Garbage Bag Suitcase

Garbage Bag Suitcase is the true story of my wholly dysfunctional journey through a childhood with neglectful, drug and alcohol addicted parents, filled with constant moves in the middle of the night, multiple schools, lack of food, and loneliness. Forgotten birthdays, drug-fueled parties and empty pantries were the norm in whatever household we ended up residing in.

Finally at the age of 13, I’d had enough. After being abandoned by my mother for weeks at my grandmother’s apartment in a retirement community, I asked to be put into foster care. Surely I would fare better at a stable home than living with my highly unstable and unreliable mother? It turns out that foster care was not the storybook ending she I’d hoped for. With foster parents more interested in the income received by housing a foster child, I was once again neglected emotionally. Even the money I earned working at the local grocery store was taken by my foster parents to “cover your expenses.” When a car accident landed me in the hospital with grave injuries and no one came to visit me during my three-week stay, I realized that I was truly all-alone in the world.

Overcoming many adversities, I became part of the 3% of all foster care children who get into college and the 1% who actually graduate. I became a successful businesswoman, got married, and had a daughter. Despite numerous achievements in life though, I still suffer from the long-term effects of neglect, and finds the coping skills that I adapted in my childhood are not always productive in adult life.

Garbage Bag Suitcase is not only the inspiring and hair-raising story of my journey to overcome my desolate childhood, it discusses in detail the lasting effects of foster care and it also presents grass-root solutions on how to revamp the broken foster care system, something many memoirs in this category fail to address.

About the Author

Plagued and embarrassed by her name, made worse by a nomadic childhood that made it impossible to build lasting relationships, Shenandoah Chefalo developed a tough skin at an early age. Along the way she learned to deal with disappointment, push through discomfort, overcome adversity and accurately gauge people, qualities that have helped her to succeed.

After spending nearly 20 years as a Law Office Administrator, Shenandoah became unsettled by the ever revolving door of people into the criminal justice system and set out to find a way to change it. She attended Coach U and became a certified life coach. Working through that program Shenandoah began to understand her childhood in a way she never had before.

She began researching and learned that there were nearly 400,000 children in the foster care system each day in the United States. Out of those children nearly 61% would age out of the system without having a place to live, nearly 50% end up incarcerated within two years of aging out and almost 80% of people on death row are former foster alumni. These and other statistics made Shenandoah realize that she had to do something.

She set out on a mission to tell her story and educate the general public about the grim realties of a life that she had always tried to hide. She believes that some of the grass roots solutions that she offers as well as ideas and solutions from others could change the lives of children and the landscape of the country.

Shenandoah Chefalo is a graduate of Michigan State University, holding a Bachelor of Arts with a Major in Interdisciplinary Studies in Social Science, a Core Essentials Graduate from Coach U, a Certified Law of Attraction Advanced Practitioner, a member of the National Speakers Association and volunteers with several organizations both locally, nationally and internationally. Shenandoah Chefalo is also the author of an e-book entitled Setting Your Vision and Defining Your Goals and is also working on another book Hiking for Stillness.