“The hardest part is when you see them return or go back to the parent or move somewhere else because you become attached to them like your own children,” says Verna and George Kite as they sit in their Bethlehem home. George smiles while Verna reminisces.

The couple — recently recognised by the Governor General for their selfless and tireless five decades of fostering children — are talking to Weekend Sun reporter Ayla Yeoman.

Last week, The Sun covered how the octogenarians’ outstanding accomplishments and 56 years contributing to New Zealand’s foster care system led to them them receiving an Honouring Excellence award at 2024′s Excellence in Foster Care Awards in March.

This week, part two of their story allows them to share their experiences with children they fostered over the years, while not identifying the individuals.

“I’ve been heartbroken so many times over children and you sort of think, ‘I’m not gonna do this again’, but then the next one comes up so you do it,” says Verna, who has forgotten how many children she and husband George have cared for in their life.

The couple, who are 85 and 80, would love to continue to foster children even at their age, but, unfortunately, George’s health isn’t up to it. Every story they tell The Sun, they tell with the same amount of enthusiasm — sharing memories of the good and the bad, the times they laughed and the times they cried.

The ‘professional thief’

“We got short-term children from Hamilton Court whose parents were fighting for custody. They would bring them out to us [at our Waikato farm] and we might have them for a week, three weeks, we might have them for three months,” says Verna, who began fostering in 1968.

“Those children were quite hard because they’d been torn away from their parents and that was really hard, you really felt for them.”

“One boy, aged 15, was 6ft and a “professional thief”, says George. “You could be sitting here and you could put your purse down there and he’d take the money out of it and you wouldn’t see it,” says Verna.

“He was so good at it. He said to us: ‘The day I started school my older brother and I broke into a house on our way home from school and we stole jewellery, at 5’.

“I said to him: ‘What did your mother do’? He said: ‘Oh, she kept the watch’,” says Verna. “I said to him: ‘Well, do you know what I would have done? You would’ve gone straight back to that house and told the people you what you’d done and taken the consequences.”

Verna says the boy ended up stealing something from the college he was attending. “... George took him back the next morning. The boy said it was the hardest thing he’s ever done and no one had ever taken the time to show him that attention, to take him back, and to show him what was right or wrong.”

It was at that moment Verna and George decided they wanted to continue fostering. “It’s kids like that that you want to help, that want to be helped,” says Verna. “He was a very bright boy.”

Last chances

The couple say: “You never know what the kid’s going to be like”. One boy, aged 7, they fostered had been in trouble before he got to them. “He was a gorgeous little kid. He’d been in trouble so many times and this was his last chance, coming to the farm.”

The boy had to go to court and Verna and George told the boy to be good. “Okay I’ll be on my best behaviour,” the boy would say. “He walks into the courtroom and says: ‘Hi George, how are you’?. That was the magistrate,” says Verna. The magistrate said to the boy: “And what did I say if you came back again,” to which the boy replied: “You don’t have to worry. I’m with good people. I’m on a farm and I love it”.

Verna says the boy had met the magistrate so many times that, as he walked out of the courtroom, he said: “Oh, you wanna come out to the farm? Come out for morning tea, Verna’s a good cook.”

Verna reckons 99 per cent of the children she and George took in came to them with problems. “They’ve all got their own problems. When they first arrive we’d let them get a feel of the place and we’d sit down and tell them our expectations and then we just work from there.”

Stock photo.

Struggle to connect

“We’ve had some really problem children,” says Verna, but the couple asked the agencies involved to remove only one child from their care.

“We had a 16-year-old girl and we’d had her for three months and I just couldn’t relate to her,” says Verna. “I said to the officer: ‘I can’t relate to her, can you put her somewhere where someone can do her some good’? So when she came off the school bus and came in she said: ‘Are you sending me on?’ and I said: ‘Well, I can’t help you. I’ve tried but I just can’t get through to you, somebody else might be able to’? She burst into tears and she said: ‘I love it here. It’s the first time I’ve felt that I’ve been loved’. Yet she couldn’t relate to us, and she really opened up after that.

“There just needed to be something to open her up, she’d been so badly damaged,” says Verna.

“Then she went on to become a doctor.”

Grandma and Granddad

Verna says some of the kids she and George fostered still keep in contact with them — one little boy even calls them Granddad and Grandma. “Unfortunately, his father’s family are all alcoholics and drug addicts, and a couple of them are overseas running gangs.

“When he was very young he had to come here and we had to try and teach the parents how to feed him and how to be parents.

“We did this twice a week in the morning for two hours. They weren’t capable of being parents, they were too heavily on drugs and he was taken off them in the end, which was the best thing because he’s in a beautiful home now and he is so loved.”

Angry

Verna says a lot of the children were very angry, very verbal and would swear a lot and throw things.

“We had one little 3-year-old boy that every word that came out of his mouth was a swear word. He was quite a violent little boy.

“After about three days we sat him on the couch there and we said: ‘Enough’ and he said: ‘You can’t tell me what to do’. I replied: ‘If you want to stay here, you don’t swear, you don’t throw things, you don’t hit people. You remember that you are in a home and we want to love you, but we can’t love you when you do this’. ‘Nobody loves me’, said the boy.

“He was a real hard little one and then one day George was outside doing something and he went out and he says: ‘Can I help you’?, and George gave him a broom and he helped, he just wanted to help.

“In winter we’d hang our clothes on a rack out in front there [Verna points out the window at the veranda]. He’d pick the clothes out of the basket and hand them to me and I’d put them on, and the same night he’d help bring them in, he’d take the pegs out and hand them in and we’d bring them in and put them on the table and fold them and he’d put them in groups because he knew what belonged to what child and put them on their beds.

“That was the way we got through to him. If any of the other family came to try and help, oh my all hell would break loose. His sister, aged 5, loved to set the table. He said: ‘Can I help’? I said: ‘Well that’s your sister’s job you ask her’. Then he was putting the spoons and forks on and he said to me: ‘Can I put the knives on’? I said: ‘Well, okay’. They put the knives on and he came back and he said ‘You trust me, don’t you’? He was 3!” says Verna.

The boy was still in a nappy so they decided to get him out of nappies. The couple went to buy him underwear — and he replied: ‘I don’t want to wear them’. “I asked why and he said: ‘Because I’m only going to wee them and poo them’.”

Verna helped potty train the boy with rewards every time he went to the toilet. In three days he was solely using the toilet — he never wet the bed again. “Then when [they] went back to their parents, he went to school in pull-ups. How demoralising is that for a 5-year-old? They just couldn’t be bothered. It’s the little things that you can do to help them,” says Verna.

Many at once

The boy was one of a group of siblings. “They came to us absolutely filthy, the two little ones stank to be honest; it was terrible. It took four lots of bathwater to get them clean. They all had nits.

“They arrived just after 5[pm] with what they were standing in, nothing else, not even a nappy for the baby.”

Verna says social service officers acquired clothes for the children while Verna cooked them dinner. “They were so badly neglected. We just fell so in love with those children, they were very affectionate.

The older children were in primary school, but were way behind in their schooling because they’d missed so many days.

“The older boy missed 109 days of school in a year. So we went down to school and just said: ‘How can we help these children’? They told us what we could do. The older boy was illiterate and he was two years behind his age group. In six months we had him up to his age group. It gave him all the confidence in the world to know that he could go to school and do the work.”

Be there

Verna and George had this family of children for seven months. “I think the biggest challenge for us was just letting them tell you what had happened, you just want to fix it, but you couldn’t.

“You had to be there for them. I think that was one of the things that I found hard is that you can’t fix it, you can listen, you can’t condemn parents, you can just be there and love them.”

Verna says the children “feel nobody wants them, nobody cares, and that there’s no future for them”. “I always say to them: ‘You can be whatever you want to be if you want it bad enough’.

“A lot of the kids used to say to me: ‘Oh, I didn’t think I could do that’, and it’s great and their school work picks up. They’d say: ‘I was always dumb but now look, I got a good mark’.”

The couple’s aim with their foster children was always tell them they could achieve their dreams — but they had to work for it. “... We did that with our children and then our grandchildren. They’ve all achieved it, they just needed something positive behind them telling them they could do it.”