- “My name is Davion and I’ve been in foster care since I was born. Old or young, dad or mom, black, white, purple. I don’t care"
Wearing a borrowed suit a size too big for him, he stood in front of the church congregation, took a deep breath and made a heartbreaking plea for a family.
“My name is Davion and I’ve been in foster care since I was born,” he said. “I’ll take anyone. Old or young, dad or mom, black, white, purple. I don’t care. And I would be really appreciative. The best I could be.”
Given the chance to make the appeal at his local church in St Petersburg, Florida, 15-year-old Davion Navar Henry Only spent weeks preparing for his big day.
To make himself more attractive to prospective parents he worked hard to lose two and a half stone in weight and knuckled down at school, gaining top grades.
The youngster knew that his future could depend on that one moment at St Mark Missionary Baptist Church. Stepping down from the pulpit, he told onlookers: “God hasn’t given up and I won’t either.”
Not surprisingly, onlookers at the church were in tears when they heard his story.
Even the Rev Brian Brown, who gave the youngster permission to appear before the 300-strong congregation, was overwhelmed.
“It just ripped at me,” he said. “Afterwards I had so many people saying, ‘Pastor, if I just had room I would take him tomorrow'.”
Davion hoped for no more than a kind couple or person in that church to find it in their hearts to give him a home. But his heartfelt speech has provoked incredible sympathy from all around the world.
First the local newspaper picked up on his emotional story, then US TV networks and websites. And now Davion’s adoption agency has had more than 10,000 requests for information about him.
There have been calls from Canada, India, Mexico, Australia, the UK and Iran and so many online enquiries that their website temporarily crashed.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said his caseworker Connie Going. “His simple plea just struck a chord with the world.”
Davion was born in prison and was just a few months old when he was taken into care by the authorities. Only recently while scouring the internet did he discover the tragic truth about his mother.
La Dwina McCloud was a crack cocaine addict with a long criminal record for robbery, theft, assault, battery and cocaine procession. She had been sentenced to at least 15 stints in prison.
Nicknamed Big Dusty because she stood over six feet tall and weighed almost 19 stone, she was well-known in her tough neighbourhood in Clearwater, a coastal resort just a few miles from St Petersburg.
In recent years diabetes led to blindness and amputation of both her lower legs. Then she died of a heart attack this summer at 55.
Big Dusty: Davion's mother
Rather than losing hope over his mother’s terrible story, Davion uses it to inspire his own future.
“When I found out all that stuff about my family, it made me want to be more successful, no matter what,” he said.
“I’m not going to use all my bad stuff that happened to me as an excuse. I’m going to use it as motivation to push me more and give me more courage.”
Since he was first taken from his mother Davion has been in and out of foster care. Right now he’s living in a home for 12 boys and has never had a room to call his own.
Learning of his mother’s death made him that little bit more determined to finally be adopted.
For some time his details had appeared on an adoption website. In the online message he explained how he wished to grow up to become a police officer, and told how he once saved a boy from drowning.
It went on to say: “Davion doesn’t care if you are rich or poor or what your ethnic background is – he just wants to be adopted by a family with a married couple who are nice, fun and that know how to cook!”
Maybe it was because he also liked hip-hop and rap music, but whatever the reason, nobody wanted Davion. Then at his mother’s funeral in June he met relatives, many for the first time, who appeared to genuinely care for him.
This convinced him that even complete strangers could love him.
Caseworker Connie said: “One of the things they told Davion was that he was loved. He got in the car and said, ‘I didn’t know I was loved, Miss Connie.’ And it is a human’s right to be loved and wanted. When you don’t feel that you are loved it’s hard to succeed in life.”
Davion’s grandmother Carole Ware, 71, says: “We really want to be a part of his life. If nobody from our family can adopt him, then we want to be able to have regular contact.
“He is such a lovely young man. At one point he said to me, ‘Grandma, don’t cry, it’s going to be all right.
"I am going to be your first grandson to go to college and I am going to make you proud of me, I promise you that’.”
His sister Demetrius tried to explain his mother’s predicament to Davion too.
“Mama battled with drugs most of her life,” she said. “Everything that went wrong for her was down to the drugs – it was an illness that she had to try to live with,” she said.
“Towards the end, she had turned things around and was trying to make amends, but by that point she was very sick with the diabetes.
“When we saw Davion he actually said if he’d have known his mama was out there and she was sick, he would have left the home and come to find her so he could take care of her.”
However, criminal convictions and their dire circumstances mean his biological family can’t adopt Davion.
Fortunately, the adoption authorities now have plenty of other options to consider. When his appeal went viral they had to employ a bank of 60 people to handle the volume of calls.
They came in from single mothers and grandparents to people who were childless and others who had already fostered kids.
Now specialists are filtering through the offers and drawing up a list of 100. A final shortlist of 10 will be prepared and Davion will be able to make his final choice.
“He will have a say,” said Connie. “We are following through with every offer, explaining the process to people and directing them to have some studies done.
“But I have no doubt that, because of these enquiries we will now find a family for him.”
Davion is amazed that “so many people actually want me” and even more excited by the realisation that, at the rate the process is moving, he might just be with the family he dreamed of by Christmas.
But the legacy of his moving plea in church is the most striking part of his story. By shining a spotlight on the thousands of other children in the care system in the US, his story has given hope to others in a similar situation.
Connie said: “We have more than 100,000 kids in care across just waiting for someone to take them in. We have been encouraging everyone to look at all the other kids who need them.”
And even after his wish apparently coming true, Davion has one more appeal to make. “There’s only one me, but all my friends, all the other guys at the home, all these other kids need families too,” he said.
“I know what it’s like to have nobody, with no light at the end of the tunnel, no one wants you. I just hope they don’t give up... and that someone give them the chance.”
Source Mirror
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