Overview

Shenandoah Chefalo is on a wholly dysfunctional journey through a childhood with neglectful, drug-and alcohol addicted parents. She endures numerous moves in the middle of the night with just minutes to pack, multiple changes in schools, hunger, cruelty, and loneliness. Finally at the age of thirteen, Shen had had enough. After being abandoned by her mother for months at her grandmother's retirement community, she asks to be put into foster care. Surely she would fare better at a stable home than living with her mother? It turns out that it was not the storybook ending she had hoped for. When a car accident lands her in the hospital with grave injuries and no one comes to visit her during her three-week stay, she realizes she is truly all alone in the world. Overcoming many adversities, Shen became part of the three percent of all foster care children who get into college, and the one percent who graduate. Despite her numerous achievements in life though, she still suffers from the long-term effects of neglect, and the coping skills that she adapted in her childhood are not always productive in her adult life. Garbage Bag Suitcase is not only the inspiring and hair-raising story of one woman's journey to overcome her desolate childhood, but it also presents grass-root solutions on how to revamp the broken foster care system.

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After spending nearly twenty years as a law office administrator, Shenandoah Chefalo became unsettled by the ever-revolving door of 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 are nearly 400,000 children in the foster care system each day in the United States. Out of those children, nearly sixty-one percent age out of the system without having a place to live; nearly fifty percent end up incarcerated within two years of aging out; and almost eighty percent 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 realities of a life that she had always tried to hide. She believes that some of the grassroots solutions she offers in Garbage Bag Suitcase could change the lives of children and the landscape of the country. Coleen Marlo is an AudioFile Earphones Award-winning narrator who has been nominated for an Audie Award twice, winning in 2011. She has been awarded three Listen-Up Awards from Publishers Weekly, an AudioFile Audiobook of the Year Award in 2011, and was named Audiobook Narrator of the Year for 2010 by Publishers Weekly. She is a member of the prestigious Actors Studio and taught acting for ten years at the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. Marlo is a proud founding member of Deyan Institute of Voice Artistry and Technology.

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