18. Steps Backwards

Over the years I have met hundreds of kids. I have seen them come on and off the streets, in and out of jails, homes, shelters and even their own communities. Though it has just been a few years, I have seen some of these kids grow up before my eyes.
I have seen some of them go from being small boys to young men. I have seen some of them move on and succeed, but most of them have remained on the streets.
It is extremely hard to see an older boy on the streets. I look at him and remember the young, innocent, kid that he was a few years back, with his whole life before him and so much potential. One of the saddest such situations was with a boy that I met all the way back when I was on my DTS.
Andre, thirteen years old at the time, would come into downtown with a group of three other boys and they would perform for money. One of their mothers had made them matching outfits and one of them would play the drum as the other three did tricks and danced.
They made a lot of money because people respected their creativity. Every night they would return home with the day’s earnings. Andre was an incredibly intelligent boy but had had a falling out at the school he had attended and they kicked him out. I watched as Andre slowly got sucked into the street life.
He started by spending weekends in Cape Town. Instead of going home, he would just sleep in town from Friday and then he would go home Sunday afternoon. From there he started strolling in Cape Town permanently and refused to go home.
I talked with him about going home and finally convinced him to at least visit. I took him to his house and wondered why he was hesitant. I soon found out.
When we got to his house, his mother was in the yard. When we approached her, she looked up from the laundry she was hanging only once, then looked back down and started screaming profanity in Afrikaans like, “Why did you bring this piece of trash here? Take him back wherever you found him! I don’t want him!”
I had no clue what to do. I tried to talk to her but she was extremely harsh. I could tell that she was not all together there and was possibly a little sick or psychotic. Andre and I went back into town and I apologized for talking him into going home. Surprisingly, he said he was happy anyway. He loved his mother dearly, despite the way she treated him.
Over the years Andre’s drug use increased and he became more bitter and hard on the streets. Then, over the course of one week, his whole world started to fall apart.
He got word that his mom had been run over by a taxi and died. He was having a rough time and started having some sort of emotional breakdown. I got a call from an organization where he was attending their daily program. They said that he was sobbing uncontrollably and could not calm down and he kept asking for me.
I went and talked to him and drove him home so he could be with his family. After the funeral, he returned to the streets. That same week he experienced another traumatic situation that seemed to be the last straw for him.
There had been a little girl on the streets that had been seducing him. Despite her numerous attempts, he kept turning her away. One night, after Andre had smoked buttons and passed out, the girl unzipped his pants and started having sex with him while he was asleep.
After a while, he woke up and groggily pushed her off in disgust. She was so embarrassed by his reaction that she screamed and told everyone that he had raped her. Everyone on the streets believed the ten year old girl’s version of the story.
The whole situation mixed with the fresh trauma of his mom’s death totally messed with Andre’s head. He started behaving psychotically.
He said that he would always see (what were actually hallucinations) the little girl and that she would tell him to do different things, most of them were bad things. He also said that when he would go to sleep, his “spirit” would walk around Cape Town and he could see everywhere it went and everything it did.
During that time he would call me at early hours of the morning in tears because he didn’t know what to do. I would try and talk to him and calm him down. He then started getting suicidal and tried on a couple of occasions to throw himself out of the train.
I got a call from some of his friends one morning and they told me how he had just walked right into the middle
of busy traffic with his eyes closed and, when he got to the middle of the street, he knelt down on his knees and held his hands in the air. He told me the voices told him to do it.
His friends got him out of the middle of the road and called me immediately. I went straight through and found them and talked with Andre. He agreed to come with me. He then told me that the only time he feels “normal” is when he either had on his one particular friend’s hat (which someone had stolen from him) or when he was touching me.
From that point on he wanted to hold my hand or be right by my side at all times. He was in a constant dream state and even when he said he was feeling “normal” he still acted extremely strange.
I took Andre to a children’s hospital and waited several hours only to get in and have them tell us that he was too old for that hospital. The social worker did however call another hospital and make an appointment for us for the next day.
We left and I had to go to the store to pick up some groceries. In the store, he acted so weird that it was hard for me to believe that it was Andre. He would pick up stuff, smell it, tap it on his head, and then put it back down or he would pick something up off the shelf and then just drop it on the ground.
When we were leaving the store, he started feeling that “everybody” was after him and he started crying and wanted to run to the car. We went to my house and until he went to sleep he refused to leave my side. He asked to sleep beside me and was terrified that I would go and sleep in the other room after he went to sleep.
A couple of times throughout the night he woke up screaming and crying and I would have to calm him down. The next morning we went to the hospital.
We sat in the waiting room from 11:00am until 4:00pm and finally got called in. When the doctor finally saw us, he took one look at the file and he refused to see Andre because the area Andre is from is not covered by that hospital.
I told him that the other social worker knew that, but because he lives on the street she sent us to this one. He was in a bad mood and was in no way planning on helping us. He even told me that “it wasn’t his problem”.
I was pretty angry. I went and talked to the receptionist and she felt really bad and called the appropriate hospital and made an appointment for us to go straight through. We sat at that hospital until about 7:30pm and then finally got called into the psychiatrist’s office.
By this point Andre had settled down a bit but was still not acting like his normal self. The psychiatrist said that the psychotic behavior seemed to be induced by the trauma and the drug use. She said that because he has a family history of psychotic behavior, the drugs Andre was abusing will continue to induce it and make it worse, eventually leading to permanent damage.
She said that the best thing that she could suggest was for him to stay off drugs. She could not check him into the psychiatric hospital because he didn’t “seem” to be acting abnormal at that moment. It was up to me to find Andre a place to stay. In the meantime he stayed with me.
One day while he was sleeping on the couch I had to run to the store. I couldn’t wake him up so I just decided to leave him there and run to the store. I knew it would only take couple of minutes. I went to the store and when I got back, Andre was curled up in a ball in front of the door. He was shaking and crying.
When I opened the door he grabbed me and yelled, “WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?!”
He frantically told me that when he woke up the ghosts started chasing him and he couldn’t get away. He told me he didn’t know if they had killed me, or what they had done with me because he couldn’t find me. Andre then ran outside and refused to go back into the house.
I tried to reason with him but he would not calm down. He decided to go back into Cape Town and he went on his way.
Andre is definitely schizophrenic. Though he does not permanently behave psychotically, he will change personalities. Although he still goes into Cape Town every day he is staying with his aunt in his mom’s old house. Sometimes something will happen there and they will kick him out for a while, but he doesn’t spend many nights in Cape Town and will return home.
I have gotten used to his personalities and have learned how to handle each of them. When he calls me, I can immediately tell which one it is and will respond and talk to him appropriately: One is extremely aggressive and rude but I have learned how to talk to him and keep that personality calm and happy.
The other one is sweet, caring and gentle, a lot like the old Andre that I once knew.
It is hard to see him and remember the little kid he once was. He is just one example, though extreme, of what the streets can do to a kid. I have seen it happen on a smaller scale with many others.