His deep, luminous brown eyes were the same as I remember, the innocence still there but tinged with wariness when he returned last month. His eyes flitted away quickly and the laughter that had always been so ready was gone.

Joey was 7 when I was his "special friend" as a volunteer with the Sacramento Children's Home for abused and neglected children, where I visited him each week. Sometimes I took him places, occasionally to the zoo, where I can still see my husband and the boy sitting on a bench under an ancient oak – a lost soul of a child and an amputee who knew suffering, silhouetted in a gleam of sun among the shadows, my husband's arm around the boy's shoulder.

About a year later, Joey, whose name has been changed along with the other children mentioned here to protect confidentiality, was placed in foster care. Now, he is 13 and back at the children's home. Like so many in the child welfare system, he has been moved many times – with no anchor, no place to truly call "home."

While most of us celebrate the Thanksgiving season with our families, many children in our community are deprived of a permanent home. These kids' emotional problems often make it difficult for them to integrate into normal family life, and they end up back and forth between families and group homes. They often see themselves as "the throwaway kids."

There are approximately 60,000 children in the foster care system in California, with more than 3,000 in Sacramento County. One in five children entering foster care has been there before. The Sacramento Children's Home today handles kids who most often have "failed" more than eight foster placements.

Kathy has been in the "system" most of her life. She is a strong athlete and math whiz but with a shell that often kept her emotionally distant. I was paired with her after Joey left and we spent many hours on walks, going window shopping and munching ice cream cones at Gunther's. After about a year, she was placed in a foster home, a placement that failed. She ended up in juvenile hall and is now at a children's shelter.

Marian, with flowing black hair and a trusting smile, suffered the loss of her mother in a car crash, reportedly due to drug problems. The girl, who already endured multiple incidents of abandonment, also has no permanent home, and is now in a shelter.

These kinds of examples are all too common for kids in the "system." Yet I have come to marvel that despite the many dark colors that are woven into the fabric of these children's lives, there are also silver threads – thanks to unsung heroes and heroines in our community who do their best to create surrogate families and special moments for these children.

I have seen staff with very little pay devote their time year after year to taking these children under their wing – offering them a smile, a word of encouragement, help with homework and some guidance about their future. I have seen women volunteers come week after week, with a new game to play, a colorful craft, a movie, a birthday cake or freshly baked cookies. I have seen men arrive after work and organize a lively basketball game in the courtyard.

One couple, paired with a little girl, has stayed in touch with her even after she was moved to a group home out of town. The girl also visits their relatives, who live there, including for Thanksgiving. When an older couple took the young boy they were paired with home for visits, a younger family in their neighborhood got to know him and adopted him.

Volunteers are also integral to the Crisis Nursery program, where distressed parents can have their children cared for, for a period of time. They host birthday celebrations and vegetable harvests. Volunteers help organize and distribute the "Giving Trees" each year, hung with the children's Christmas gift "wish stars." Many local companies host these trees, and their employees help purchase items.

During my visit last week, the gleam began to flicker in Joey's eyes again. He was playing cards with a man on the staff who had befriended and guided him when he was here before. The boy showed me a scrapbook in which he had pasted pictures of friends, both human and animal. They were all in pairs – two school chums, two cats, two dogs. During his travails these past many years, it seems, it was these moments of companionship, of someone caring, that had sustained him.

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Margaret A. Bengs is a former political speechwriter who lives in Carmichael. Reach her at peggybengs@hotmail.com.

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