A painful story

After about a year, he wandered back to his home village, where a miracle occurred. His mother, stepfather and six siblings, who had been scattered across the countryside during the war, were home.

Jack's father had left the family when he was a baby. He had been adopted by his mother's second husband, Haniel, the namesake of the home Jack now runs.

"He took me in as his own son and loved me like a son."

To understand the rest of the story, you have to understand African culture. Family is the society, run almost like a government, and the will of the family is a powerful force. Haniel's family -- his brothers, sisters, parents, nieces, nephews, cousins -- did not accept Jack because he was not a blood relative.

"When I graduated from school, they forced me out," Jack says. "Haniel didn't have enough power to stop them."

It's the truly painful part of the story, the part that makes him connect with the kids who walk into his home.

"The rejection, the feeling that nobody wanted me," he says, "that was far worse than being homeless."

An opportunity

The Missouri Department of Social Services sends a young man to a place like Haniel's, licensed as a residential child-care facility, because he has been removed from his family and cannot live peaceably in a foster home.

"When children are sent to residential care, they are going into the most structured type of setting short of incarceration," says Fred Proebsting, a Social Services Department supervisor. "Residential treatment is designed for a young person who needs a lot of monitoring."

Jack and his wife, Veretta, opened Haniel's 11 years ago after five years as foster parents. It is intended to be a place of peace for children who have known little more than chaos.

Most of the youths who go to Haniel's don't want to be there.

"I can't stand this place," says Rodney, 16. "How do you expect me to excel when they tell you when to get up, when to go to bed, when to talk? I been through foster homes all my life, but I never saw anything like this."

Jack says that most youths who come to his home have had trouble with the foster-parent system or the law. They have been violent or unruly.

"Their attitude coming in is not that different from a prisoner's. They feel like maybe they are being punished," he says. "Our job is to make them feel like they have an opportunity for a new start."

Victims of trauma

When you walk through Jack's dormitory, it seems nice enough. The living area has two televisions, one with cable and one with Nintendo. A radio pumps out Nelly, P. Diddy and Murphy Lee, exhorting everyone to "shake a tail feather." Some of the kids relax around the Nintendo machine, while others eat breakfast. They seem well-behaved and normal.

Jack walks around the living and dining areas of the long, narrow building that he and volunteers converted into the dorm. It is part of a complex of buildings that includes a house used for administrative work and an old motel that has been converted into apartments for a transition-living program. Jack is carrying a gallon of milk, pouring it into bowls of cereal the young men hold.

"If you don't do this," Jack says, "the milk will be gone in no time."

This is not his normal job. He spends most of his time with administrative work, budgeting, raising money and talking with state social services officials. Haniel's Home of Hope is big and has two missions: residential care for younger children trying to re-enter a foster home and transitional living for boys 16 to 21 to prepare them for the real world.

Jack is cruising the dorm this morning because the woman who has been supervising in the mornings quit.

"Oh, something happened that made her decide that was enough," Jack says. "These guys can be hard sometimes."

If they are hard, they come by it honestly, says Haniel's therapist and program director, Joe Murphy.

"Unequivocally the connection between all of the children is trauma," Murphy says. "Abuse, lack of parental awareness, lack of basic resources, limited medical attention. Put these together for a child, and it just blows them away."

A way out

Rodney came into state custody when his mother forced him to sell drugs.

"She turned her back on me after I chose to step away from that," he says. "I've just been moving around since then, one place to the next place. And now people look at me like I'm nothing but a ruthless thug. That's what they call me, but I'm going to shock a lot of people."

Rodney says he wants to be a writer. He says most people could never understand his reality.

"I've talked to people who've had everything -- a home, clothes, anything they wanted," Rodney says. "I was real with them. I don't fabricate. But you tell them your lifestyle, how you were brought up, and they don't get it."

Youths who are assigned to Haniel's can be from any walk of life. But most come from economically depressed neighborhoods, and nearly all come from broken homes. The fact is, Murphy says, that what these kids appear to be on the outside belies their real nature.

"Most of them are good kids," Murphy says. "They've just had more to deal with than any kid ever should."

That's where Ibanibo Jack can relate. But he also believes there is a way out -- through family and faith.

Faith into practice

Jack doesn't like to talk about his own tribulations, but if not for them he wouldn't be in Kansas City. He would not have met his wife, and he would not have built his new family.

His faith and his church are a big part of that family. Jack will not force religion down any child's throat. But he also will not hide his Christianity. One Sunday morning, he has taken most of the youths from Haniel's to his church, the Wabash Avenue Church of God.

Veretta and daughter Lewketta-ine, 19, help lead the opening songs as the lyrics are projected on the wall. His sons Otonye, 15, and Oboma, 10, play percussion. The small church is rocking as the congregation of about 100 sings "Chain Breaker."

"This is the only answer," Jack says. "Faith and your family."

Some of the young men from Haniel's hang back, playing it cool. Others sing along joyfully: "I felt the chains falling off of me, oh Lord..."

"I have seen how he has grown in his faith with the Lord," pastor David Cotto says. "He is constantly looking for ways to put his faith into practice, and he adds a great deal of strength to this church."

Next to Jack stands Nemi Wisdom Adoki, a visitor from Nigeria he calls "Uncle."

"He is not a blood relative," Jack says. "He is someone who grew close to me while I was in school and became family to me. In Nigeria if someone is like family to you and older, then you call him `Uncle.' "

It is this expansive sense of family, a common African idea, that gave Jack the strength to overcome his early hardships.

"After I was pushed out by my family," Jack says, "(Adoki's) family invited me in."

In a sense, that's what Jack and his family have done in Kansas City. But it was a long journey for Jack before he could help others.

A new home

Adoki, chief in a Nigerian village of more than 1,000 people, says he could always see in Jack a drive to succeed.

"He was very disciplined, even as a young man," Adoki says. "When his family members became brutal to him and pushed him away, he decided he needed a new home and that would be in America. I told him: `What you are doing is best. Go for the Golden Fleece.' "

Jack knew a friend who had moved to Kansas City and attended Penn Valley Community College. He decided he wanted to do the same.

To receive a student visa, he needed enough money to pay for two years' tuition. For five years, Jack worked a full-time job at the post office. At night he worked as a traffic officer.

"He did not use the money for his own comforts," Adoki says. "He saved everything he could. He worked hard and stayed focused."

Then when had enough money for the flight and the tuition, he left.

"After the first year in Kansas City," Jack says, laughing, "I had spent all of the money."

So he went to work for a janitorial service. After a year he started his own janitorial business and hired three workers to help him, all while attending Penn Valley.

Mutual mission

He also met Veretta, who lived in Rockford, Ill., while she was visiting friends in Kansas City. Her childhood had been no fairy tale either -- she was the youngest of eight children reared by a single mother.

"Dad left when I was 2," she says. "Mom got by. She did some welfare, worked two or three jobs when I was older, made ends meet."

Early in Veretta's life, the family lived in Cabrini Green, a notorious housing project in Chicago.

"When I was 8 years old, some of the gang members got after my brothers," Veretta says, "so my mom left there running one night, and we never looked back."

When she and Jack fell in love, they found a mutual desire to serve children. They became foster parents in 1987, a year after they were married.

The mission has grown from there, eventually becoming a licensed center with a board of directors and employees. Cotto says the Jacks have made a tremendous impact on the community, simply by making themselves available.

"Brother Jack is a person of vision," Cotto says. "He not only sees what is, but what can be. He is able to not only set a goal, but to pursue it and reach it."

The Jacks are humble about their mission.

"We just had a desire to do more," says Veretta, who works at Research Medical Center as a nurse's aide. "You look around and you see people who could help, but they have this attitude that `I got mine.' It won't work that way."

Her husband has carved a new home and a new life in America. But he has not forgotten his roots. He returns to Nigeria once a year to visit his mother, Ineba. Haniel died on Christmas last year.

After all the years, after all of the pain, Jack still feels a deep connection to his country. So the lines stay open.

"He has taught us something about American society," Adoki says. "We see in that society a high level of discrimination, where not all people are allowed to bring their full potential. But he has been able to break the ice. And we see now that if you are willing to work hard, you are able to make great strides in America. We were skeptical that he would be able to make it. But he did."

And Jack, who sees the victims of poverty in America every day, says there is something to learn from Africa as well.

"In Africa the community takes care of each other," he says. "We don't look to the government or social service to do it; it is the family's responsibility and all of the community's. Why should a child fall through the cracks? Why shouldn't somebody care about him?"