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“I’m always willing to try new things,” said Desiree, who is the winner of the Tribune Extra Effort Award at Bangor High School.
Desiree, 17, hasn’t always had a choice about trying new things.
When she was 3 years old, Desiree, her younger sister and two older brothers were placed in foster care.
Their mother suffered from mental illness. Her father had his own troubles.
“Dad wasn’t around all that much,” she said.
Desiree and her siblings lived for about two years with one couple before the siblings were split up. The boys went to live with a family in Rockland; the girls were placed with Marjorie and Dave Lawrence.
Desiree remembered the excitement of waiting to meet her new mother, wondering what she would be like. She hoped she would be tall and blond — “a Barbie-doll type mom.”
That wasn’t exactly the case.
Marjorie, 62, was a nurse. Her husband, Dave, was the former principal of Hylandale Academy. The couple had two grown children and a teenage daughter of their own.
They had decided to become foster parents at the urging of their son, who had done the same. The Parker girls came in the summer of 1995, an emergency placement.
“Here’s two little girls in car seats,” Marjorie remembered. “Two little red-heads. That was a surprise.”
Desiree warmed up to Marjorie, who she describes as a caretaker and a good cook.
“It’s kind of like a growing process,” she said.
Being separated from her brothers was the hard part. “It wasn’t like ‘pity me,’” she said. “It was ‘how can I make this better?’”
Desiree is “gregarious, outgoing, bubbly,” said Bangor Principal Don Addington. “She’s always got a smile on her face.”
Growing up in the Lawrence home helped nurture her love of helped nurture her love of music. She plays clarinet in band and helped tutor other students her freshman and sophomore years.
But singing is her passion.
This year, Desiree, a senior, starred in the school’s production of “Annie Get Your Gun.” “She knocked everyone’s socks off,” Addington said. She also sings in the madrigal and vocal jazz groups.
“I’m known for being the girl who sings at school,” she said.
She’s also known as the girl who’s involved in countless extracurricular activities and volunteers through her church.
Desiree isn’t done trying new things. Next fall, she plans to study nursing at Andrews University, a Seventh Day Adventist college in Berrien Springs, Mich.
“I want to be in a university with good people,” she said, using her fingers to indicate quotation marks around the word good.
For many of her classmates, she said, the idea of fun is going out to drink beer. But they don’t know the kinds of problems that can cause some families, Desiree said. “I’m like ‘You have no idea.’”
Desiree is excited about Andrews because of its reputation for a multicultural student body. “I think that’ll be really cool to meet people from around the world,” she said.
Desiree wants to do missionary work, preferably in Africa, which captured her attention when she saw a television show about genocide there. She hopes to use her nursing degree to fight AIDS and poverty.
Still, she’s a little nervous about the potential for living in countries without modern conveniences.
“That will definitely be eye-opening,” she said.
Eventually, Desiree hopes to find “someone that’s good to marry,” adopt three or four children and get involved with community projects
“If anything, I would like to leave my mark on the world in any way possible that was for the betterment of society,” Desiree wrote in her Extra Effort Award application.
“In my situation, foster care made me grow as a person, striving to be the best I can be, and to help those around me that are less fortunate than myself.”
