"I'm Neal Conan in Washington. When Dwayne Stenstrom was eight years old, a van pulled up to his home on the Winnebago Reservation in Nebraska. The woman behind the wheel said she was taking him away, just for the summer, a summer that turned out to be 12 years long. Dwayne Stenstrom joins us now from his office in Mission, South Dakota, and nice to have you with us today.

DWAYNE STENSTROM: Thank you.

CONAN: And some listeners will remember you from a story last week on MORNING EDITION where you describe waiting for that lady and her van again at the end of that summer.

STENSTROM: Yeah, obviously it never came back.

CONAN: And you went on to a life in foster care there in Nebraska, with people who you say treated you very well.

STENSTROM: Yeah, when I was in foster care, and the last family that we ended up in, like I said, I thought it was just going to be a summer visit and I guess never really paid a lot of attention to, you know, what was going around me. Being that young, I don't know if I was supposed to, but I guess what was always on my mind was just waiting for that vehicle to come back and take me back home.

But I guess as the months went by and then the years went by, the realization was that I guess I wasn't going to go back. "

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