My name is Frankie Abel and I am a guardian ad litem advocating for abused and neglected children in the court system in Broward County, Florida.I'm married to Jonathan. We are Frankie & Johnny.I was born in Port-of-Spain but lived in Clifton Hill Oil Camp, Point Fortin, from the age of four to nine. It was amazing. We grew up with a very diverse group of children from Holland, England, Nigeria, Trinidad, all different races and colours.
I'm more agnostic than atheist because I'm kind of a proof person and have no proof one way or the other. But there're too many things wrong in the world for there to be this all-powerful, all-caring person that could fix everything.I came very close to dying in 2006. I was in a coma for two weeks. Had I been in Trinidad, I probably wouldn't be here today. Not the quality of the doctors, Trinidad has great doctors, just the facilities that were available to save my life on short notice like that.
My medical bill was three-quarters of a million US dollars. I think my husband and I were out-of-pocket maybe $5,000 out of that. But people have lost their homes from medical bills. That's why we want Obamacare!
After I woke up, religious people told me they were praying for me. "So you see how God does answer prayers? I say, "You see how good that 24-hour dialysis machine working?" It was the doctors' intelligence and the quality of machines and medicine that kept me alive. And maybe I had a will to live, too. But it wasn't God. I didn't see any bright light, no voice telling me to go back. They had a lot of Asian people, though.
Every book I've ever read, I've read the last page first; because, in case I die, at least I know how it ended. I don't have to fast-forward to the last scene of a movie, though; I really don't think I'm going to die in two hours.I was on the board of directors of the company I was working for, the best in Trinidad. I was 35 years old and there was nowhere else to go. So, after my divorce from my first husband, I applied for an inter-company transfer.
I left my Miami job in 2004 and volunteered at a hospice. The difficult part wasn't dealing with people at the end of life. It was that I got bored at an intellectual level. A friend told me I would be a great guardian and it did stimulate me, intellectually, because you have to learn the welfare and court systems and, more than that, you're advocating for children.
A guardian ad litem will visit one or two children and write a report that goes before the judge. I'm now a courtesy guardian. I have 15 cases, children whose cases originated somewhere else but who have been placed in Broward County. The guardian in the other county cannot visit, because it's too far, so I write the reports on their behalf. I can help a lot more children than just one or two.
It's like triage: I determine whether the children are in a safe enough environment that we can, as it were, give a guardian to the gunshot wound and take a little more time to get one for the broken arm.There are times I leave a case and feel extremely sad, but I let myself feel the sadness and let it go. You can't hold on to it. You can't help the children if you're busy feeling sad.
The best part about the job is when I close a case, because it means the child has got permanency. The worst thing is to have children floundering in the court system for years and years. The bad side of the job is that we actually have to have guardians.I have cases that are babies. Children sexually and physically abused to a point where the damage is often irreparable. It's stupid to think there could be a God who would allow that kind of thing to happen.
Anybody born and raised in Trinidad is one of the luckiest people in the world. All my Trini friends have friends of different races and creeds. In America, even though people say they're not racists, birds of a feather flock together.I couldn't imagine my life without black or Indian or Chinese friends.
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