16. Let’s Scrap

Life on the streets is sporadic and spontaneous! The money made today, is spent before tonight. Live for the day, and let tomorrow worry about itself. In the same way, the social behavior of the kids is just as erratic.
Kids will move from group to group. They will be enemies one day and best friends the next, and vice versa. A fight can break out over the smallest thing and weapons will be pulled out and objects will be picked up and they will fight as though it is the last fight they will ever fight.
You might come back ten minutes later and find the two bloody kids, who had just been fighting, sitting arm in arm laughing and talking as if they were the best of friends. That was the amazing part for me! They are ready to fight at the drop of a hat, but their capacity to forgive is amazing.
It took me a while to get used to this aspect of street culture, but I learned quickly. I have broken up hundreds upon hundreds of fights, and I learned which ones to step into and which ones to leave be. This only came from trial and error.
I remember one of the first fights I ever broke up. It was in the first week I had moved back to Cape Town, in August 2000. I had gone to the train station to find Desmond, a kid that I had

become close to. I found him and we were standing there talking and then all of the sudden, out of the clear blue, Anthea, a street girl, ran up to him and started choking him and punching him in the face.
I didn’t realize that it branched out of something that had happened right before I came. I was stunned.
Now, let me just quickly say, I would rather go against some of the roughest gangsters in town before going against a street girl, because they can be ruthless. I tried to pry Anthea’s hands off of Desmond’s throat and I was eventually successful. She ran off, only to return a few second later with a huge wine bottle.
She threw it at Desmond and then ran towards him. He dodged the bottle but it crashed on the ground, echoing throughout the train station. Before I knew it, Anthea had her death grip on him again.
Finally, some station security guards came and split them up. To my surprise, they walked them out of the station, faced them towards each other and said, “If you want to fight, you can fight out here.” I jumped in between them before Anthea could get to Desmond again.
She would move one way, and I would move with her. We went back and forth with this dance for a while and then she picked up an empty coke can and tried to hit Desmond, reaching over my head, the whole time saying, “Get out of the way Ryan! I don’t want to hurt you!!”
She accidentally gave me a hard blow to the head with the coke can and was so shocked that she totally froze and started apologizing. She walked away in embarrassment.
I thought the fight was over. Desmond and I started walking away when all of the sudden Anthea appeared again, this time with the back up of an older gangster.
He walked up to Desmond and punched him a couple of times across the face. I tried to convince him to stop but that only turned his attention and anger towards me. He started strutting in my direction as if he was going to also teach me a lesson.
Just about the time he had almost reached me the security guards showed up again and arrested all three of them. Poor Desmond was bleeding, crying and confused. Anthea was still yelling and screaming and as they led them all away, the gangster looked at me and told me that the next time he saw me in town he would kill me.
The fullness of his words resonated in my head. Wow, my first death threat! A kid that was standing nearby watching the whole thing came up to me and reprimanded me. I will never forget his words.
He said, “Ryan, I don’t ever want to see you break up a fight again. You have to understand how we live. One minute we fight, the next minute we are friends again.” He then reassured me that all three of them would be friends again the next day. I didn’t believe him.
The next day, I decided that it was best to tend to the death threat as soon as possible, so I went to find that gangster to try and settle things. To my absolute shock, I not only found him, smiling and greeting me as though nothing had ever happened, but he was standing there with none other than Demond and Anthea. They all seemed to be best of friends.
They told me they sorted out their differences and everything was over now. I could hardly believe it!
That was one of my first times to break up a fight and I learned a good lesson out of it. I learned that it is just a part of the way that these kids live and I need to respect it to a certain degree. Now, that doesn’t mean that I would sit there and watch two kids kill each other, but I also learned how important it is for me to have the respect and relationship with the kids, before I jump into the middle of a battle.
That first blow to the head with a coke can in that first situation is only one of two times that I got hurt breaking up a fight. And that is out of hundreds of them. It got to the point to where I had built up enough respect that if I stood in between the two kids that were fighting, they would stop because they didn’t want to hurt me and then we could talk things through. This of course did make for some pretty funny situations.
A good example of one of these times also happened outside the station. I had a new volunteer from Beautiful Gate with me and was showing her around town. She had just come from Holland and she wanted to see what it was like on the streets.
When we got to the train station, we stood and talked with a group of kids. An argument broke out between two boys, Gabriel and Tino. It got heated when Tino hit Gabriel across the face and Gabriel pulled a six-inch butcher knife from his pants. He started chasing Tino around the grassy area outside of the station.
While he was running he was swinging the knife in a hacking motion, like the killers always do in old horror movies. Tino made an escape and disappeared into the station and Gabriel came back and stood with the group.
The Dutch girl looked a little shaken up by the whole event and I knew that it was far from over and expected Tino to come back for revenge.
I talked to Gabriel, who was panting heavily and got him to settle down and put the knife away. Right about that time, Tino came strutting around the corner with a huge rock in one hand and a wooden pole in the other.
Gabriel, once again, drew his sword. I started talking to them both before Tino had reached us. There they stood on either side of me, yelling at each other. They kept asking me politely to get out of the way and I refused, saying there was no way I was going to allow them to hurt each other like that.
Finally, Tino thought he saw an opening and tried to swing the pole for Gabriel’s head. I don’t really know how it happened but my ‘ninja’ instincts must have kicked in and I reached up and caught the pole. I immediately looked over at Gabriel for the counter attack and sure enough he was about to swing his knife.
I managed to catch his wrist and stop the motion. Now here I stood holding the pole in one hand, the wrist with a knife attached to it in the other hand, and I was prying them apart from each other with my body. This is where it got funny.
Tino tried to hit Gabriel with the rock but before he could, I somehow managed to kick the rock out of his hand. Then I managed to pry the pole and the knife out of their hands.
After I obtained possession of the weapons I joked with them that if they didn’t stop, I would stab them both! They laughed and we talked through their problem and they calmed down, for the moment.
The Dutch girl was pretty shaken up. We stood there and talked for a few more minutes when all of a sudden the argument started up again. When they had calmed down after the first bout, I had given the knife back to Gabriel, so of course, he pulled it out again.
This was the funniest part for me. The Dutch girl was extremely scared at that point and there was a smaller kid that was standing there watching the whole thing. He is small, but he is about sixteen and has been in Cape Town for eight years or more, and is one of the hardest kids I know.
He was not fazed a bit by the whole situation and just continued to emotionlessly watch the spectacle while huffing on his thinners. The Dutch girl, probably trying to comfort herself, came over to him and said, with a shaky voice, “Don’t be scared!! It will be OK!!!” His reaction was classic! He just kind of looked up at her with a kind of “whatever” expression and turned his attention back to the fight.
I broke it up quickly and we fully talked through the problem that time. I then had to attend to the poor traumatized Dutch girl.
Another memorable time was with two boys that had gotten into a pretty bad brawl. One Friday night I was sitting in a restaurant with a friend eating supper when I got a call from another lady who also works with the street kids. She was at her house and had just gotten a phone call from a group of kids in town that were a bit frantic because two of the boys had stabbed each other.
Fortunately, I was still in town and was able to check out what was going on. They were at a private hospital, so I went there to see what the story was.
When I got there, part of the group was outside and they told me that the two boys were inside. I went in to check out the situation and spoke to a doctor. Because the hospital where they were was a private one, the doctors had only stabilized them and stopped the bleeding but they were waiting to be transferred to a government hospital.
One of the boys had been going into convulsions on arrival and the other one had been bleeding profusely. They were waiting for the ambulance so I told them that I would take them with my car. The two boys got into my car and immediately started to argue.
I turned around with a very stern voice and look on my face and told them that they were not going to fight anymore. They had never seen me in such an authoritative role so they were both extremely surprised and a little scared that I might “pull over” as an agitated father would on a road trip.
They didn’t say another word until we got to the hospital. The story came out that they were just high on glue and had gotten in a little argument over a game and ended up stabbing each other with broken bottlenecks.
The one boy, Bobbie, had about a four inch stab on his neck and the other, Sipumle, got hit on a cut that still had the stitches from a previous injury, so the area around the old wound was swollen up. They both had minor cuts and scrapes here and there.
When we got to the government hospital we didn’t even have to wait and got to go straight back, which is probably one of the few times I have ever gotten such quick service. They immediately started cleaning and stitching them up.
When they had both been seen they were sitting beside each other but they were still angry and wouldn’t even look at each other. Now this is the part that amazed me. All of a sudden, Sipumle pulled a lollipop out of his pocket, bit it in half and gave the other half to Bobbie.
He didn’t say anything, or give a hug, or a big smile, but it came from his heart and Bobbie knew what he was saying. That simple act was an apology and a “please forgive me”. Bobbie accepted and from that point on they both forgot completely about what had happened and forgave each other. It was almost as if it had never happened.
They immediately began laughing and talking again. It was an amazing lesson for me. So many times, we hold grudges for hours, days, even years over little things, and they stab each other and a few hours later they are best friends again. It really made me think!
I have learned so much from the spontaneity of street life. I have definitely become an expert ‘fight-breaker-upper’, at the very least. There really is a lot we can learn from these kids. So many times, we will have a problem with someone and not be straight with them. We will hold in the grudge or make ‘round-about’ remarks, without really confronting the real issue.
In comparison to that, I think I would rather someone just come up to me with a knife and tell me exactly what their problem with me is. I am not saying it is good to fight over every little thing but I do think there is something to learn from it.
But beyond that, something that has stuck with me on a deeper level is the kids’ capacity to forgive and even forget. We can all take a lesson from a couple of bloody kids that had fought, sorted out their problems and then sat with their arms around each other, talking, laughing, and bleeding on each other.