12. The System

“Woman hold her head and cry, because her son had been shot down in the street and died, just because of the system.”

These are the words of Bob Marley in his song Johnny Was. The “system” is an abstract word that is made up, in the natural, of many different elements, which can either positively or negatively affect those that live under it. In Cape Town, many of the street kids become victims of the system, entering into it innocently at a young age, only to be sucked in and led astray.
They become familiar with the way the system works and they use it to their advantage, playing off the conflicts between different organizations and going in and out of the different facilities. It seems to be fun and exciting for a young child but when that young child grows up, loses his or her cuteness and is stuck with the harsh reality that it might now be “too late”, they have to fight even harder to try and make something of their lives.
I have seen this over and over again. The kids have run away from home, been in and out of every shelter and home in Cape Town, in and out of the different jails and juvenile facilities, and always head back to the streets. Then they come to the point where they are tired of that kind of life, and all of their options are used up. I had my first real taste of this in January of 2001.
I was in town one day and I saw a twelve year old kid named Daniel. I had known him for a while and he was normally playful and happy, but that day he looked miserable.
After talking to him for a few minutes and not getting much response, he eventually told me about some terrible experiences he had gone through the night before. He said he just wanted to go home, and I agreed to take him. He explained to me that he lives with his foster mother, who had taken care of him for most of his life. He had run away because she yelled at him all the time and beat him a lot.
We drove to his foster mother’s home and I was staggered at her response to Daniel. She totally ignored him but acted extremely excited to see me, someone she didn’t even know.
I told her that Daniel had been in Cape Town and that he wanted to come home. She said it would be okay but still didn’t pay much attention to him.
This was the same time that my friend was visiting from the States and we were going to go do some site seeing and I asked if it would be okay if Daniel came with us and that we would bring him back that evening. She said it would be fine.
We had a great day and then when we went to drop him back off, he didn’t want to get out of the car. I think he had remembered why he had run away in the first place. He also didn’t want to go back to Cape Town.
He finally thought that the better of the two would be to stay with his mom and I told him that if he had any problems, he should call me or come to my house because I didn’t live too far away.
Sure enough, the next morning I had a knock on the door. It was Daniel. His mom had been terrible to him the night before and refused to give him food, but she and his little sister ate in front of him. I told him not to worry and that he could stay at my place until I could find a place for him to stay.
I had no clue how difficult it would be. Because it was the holiday season, most of the social workers of the homes and shelters were not even at the organizations. It was difficult because not only was I trying to look for a place for him to stay, I was also looking after him.
It was an eye opening experience and I learned a great deal from it! It was different from hanging out with the kids on the street. I was responsible for him. We had a good time but there were a few times when we butted heads.
It would start out as small thing that I would confront him on and because of the ways he had learned to deal with conflict, he would throw a temper tantrum and want to run away. I would tell him that he was welcome to leave but I would not let him go until he calmed down and talked about it. He struggled with that concept for a short while but got the hang of it after a while.
Eventually it got to the point, after he threw some fits on a couple of occasions, when he learned to sit and talk and not get so worked up so quickly. I remember writing my mom and dad an email during the second week Daniel was staying with me. I told them what an eye opening experience it was for me and I thanked them for everything that they had done for me, and for how patient they were with me.
I said something to the extent of, “Thank you for all those times I might have seemed ungrateful and unthankful. I am sorry for all those times I gave you such a hard time and I now understand what you were talking about when I would get upset with something and you would say, ‘One day when you have your own kids, you will understand!’ I now do understand!”
After two weeks of running into brick wall after brick wall, I finally was able to get him into Beautiful Gate, even though he was older than the kids that we normally take in.
After all of that, he stayed at Beautiful Gate for about a week and then ran away, to go back into Cape Town. It was sad because I had seen, in the time that he had stayed with me, that he had a lot of potential. He was just a kid that seriously needed a lot of personal attention, and in a home with other boys it is hard to give that kind of attention. That is where the system fails many of these kids in a big way.
Not too long after that, he met up with some gangsters downtown. They used him as a look-out boy. They broke into a house, robbed it, and raped the lady in the house. They then tried to kill her by stabbing her, but were unsuccessful.
They got caught, and Daniel, along with the gangsters, got arrested and charged with breaking-and-entering, rape and attempted murder.
I visited Daniel in the juvenile prison and he said that he didn’t realize what they were going to do and if he got out of jail, he was going to go home and stay home. The gangsters thought that Daniel had given a lot of information and they promised to kill him when they got a chance.
He stayed in the juvenile facility for a while and then he managed to run away. That facility is notorious for being easy to run away from.
He came straight to me and I called the court to ask what could be done. They said that if his foster mom agreed to allow him to stay at her house, they would give him house arrest.
We went to her and explained the situation and she agreed and went with us to court to make it official. He stayed there for about a month. In that time he had to appear in court on several occasions and I would pick him and his foster mother up and we would all go together.
She was still just as rude to him but he hung in there because he knew that there were no other options for him. He finally couldn’t take it anymore after she beat him one night and he ran over to my house.
I managed to get him in a shelter, and I informed the courts about the change. He would only have to stay there for a week because what was supposed to be his last court case was at the end of that same week.
When I went to pick up his mom the morning of the case she told me that she was not going to go and that she never wanted to see him again. I couldn’t change her mind so I went and picked up Daniel and we went to the court case without her.
During the case, when they asked Daniel, “where is your legal guardian?”, he turned around and pointed to me. The whole courtroom turned around and looked at me in confusion. The magistrate asked me to step forward.
I told her about the whole situation and how his mother had refused to come to the case. The magistrate asked me if I would agree to be his legal guardian for court purposes only. I explained to her that I would be glad to but that I could not be responsible for him outside of court.
I explained that he was staying in a shelter and if he was in court, I would also be there. She said that that was all that she needed from me and I signed the papers as his legal guardian.
They postponed the case for another month and when I went to pick up Daniel for the next court date, he had run away from the shelter the night before.
I didn’t see him after that for a long time but at one point I did get a call from another court and they informed me that he had another case against him. I had no clue where Daniel was and I was worried because the gangsters were still after him and the case was taking longer because Daniel had run away, which was only agitating the gangsters further.

He ironically popped up in town one night, almost a year later, on the same week that the other gangsters were let out of jail. I had already heard that they had been looking for him and had just seen them right before I saw Daniel.
When I bumped into him, without even greeting him I asked him if he knew who was in town. His faced turned white when I told him and he said that he had been staying in a shelter and had to come to court that day and had missed the last train. I told him to meet me at a specific place later and I would take him back to the shelter where he was staying.
About an hour later, when I pulled up to the spot where I had told him to wait, he was sitting there looking extremely nervous.
I took him back to the shelter where he was staying, which was only a temporary place for him. Since then, he has remained off the streets and out of town but has hopped around from place to place. He was actually even living on the streets in the area that I live in for a while but got into another shelter soon after that.
Daniel is a kid that does not have a stable home to go to, so he has spent his whole life moving from the streets to the shelters to the juvenile jails and back to the streets again. The open-door policy at all of the shelters makes it easy for these kids to just run away when things don’t go their way. The lack of involvement of individuals working in social services makes it all the easier for kids to walk away and the lack of follow up by the juvenile judicial system lets the kids get away with practically anything.
We can’t really blame the kids. They have just adapted to their environments and we are the ones that have allowed them to develop these runaway defense mechanisms by allowing them to continue running back to the streets. Daniel is just one example of a child of the system. In my time here I have come across many similar situations.
In January of 2002, I had five kids approach me wanting to come off the streets. I struggled to get places for them because they all fell into the same age group of around thirteen and most places for older boys won’t take them because they are too young, and most places for younger boys will not take them because they are too old. I ended up only being able to find a spot for one out of the five of them.
The weak structure and the system here have been incredibly difficult to work with and against. Organizational politics and lack of government care and involvement only helps to perpetuate the system.
Eventually someone has to stand up and say that they will no longer allow kids to throw away their lives! We have to stand up and not allow kids to make decisions that they are not capable of making, such as living on the streets and being in charge of themselves. We have to take back the role of adults and allow the children to take back the role of being children again. We cannot continue to allow this generation to become children of the system.