Kevin Almestica is a New York City real estate agent and bartender with big goals. "I want to design and own an apartment complex that is affordable housing, lottery-based, for all the people who come from terrible situations and need a place to stay," he says.

He knows what it’s like to need a safe home. Kevin's mother Diana gave birth to him while in shackles at a hospital near Rikers Island Correctional Center, where she was incarcerated.

Diana didn't want her boy growing up in the foster system, which is what happens to many kids born to incarcerated parents. She wanted someone to bring him into their family. And she knew whom to ask.

ADOPTED FOR GOOD

At the time of Kevin's birth, Mayra and Jose Abreu ministered to incarcerated women at Rikers Island. The couple saw their ministry as "adopting" the women—counseling them, holding Bible studies, inviting them into their home once released. Diana was one of the women they served.

They had not intended to take in a child, but when Diana asked them to look after Kevin until she was released, they said yes. Mayra recalls, "[Diana] was happy that she had someone that could take her child and bring him home, give him a family."

"As soon as I was born," Kevin says, "my mother"—that's what he calls Mayra—"took me in, and she raised me until my biological mother got out of prison." Though Diana eventually got out of prison, she remained mixed up with the wrong crowds.

Still, Kevin went to live with Diana upon her release. One day a drug-related shootout occurred in his home. Then, Diana took off, leaving 5-year-old Kevin and his dog in a New York City apartment.

GRAPPLING WITH GRIEF

Mayra and Jose raised Kevin in the church. "I was very, very involved with the Lord," Kevin remembers. "I prayed every day, I went to Bible camps, and I studied the Bible."

Home was now a calmer and safer place. Yet, Kevin's world was about to be rocked. His biological mother had come back into his life. Diana would visit him every Saturday. He really loved her. Then one day she didn't show up. She had been killed. "It was really hard on me," Kevin says. "I cried every day for like two years."

Grief colored Kevin's childhood. His biological father passed away when he was almost 8. His biological mother died one month before his 9^th birthday. Jose, his adoptive father, died when he was 12.

But in the darkness, two reliable sources of light shone in Kevin's life: Mayra and Angel Tree^®.

A FAMILY TRANSFORMED

Angel Tree is a Prison Fellowship® program that provides a pathway for incarcerated parents to give a Christmas gift, the Gospel, and a personal note to their children. The program had transformed Mayra and Jose's lives before they met Kevin.

Earlier in his life, Jose had struggled with drugs and was sentenced to two and a half to seven years in prison. While incarcerated, he filled out an Angel Tree form. "We didn't have anything for Christmas," remembers Mayra. "It was Christmas Eve 1989 when UPS delivered the [Angel Tree] box, and it changed my life completely. ... It was a total life transformation, reconciliation. I accepted the Lord, went to church."

Jose came home two and a half years later, after undergoing a transformation of his own. "He really was a new man," Mayra says. She joined the Prison Fellowship staff to help bring Angel Tree to more families and kids—like Kevin.