STUDENTS

Charity Begins at Home

WE HAD BEEN WAITING FOR WEEKS. Then the e-mail came telling us what we wanted to know. The subject line was hopeful: Maybe Baby. Charity Bell, a second-year MPA student, might be getting a new baby. “Feel free to call me late on Monday,” she wrote, “when I’ll know more.”

The baby did come. A boy. Sitting in the Forum two days later, Bell easily holds him in one arm, rocking slowly. A navy blue stroller is parked next to the table, her bookbag hooked on the handle. A stranger walking through the school might not look twice at the scene: a young mother and her newborn, visiting in between exams.

But things are not always what they seem.

For starters, Bell is not your typical graduate student: she’s a 29-year-old emergency foster parent, without a car or trust fund, caring for babies on her own. And the baby, just seven days old, is smaller than most. A little more than five pounds. Wrapped in a fleece blanket wearing a cotton, striped cap, he is amazingly quiet despite scraping chairs and the clank of pans and dishes in the nearby kitchen. His eyes never open. Born to a woman who abused cocaine, he sleeps more than other babies. “It’s their way of dealing with withdrawal,” Bell explains, stroking the boy’s tiny palm. “They try to escape.”

Like the 47 other kids that Bell has taken in since she became licensed by the Massachusetts Department of Social Services (DSS) in 1997 (almost all babies, most drug addicted), this baby came with little notice. He may leave just as quickly.

Bell’s foster care began as a short-term “hotline” parent when she was 23. At the time she was volunteering at a hospital when she noticed a little girl who never got visitors. The girl, she learned, was in between foster families. Bell was floored. “In a city this rich, I found that amazing,” she says. She called DSS and started the training to become a foster parent.

Now she keeps the babies longer. Her first was a newborn that, for safety reasons, had to be whisked away from the hospital. He was only 17 hours old. Unfortunately he got sick and spent five days in the neonatal intensive care unit — an exhausting experience that became an eye opener for Bell.

“That’s when I realized what being a foster parent was really about,” she says. “I stayed with him. Some friends, even the nurses, were surprised. It never crossed my mind to leave. If it had been my [biological] baby, people would have helped. Someone would have brought me a toothbrush. But no one came. It wasn’t my baby.”

Sitting in the Forum, Bell looks away from time to time to say hello to other students who pass by. “How old’s this one?” someone asks. “Boy or girl?” says another. Bell and her babies have become a common fixture around the school, even going to class and the library together.

“I didn’t give the school an Option B,” she jokes. “This is the end game at the Kennedy School. This,” she says, pointing to the baby, who is still sleeping, “is what public policy is all about. It’s really about: can we support those who come into the world with the least? This is the real test for us.”

There’s a tenacity about Bell that’s infectious. It didn’t come easily, though. She grew up on welfare. Her dad skipped out early. Her mom was loving and supportive, but struggled raising two kids when she was still a teenager.

“I’m not supposed to be here, at Harvard, answering these questions,” Bell says. “I was supposed to be a statistic.”

But she’s clearly not — at least not a predictable one. She snagged an undergraduate scholarship to the prestigious New England Conservatory of Music to study opera. (“The babies love the singing, though they enjoy Carmen less than they do the “Itsy-Bisty Spider,” which I sing with a classy little jazz swing!”) She spent two years with the Peace Corps in Guinea, where she helped deliver babies and learned the importance of celebrating birth — something she rarely saw in the poor West African nation where hope for a long, happy life is minimal. The Boston Globe named her one of its 2002 “inspirations.” Last semester, she earned straight A’s. Throughout, she’s amazingly calm.

“I don’t need a lot of sleep,” she jokes when asked how she manages. Diet Mountain Dew also helps. Loans on top of loans pay most of her way. (The state gives her less than $15 a day to cover each child’s expenses.) And although her mother died just after she graduated from the conservatory, the lingering effect of her love pulls Bell through.

“Although my mom struggled when we were growing up, she loved us deeply,” Bells says. “I know that loving a person makes his or her life better. Each of us has the power to change lives, just by caring. My mom was right: after you go through the really bad parts, the rest is cake. I love the quote by Churchill that says, ‘If you’re going through hell, keep going!’ I want to help people keep going, even if I have to carry them myself through the worst of it.” — LH

Saved by the Bell: the Numbers