING HOPE
Pat Gee / pgee@starbulletin.com
"Papa."
That's what the children call Jacob Tanner, the man who kept a family of one brother and two sisters together. Because he made them a "solemn promise that they'll never be taken away from me," Tanner plans to adopt them.
He started calling them "my son" and "my daughters" when he started taking care of them a year ago as a foster parent. He plans to apply for a legal adoption in November.
The Waimanalo Beach man comes from a large Hawaiian family with a big-hearted attitude toward kids who need a home, so taking in orphans was nothing unusual. His parents took in four foster kids when Tanner was 8, and they were raised as his brothers and sisters with his four other siblings, he said.
Tanner speaks perfect English but often lapses into playful pidgin, and he laughs often. He tutored special education students at Lincoln Elementary before leaving the job to take care of his children.
He was asked to foster them by his aunt, who thought he would be the ideal candidate because had his own house and she told him, "you perfect with children," he said. And "nobody else would take the whole family," Tanner added. "I can't see splitting the family."
Another reason Tanner decided to legally adopt the kids instead of informally raising them through the traditional Hawaiian system of "hanai" is to ensure that they stay out of the hands of their abusive father, who was just released from prison on the mainland. Their mother died of breast cancer three years ago.
After the oldest boy told Tanner how his father sexually molested him and threatened to kill him if he told anyone, Tanner made a promise that "that guy never going touch you again ... I cry every time I think about it." He points out the scars on the boy's shoulder and feet, where he was stabbed by his father as evidence of a history of abuse.
(To protect the children's privacy, the Star-Bulletin agreed not to use their real names, referring to them instead as Enrique, who is 12, Carla, 9, and Lani, 8.)
Tanner has used cleaning the house and teaching the children to read as the main tools to turn them around. They were disrespectful and undisciplined when they came to him, but are now well-mannered, industrious and responsible children who are pointed to as good examples for his other relatives' children to follow, he said.
"(Carla) never knew how to do rice; now she's a professional rice cooker," he said, laughing. Pointing to the clothes hung on the line in the garage, he said proudly, "they do their own laundry," even the littlest one.
Education and "being responsible" are the two most important things he stresses to the children, who are learning disabled because of all the abuse they suffered.
Carla is the "mother hen" of the bunch, scolding the others - "that's not the way to do that" - if their housework is sloppy, Tanner said.
But if cleanliness is next to godliness in the Tanner home, camping at the beach is the all-time favorite reward for a job well done, the three agree. They pitch tents with other relatives almost every weekend, crabbing, fishing, swimming, surfing and "wrestling with my cousins," Enrique said.
Tanner said Enrique bore the brunt of the abuse from his father, and "wouldn't even speak, just sit in the corner" last August. Now the two "talk for hours if he needs to get something off his chest."
Enrique is the main reason Tanner quit his job temporarily. "So I could make sure all his needs were being met ... being home after school, taking him to doctors, therapists, the psychiatrist. There's so much they (all) need," said Tanner.
Carla said: "We want to be adopted because we don't want to leave. We don't want to go back to our dad because of the way he treated us and uses drug in front of us. Me and my sister were real small and we watched our father abuse our mother. We were crying that time.
"We're happy here with Papa. He (Tanner) would like to be called 'Dad.' If we get adopted, we'll see if we can start getting used to calling him 'Dad,'" she said.
Tanner raised his eyebrows and laughed.
The 10 areas in Hawaii with the largest average family size in the Year 2000. All exceed the statewide average of 3.42, which was down from 3.48 in 1990, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Big families
*Census-designated places
Average Total Area* Family Size Households Nanakuli Home Land, Oahu 5.07 1,010 Waimanalo Home Land, Oahu 4.97 623 Waianae Home Land, Oahu 4.86 367 Auwaiolimu-Kalawahine-Kewalo- Papakolea Home Land,Oahu 4.85 342 Laie, Oahu 4.75 903 Nanakuli, Oahu 4.74 2,324 Paukukalo Home Land, Maui 4.66 167 Kahuku, Oahu 4.63 509 Waimanalo Beach, Oahu 4.50 1,006 Ewa Beach, Oahu 4.47 3,305
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Census 2000