5. Welcome Back

What an amazing feeling it was to come back to Cape Town! I was excited to get started and embark on this new adventure that was set before me.
In the beginning stages, I really just went on trial and error. I had the few relationships that I had already built with a small group of kids and I had a general outline in my mind of how this “street work” should work, even though Beautiful Gate had never had a street worker before, and I myself had never been a street worker before.
My friend Ronel joined me on the streets in the first few months of my return. That was helpful because not only was I not in it totally alone, but Afrikaans is Ronel’s mother language.
I felt strongly that the kids should not have to conform to me and speak English, so I would get Ronel to translate what I said into Afrikaans and then she would translate what they said into English for me. This made the kids more open to communicate with us.
Because I would hear everything that I and the kids said twice, it was easy for me to pick up the language. After about three months I could understand about half of what was being said.

In the beginning, Ronel and I went to town three times a week. We would go into town and find the different groups of kids and just hang out and talk with them.
Sometimes we would take a soccer ball and play soccer in any patch of grass we could find downtown. I also led the weekly soup outreach and took a team of DTS students into town every Tuesday night.
The other two days of the week I worked with the after school program that I had been involved with during my DTS. They needed someone to lead it for a three-month period and I agreed to do it for three months and then see whether or not I could continue.
I enjoyed the after school program but after the three months was up, I stopped working with the program to allow myself more time to work with the street kids.
Around that same time, Ronel came down with Hepatitis A and she had to stay in her house, without coming out, for six weeks. This is when I started getting out on my own. This is also when I started experimenting with Afrikaans.
Up to that point, I had depended on Ronel. Now, I was on my own. The kids were incredibly patient and helpful with me. Before you knew it, I could understand about seventy-five percent of what was said and I could speak enough to get by.
In those beginning days, I would spend long hours in town. I never had a “day off” and usually went into town every single day, even if it was just to drive through and see what was going on.
Some days I would go around 10:00am or 11:00am and then stay until around 5:00pm, only to go home, grab a bite to eat and then come back in the evening and then hang out until the early hours of the morning. Those early hours of the morning are some of the best foundations for many of my relationships.
I think part of the reason is because that is what separated me from the other organizations. The kids saw that it wasn’t a nine-to-five type job for me and I learned quickly that the only effective way to work with these kids is to let it just become a lifestyle, and not a job.
They are on the streets 24/7 and they never have “off hours” so I didn’t either. I also built all of my relationships with them strictly on the relationship, and nothing else, such as food, clothing, or money.
Building relationships is the main part of my work and everything else branched out of that. From there, I would help the kids with their problems and try to work towards a better future for them.
I soon saw that although it would be ideal if they would all get off the streets, it wasn’t a practical goal because of the structure of the system and the weak structure of the broken down communities. They basically chose to be there, and no matter how hard a person tries to convince them to come off the street, it has to be them that choose to leave.
I would take them for home visits if they wanted to, take them to the hospital if they were injured or sick, go with them to court, visit them in jail, and just be there to hang out.
We would talk if they had problems and sometimes just play around and goof off and laugh. Some of the most fun times were just the totally random, spontaneous situations I would find myself in. In all of this, I learned the ways of the streets and gained respect and authority.
Authority on the streets doesn’t just come over night - it has to be earned. There were many different ways I began to earn mine.
I remember one of the first situations where I could literally see a change in how the kids viewed me. In Cape Town, the homeless people dig through the trashcans for food and the average citizen knows this. So they will often gently place leftovers from a restaurant into the trash can, knowing that someone will come by and take it. The kids always manage to find good stuff in the trashcans.
One day when I was in town, this one boy had found almost a whole pack of hot chips (French fries) in a trashcan. A group of about seven kids started dividing the chips amongst themselves. One of the boys had the idea to also share with me. Some of the boys didn’t like the idea and assumed that I would not eat out of a trashcan.
The boy looked at me and decided to offer me a handful of chips anyways.
I took them from his dirty hand and ate them without hesitating. I will never forget the looks on their faces. They laughed and said things like, “OK! Now we can see that you are one of us!!!” That was the first of many times of eating out of the trashcans with the kids. Heck, there were even times where my money didn’t come in and I was broke for a whole week, when I found a couple of meals for myself out of the trash.