Garbage Bag Suitcase by Shenandoah Chefalo

Garbage Bag Suitcase by Shenandoah Chefalo

Garbage Bag Suitcase is the true story of Shenandoah Chefalo's wholly dysfunctional journey through a childhood with neglectful, drug-and alcohol addicted parents. She endured numerous moves in the middle of the night with just minutes to pack, multiple changes in schools, hunger, cruelty, and loneliness.

Finally at the age of 13, Shen had had enough. After being abandoned by her mother for months at her grandmother's retirement community, she asked to be put into foster care. Surely she would fare better at a stable home than living with her mother? It turns out that it was not the storybook ending she had hoped for. With foster parents more interested in the income received by housing a foster child, Shen was once again neglected emotionally. The money she earned working at the local grocery store was taken by her foster parents to cover her expenses. When a car accident lands her in the hospital with grave injuries and no one came to visit her during her three-week stay, she realizes she is truly all alone in the world.

Overcoming her many adversities, Shen became part of the 3% of all foster care children who get into college, and the 1% who graduate. She became a successful businesswoman, got married, and had a daughter. Despite her numerous achievements in life though, she still suffers from the long-term effects of neglect, and the coping skills that she adapted in her childhood are not always productive in her
adult life.

Garbage Bag Suitcase is not only the inspiring and hair-raising story of one woman's journey to over- come her desolate childhood, but it also presents grass-root solutions on how to revamp the broken foster care system.

Deborah Chefalo got dissatisfied with the ever-revolving door of the criminal justice system after nearly two decades as a law office administrator, and set out to discover a method to fix it. She went to Coach U and earned her certification as a life coach. Shenandoah began to understand her childhood in a level she had never known before after completing the program. She began her investigation and discovered that almost 400,000 children are placed in foster care every day in the United States. Over sixty-one percent of those children leave the system without a home; approximately fifty percent end up in prison within two years of leaving; and nearly eighty percent of inmates on death row are former foster children.

These (and other statistics) convinced Shenandoah that she needed to act. She was on a mission to tell her story and educate the broader public about the harsh truths of a life she had long sought to conceal. She feels that some of the grassroots ideas she presents in Trash Bag Suitcase have the potential to improve children's lives and the country's landscape.