Bethany’s Story
Our daughter, Bethany, who has Down Syndrome, lived with her family for nineteen of her twenty-five years. This family included myself (her mother Julia), her Dad Don, and her two older brothers, Josh and Joe. I was not at all ready to part with her when Bethany announced that she wanted to leave home and live with “friends”. But she has indeed found a caring home in L’Arche Edmonton, and a job she loves in the community where she lives. She has always been an affectionate, outgoing person, but true friends, outside of “programs”, always seemed to be most precious because they were so rare.
While Bethany was in school the staff did facilitate small “Circles of Friends” from time to time. Most of these people have long since vanished from Bethany’s life. Now that she is a young woman, living apart from us, we felt that it was time to start over. Because we live far from Edmonton, in the Northwest Territories, we knew that we needed help!
We already knew about PLAN from a Wills & Estates workshop and other events we had attended in BC many years ago. We knew that PLAN believed that relationships were of utmost importance to our sons and daughters, and that they offered a facilitation program that could help us organize a new network of support for Bethany.
It is our hope that the network, still in its planning stages, will be built around the goals that Bethany, with PLAN Edmonton’s help, has set for herself. She wants to build friendships outside of paid staff, and to participate more in the community life of Sherwood Park where she makes her home. She is especially seeking a welcoming church family where she can exercise her gift of music. We would very much like to have persons in Bethany’s network that could assist her in attending activities where she can safely meet members of the opposite sex. Above all else, Bethany wishes to find a “soulmate”, one who will accept her and love her unconditionally. We too want her to have that chance.
We look forward with enthusiasm to the network-building process that will help Bethany’s cherished dreams come true.
— Julia Flumerfelt
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Plan E Newsletter© 2011 PLAN Institute
