"We feel every kid, whether a child or a teenager, deserves a home, nurturing, love and care," Sherri Andrade said, calling each boy her son. But it has not been easy and at times, she said she has cried because she thought she was failing.

"When it comes to the point you don't want to do it anymore, they'll come up to you and genuinely apologize and say, 'Sorry I stole, sorry I lied or smoked.' They say, 'Thank you for loving me and being here.' "

Soft-spoken and respectful, the boys said they are now in a home where they are loved.

"Without this place, I wouldn't be getting good grades," said Jonathan Alsip, 16. "I wouldn't be going to school. I would be living on the street."

Persuading more families to follow the Andrades' example and agree to care for teen foster children is one of the goals of the Hawai'i Foster Parent Association's ninth annual Foster Care Conference being held Thursday at the Sheraton Waikiki.

Elaine Chung, a social worker with the state Department of Human Services, said 1,509 children — or 31 percent of all the foster children in the state — were between 12 and 18 years old in 2002, the latest figures available.

The state has 1,200 licensed homes for foster children, but many refuse to take teenagers, she said.

That's because people fear the challenge of dealing with them, Chung said, adding that she's convinced that if people attend the conference, they'll be persuaded to try.

As an incentive, Chung has $1,000 from a Sam's Club grant to pay the $75 conference fee for interested parents.

"It's for people who have thought about doing this but are fearful of taking a teen," she said.

Michaela Alexander

Sexually abused and neglected at age 10, Alexander was removed from her Hawai'i home and taken into foster care. She spent the next several years shunted from family to family until she was adopted at age 17.

Today, 30 years later, Alexander sees her foster care as positive despite all of the hardships. But at the time, she always expected the worst: to be taken away yet again. She lived with seven families — some for months and others for years.

"(Each move) was horrible because it was a personal rejection every single time," Alexander said.

Despite all that, her message to the conference will be that the foster parents who cared for her made a great difference in her life.

These days, she expresses her gratitude by talking to groups of prospective foster parents and at conferences to let people know that foster parents save children's lives.

"I know I wouldn't have survived were it not for the kindness of strangers," she said.

A social worker dropped by her home one day while she was hanging clothes to take her to a foster home, she said. She tried to go back into her home to talk to her parents. The doors were locked and her clothes were in brown paper bags on the porch.

But her first foster home gave her a sense of safety, sheets on the bed, medical and dental care. She discovered that normal people eat at a table, don't hit kids, and she wasn't asked to give her body to a man.

"None of these people who had me in their home needed to," Alexander said. "But they did. They opened their homes, and I wanted to stay with every single one of them."