In the two weeks that Daniel stayed with me, I didn’t get to go to the streets that much and was stressed out by not being able to find a place for him to stay. The one day I did manage to make it into town and I didn’t see the kids anywhere.
I remembered that not too long ago they had shown me a water reservoir located downtown where they often go to swim. I had only been there once and they tried to get me to swim and I told them I couldn’t because I had on jeans.
Because I didn’t see the boys anywhere that day, I decided to go look at the “dam”, as they called it. Sure enough, there they were. There were about twenty to thirty of them there, young and old.
They were happy to see me and when I jumped the fence they immediately wanted me to also join them and swim. It was a hot day and I really wanted to take them up on their offer but, I had on jeans again. I declined, but this time, they were not going to take ‘no’ for an answer.
An older gangster walked up to me and told me that I had to swim. I explained my predicament to him but before I could think twice, he took off his pink and purple striped boxers that he had been swimming in, which was all he had on, and handed them to me. He told me that I could borrow his shorts.
I could not get myself to turn down this nice gesture so I took the boxers from the naked gangster.
I went in the bushes and changed into them. The boys became so excited when I walked out of the bushes ready to swim. I felt a little ridiculous with my white legs showing because of the shortness of the pink and purple striped boxers, but the cheers of the boys made me soon forget about it.
There was a huge drop off that the kids jump off of and they walked with me to the edge. I pretended like I was scared and that I wasn’t going to jump and I walked back to the bushes as if I was going to put my jeans back on. The kids were incredibly disappointed.
All of a sudden, I turned around and ran for the edge, and I dove off. As I glided into the cold refreshing water, I felt more than just physical refreshment. I also felt like all of the stress that I had been feeling was being washed off in the water.
As I emerged to the surface I could hear the cheers and clapping of all the kids. I wiped the water out of my eyes and looked up to see all the kids standing on the edge of the drop off, cheering for me. They then started jumping in with excitement and swam out to me. I thought they were going to drown me with excitement when they got out to me.
We swam all afternoon and had a great time. It was an incredible experience for me. At the end of the afternoon, I returned the boxers to the gangster, and I went home, feeling totally refreshed and renewed.
Some of the most amazing times I have had with the kids have been totally spontaneous situations. I can also always count on them to make me feel better if I am down.
People have worried about me before saying that I “work” too much and that I am going to burn out. But for me, it is different. It is hard for people to understand. I get life from hanging out with the kids.
Many times, I have been in hard situations, and really had no one to turn to for advice or comfort and then I get around the kids and I feel better. I am sure that I have given the kids something over the years, but I am also very sure that they have given me just as much if not more. I have been privileged to get to know the kids in this way and I wish that everyone could experience them and get to know them in the way I have, and not just as these hardened little dirty street kids.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
14. What a Gas
One day I came across a boy named Aviwe who was huddled over a drain. He was shaking and he didn’t look good at all. He is normally a very happy and hyper kid so I knew that something was wrong.
I was on the way to a meeting with the police so I took him with me and he slept in the office during the meeting. When we finished the meeting he still looked very bad and felt awful so I took him to the hospital.
We sat in the waiting room for a while. Aviwe was in intense pain the entire time. Different things ran through my mind of what could possibly be wrong. It could be a stomach ulcer, appendicitis, he could have food poisoning, and the list of terrible sicknesses went on in my head. They finally called us and we went back to see the doctor.
The doctor asked him the normal questions about what he had eaten and his general health and then began his check up. He began to press Aviwe’s stomach, asking him if “it hurt there”, and then he must have pushed the magic button because Aviwe passed gas.
He was immediately relieved and back to his normal self and pleased with the excellent job of the doctor. So, it wasn’t an ulcer, appendicitis or any other bad disease, but rather a bad case of gas.
The doctor just prescribed him with some anti-gas pills and we were on our way. It was a rather easy cure and VERY funny!
I was on the way to a meeting with the police so I took him with me and he slept in the office during the meeting. When we finished the meeting he still looked very bad and felt awful so I took him to the hospital.
We sat in the waiting room for a while. Aviwe was in intense pain the entire time. Different things ran through my mind of what could possibly be wrong. It could be a stomach ulcer, appendicitis, he could have food poisoning, and the list of terrible sicknesses went on in my head. They finally called us and we went back to see the doctor.
The doctor asked him the normal questions about what he had eaten and his general health and then began his check up. He began to press Aviwe’s stomach, asking him if “it hurt there”, and then he must have pushed the magic button because Aviwe passed gas.
He was immediately relieved and back to his normal self and pleased with the excellent job of the doctor. So, it wasn’t an ulcer, appendicitis or any other bad disease, but rather a bad case of gas.
The doctor just prescribed him with some anti-gas pills and we were on our way. It was a rather easy cure and VERY funny!
15. Street Doctor
Stab wounds, security-dog bites, burns, scars from police brutality, gashes from flying objects (such as bricks or metal stakes), sliced bottoms of feet from stepping on broken glass, chipped and rotten teeth. Injuries are VERY common with the street kids.
These listed above are just some of the more common ones. The story of ten year old Jason is just one example of how the kids damage themselves. Apparently he ‘ran his head into a flying metal stake’ thrown by a friend. He swears that it was only an accident and that the other kid didn’t mean to do it.
Like I said, these injuries are quite common and I have seen my share of them! One thing that has amazed me is that, one way or another, the kids always seem to make it to a government hospital or clinic where the treatment is free, whether they are taken by a friend or just manage to get there by themselves.
The other common thing that happens is the kid’s lack of follow up. They will go and get treatment, but then not necessarily follow through with it and sometimes their wounds end up in worse shape than when they started.
With Jason, he went the first time, and sat in the waiting room for a very long time and got impatient and left. Then realizing the next day that he should have stayed, he returned. Because
it had been over 24 hours since the accident had occurred they could no longer stitch it up for fear of it becoming an abscess. So instead, he was supposed to get it cleaned out every day and then return in one week to get it properly stitched.
However, when he asked me for help the only part that he remembered was that he had to go back in one week’s time to get it stitched. He totally forgot, or didn’t even understand from the beginning, that he had to go every day to get it cleaned.
When I took him to the doctor they informed me that he was supposed to have come every day and that they could no longer stitch it up. I then just had to take him to get it cleaned out every day for more than a month, until his wound healed.
I had another great example of this during that same month. At that point I had been living in Cape Town for about a year. Another boy, Donnie, probably around the same age as Jason also had trouble following up with his injury. He had been beaten up by the cops and had gone to the doctor where they gave him stitches for one of the cuts over his eye.
This had happened over a month ago and he had never returned to get the stitches removed. So one day while I was talking to him and a few other boys, I noticed that the wound had healed as much as it could but was starting to get scabby and red because the stitches should have been removed a long time ago.
He complained that he wanted them out and I joked with him saying that I would pull them out, as I joke when they complain about sore teeth. Usually they say, “No way!!” or something to that effect and the thought of me trying to “fix them up” is enough to make them want to go to the doctor or dentist.
In this case, it didn’t seem to work that way. Donnie was so annoyed with the stitches and so ready for them to come out that he said, “Ok!” and he pushed his face closer to me as if he was ready for me to just take the stitches out right then and there.
I decided to play along with it for a second and pulled out the scissors of my Swiss army knife to kind of scare him away from the idea of me taking out his stitches. I lunged the scissors towards his face in a cutting motion, hoping he would back down.
To my surprise, he closed his eye and pushed his face closer to my hand and assumed the “ready position”. I felt that I had taken it so far that by not taking out his stitches I would be letting him down so... OK, I had never removed stitches before, but I did watch very carefully as my doctor removed the stitches in my arm the summer I cut myself with hedge clippers, so at least I wasn’t going into it totally “uneducated”.
I just said a quick prayer in my head and started snipping. I successfully removed all the stitches, without hurting him I might add.
After I finished, it really was a huge reward to see his face and to hear him thank me over and over again. He seemed a bit shocked. The funny thing is that he wasn’t shocked that I actually “knew” how to remove stitches, but it was more because I DID remove them, right there on the street for him. It really meant a lot to him and it is certainly another situation that I will never forget!!
His wound is totally healed and there isn’t even a scar. Since that first experience my little Swiss army knife, that was a gift from a good friend, has come in handy over and over again. I have removed hundreds of stitches. The most I have ever removed in one sitting was with a boy that had fallen out of a train. He had cuts and gashes ALL over his body. I lost count that day at around thirty stitches!
These listed above are just some of the more common ones. The story of ten year old Jason is just one example of how the kids damage themselves. Apparently he ‘ran his head into a flying metal stake’ thrown by a friend. He swears that it was only an accident and that the other kid didn’t mean to do it.
Like I said, these injuries are quite common and I have seen my share of them! One thing that has amazed me is that, one way or another, the kids always seem to make it to a government hospital or clinic where the treatment is free, whether they are taken by a friend or just manage to get there by themselves.
The other common thing that happens is the kid’s lack of follow up. They will go and get treatment, but then not necessarily follow through with it and sometimes their wounds end up in worse shape than when they started.
With Jason, he went the first time, and sat in the waiting room for a very long time and got impatient and left. Then realizing the next day that he should have stayed, he returned. Because
it had been over 24 hours since the accident had occurred they could no longer stitch it up for fear of it becoming an abscess. So instead, he was supposed to get it cleaned out every day and then return in one week to get it properly stitched.
However, when he asked me for help the only part that he remembered was that he had to go back in one week’s time to get it stitched. He totally forgot, or didn’t even understand from the beginning, that he had to go every day to get it cleaned.
When I took him to the doctor they informed me that he was supposed to have come every day and that they could no longer stitch it up. I then just had to take him to get it cleaned out every day for more than a month, until his wound healed.
I had another great example of this during that same month. At that point I had been living in Cape Town for about a year. Another boy, Donnie, probably around the same age as Jason also had trouble following up with his injury. He had been beaten up by the cops and had gone to the doctor where they gave him stitches for one of the cuts over his eye.
This had happened over a month ago and he had never returned to get the stitches removed. So one day while I was talking to him and a few other boys, I noticed that the wound had healed as much as it could but was starting to get scabby and red because the stitches should have been removed a long time ago.
He complained that he wanted them out and I joked with him saying that I would pull them out, as I joke when they complain about sore teeth. Usually they say, “No way!!” or something to that effect and the thought of me trying to “fix them up” is enough to make them want to go to the doctor or dentist.
In this case, it didn’t seem to work that way. Donnie was so annoyed with the stitches and so ready for them to come out that he said, “Ok!” and he pushed his face closer to me as if he was ready for me to just take the stitches out right then and there.
I decided to play along with it for a second and pulled out the scissors of my Swiss army knife to kind of scare him away from the idea of me taking out his stitches. I lunged the scissors towards his face in a cutting motion, hoping he would back down.
To my surprise, he closed his eye and pushed his face closer to my hand and assumed the “ready position”. I felt that I had taken it so far that by not taking out his stitches I would be letting him down so... OK, I had never removed stitches before, but I did watch very carefully as my doctor removed the stitches in my arm the summer I cut myself with hedge clippers, so at least I wasn’t going into it totally “uneducated”.
I just said a quick prayer in my head and started snipping. I successfully removed all the stitches, without hurting him I might add.
After I finished, it really was a huge reward to see his face and to hear him thank me over and over again. He seemed a bit shocked. The funny thing is that he wasn’t shocked that I actually “knew” how to remove stitches, but it was more because I DID remove them, right there on the street for him. It really meant a lot to him and it is certainly another situation that I will never forget!!
His wound is totally healed and there isn’t even a scar. Since that first experience my little Swiss army knife, that was a gift from a good friend, has come in handy over and over again. I have removed hundreds of stitches. The most I have ever removed in one sitting was with a boy that had fallen out of a train. He had cuts and gashes ALL over his body. I lost count that day at around thirty stitches!
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.
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.
17. That Bugs Me
Lice, bed bugs, ringworms, weird kind of termite-like bugs, and scabies; I have conquered them all. These are all things that street kids are in constant battle with, and I have also had the opportunity to share it with them. I am actually fortunate that I have not had them more than I have.
I have actually been extremely fortunate. Let’s see… I had lice and bed bugs once each. A simple cutting of the hair and washing of the sheets worked fine for both.
Ringworms I have had on a couple of occasions. Once I had two huge ones on my face. The only thing I could remember every time I looked in the mirror was how my mom told me, when I was little, that if you pick your nose and eat your boogers, you would get ringworms. That is the very reason I stopped that, at a young age I might add. All I knew was that I had definitely NOT gotten those ring worms from eating boogers!
On a couple of occasions I have had this weird kind of boil-like things appear on my hand. I still have no clue what in the world they were. They kind of looked like a pimple that was exposed to some sort of radioactive chemicals or something. I still have a scar on my hand from one of them.
The weird termite-like bugs had to be the funniest! I actually call them homeless bugs because they are quite common in the
blankets of homeless people. I have no clue what class they are but they bear a striking resemblance to termites. They are extremely passive bugs though. They don’t bite or cause trouble; they just like to hang out in your blanket and eventually your hair.
I was intimately introduced to them when one of the kids stayed at my house one night because I had to take him to the hospital the next morning. The bugs must have decided they were tired of him and that they were going to move on and stay with me.
I tried to vacuum them up, and thought I got them all. Well, I didn’t. A few days later I felt something on my forehead. It felt like a drop of sweat. I tried to wipe it off, but to my surprise, it was a homeless bug! I had long hair at the time and they had nested in it.
It was a pretty funny and embarrassing thing, at times, to be talking with someone and then feel something on my forehead and then see a look of horror in the person’s eyes as they try and figure out why I had bugs crawling out of my hair and onto my forehead. Fortunately, after a few months, they must have gotten tired of me because the just went away.
The worst thing I have EVER experienced is scabies!!! Oh my word!!! I had scabies in the summer of 2002 and it was awful. It was truly one of the most terrible things I have ever had!
There was a bad breakout of them amongst the kids that summer. Scabies burrow under your skin and it makes these red dots appear that eventually turn into huge rashes. They can only burrow in areas where they have something to push against so the armpits, waist line, bases of fingers and pubic areas are the common areas that are affected.
I didn’t even realize what I had for a couple of months so I assumed it was fleas or bedbugs. When I finally realized that is was actually scabies, I had already developed an extremely bad case. I spent MANY nights awake, because that is the time that they are the most active and it itches even more.
I have never itched like that in my life!! There were times when I felt like cutting off my skin! I went to the pharmacy to get medication and I went home to apply it. After I had evenly smeared it over my whole body, it started to feel like it was burning my skin off.
I have a pretty high tolerance for pain but I have never felt anything like that before! It literally felt like acid eating away at my skin. I tried to wash it off and the water seemed to make the pain increase.
I washed with soap as my skin continued to burn and after about fifteen minutes it finally stopped. I laughed because I was supposed to keep that stuff on my skin for twenty-four hours and I couldn’t even make it for a few minutes. I called the pharmacist who said, “Oh, yeah. Some people’s skin is incredibly sensitive to it.” Thanks for letting me know!
I finally had to wait for some medication to come in the mail that my mom had sent me from my doctor in the States. It took me a couple of months but I eventually got rid of them.
Scabies were terrible and I don’t think I would wish them even on my worst enemies but when all is said and done, I survived them, along with all the other strange creatures I have been a home for.
I have conquered them all and now I have funny stories to tell my grandkids. At least now I can say, “Been there, done that”, I got the T-shirt… and I washed it!!
I have actually been extremely fortunate. Let’s see… I had lice and bed bugs once each. A simple cutting of the hair and washing of the sheets worked fine for both.
Ringworms I have had on a couple of occasions. Once I had two huge ones on my face. The only thing I could remember every time I looked in the mirror was how my mom told me, when I was little, that if you pick your nose and eat your boogers, you would get ringworms. That is the very reason I stopped that, at a young age I might add. All I knew was that I had definitely NOT gotten those ring worms from eating boogers!
On a couple of occasions I have had this weird kind of boil-like things appear on my hand. I still have no clue what in the world they were. They kind of looked like a pimple that was exposed to some sort of radioactive chemicals or something. I still have a scar on my hand from one of them.
The weird termite-like bugs had to be the funniest! I actually call them homeless bugs because they are quite common in the
blankets of homeless people. I have no clue what class they are but they bear a striking resemblance to termites. They are extremely passive bugs though. They don’t bite or cause trouble; they just like to hang out in your blanket and eventually your hair.
I was intimately introduced to them when one of the kids stayed at my house one night because I had to take him to the hospital the next morning. The bugs must have decided they were tired of him and that they were going to move on and stay with me.
I tried to vacuum them up, and thought I got them all. Well, I didn’t. A few days later I felt something on my forehead. It felt like a drop of sweat. I tried to wipe it off, but to my surprise, it was a homeless bug! I had long hair at the time and they had nested in it.
It was a pretty funny and embarrassing thing, at times, to be talking with someone and then feel something on my forehead and then see a look of horror in the person’s eyes as they try and figure out why I had bugs crawling out of my hair and onto my forehead. Fortunately, after a few months, they must have gotten tired of me because the just went away.
The worst thing I have EVER experienced is scabies!!! Oh my word!!! I had scabies in the summer of 2002 and it was awful. It was truly one of the most terrible things I have ever had!
There was a bad breakout of them amongst the kids that summer. Scabies burrow under your skin and it makes these red dots appear that eventually turn into huge rashes. They can only burrow in areas where they have something to push against so the armpits, waist line, bases of fingers and pubic areas are the common areas that are affected.
I didn’t even realize what I had for a couple of months so I assumed it was fleas or bedbugs. When I finally realized that is was actually scabies, I had already developed an extremely bad case. I spent MANY nights awake, because that is the time that they are the most active and it itches even more.
I have never itched like that in my life!! There were times when I felt like cutting off my skin! I went to the pharmacy to get medication and I went home to apply it. After I had evenly smeared it over my whole body, it started to feel like it was burning my skin off.
I have a pretty high tolerance for pain but I have never felt anything like that before! It literally felt like acid eating away at my skin. I tried to wash it off and the water seemed to make the pain increase.
I washed with soap as my skin continued to burn and after about fifteen minutes it finally stopped. I laughed because I was supposed to keep that stuff on my skin for twenty-four hours and I couldn’t even make it for a few minutes. I called the pharmacist who said, “Oh, yeah. Some people’s skin is incredibly sensitive to it.” Thanks for letting me know!
I finally had to wait for some medication to come in the mail that my mom had sent me from my doctor in the States. It took me a couple of months but I eventually got rid of them.
Scabies were terrible and I don’t think I would wish them even on my worst enemies but when all is said and done, I survived them, along with all the other strange creatures I have been a home for.
I have conquered them all and now I have funny stories to tell my grandkids. At least now I can say, “Been there, done that”, I got the T-shirt… and I washed it!!
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.
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.
19. Steps Forward
The draw of the streets is strong and as I mentioned, I have not seen many kids truly manage to get off the streets. But there are some kids that I was directly involved with as they went through the process of coming off the streets.
The following stories are of a few kids that did manage to make it away from the streets. For some of them it was easy and for others it was more difficult. They all, however, managed to successfully make that huge step of coming off the streets.
One of the most memorable stories is of a thirteen year old boy named Thabo. I met him the first day he came into Cape Town. He is a Xhosa-speaking kid from an area called Khayelitsha, but I was amazed at how well he could speak English.
Thabo is an extremely polite and gentle-natured kid. He always has the best manners and is extremely loving. He is also very animated and loves telling stories and I loved listening to them. I never really understood why he was on the streets.
He said there really wasn’t a problem at home and I looked at him and it hurt to see all that potential going to waste on the streets.
I spoke with him several times about going home and he was hesitant for an unknown reason. I saw him get sucked into the street life and begin to use drugs more heavily. He began to stop looking after himself and his general health and physical appearance were beginning to deteriorate.
One day, he seemed sick and I told him that he should at least consider going into a shelter until he gets better. He looked at me with a serious look on his face and said, “Okay!” and I said, “Okay? Okay what? You want to go?” and he said he did.
We started walking to my car and he stopped. I thought he was reconsidering his decision. He said, “Ryan, would you be able to just take me to my home?” I was of course happy to hear that and said I would love to take him to his home.
Sarah, a friend of mine, was with me that day so she rode with us as we went on our way to Thabo’s home. He already seemed to be feeling better when we got in the car. I was a little nervous, not really knowing what to expect when we got there.
I drove and he led me right up to a little shack. I stopped the car and we got out. Thabo, Sarah and I walked up to the door of the shack. Thabo knocked on the door. I heard a voice from the inside and then the door opened. His two older sisters were standing at the door and his mom was sitting back on a chair.
When the first sister saw him, she screamed. She grabbed him and squeezed him lifting him up off the ground. His body was limp as she hugged him and swung him back and forth.
The other sister and mom came to the door and also starting screaming in excitement. They all started crying in happiness. Right when his sister put him down she picked me up and started hugging me and the next sister picked up Thabo and started with the same procedure. They put us down and his mother picked up Thabo, the next sister picked me up and the other sister grabbed my friend Sarah.
We went around like that probably about three times!!
They were so excited to have him back and they asked me all sorts of questions about where he had been and what he had been up to. They had no clue where he was. We talked for a while and I promised to come back and visit. After we received more hugs, I said goodbye to Thabo and told him to be good, and Sarah and I went on our way.
It was such a refreshing experience for me because the family was so happy to have him back and was so loving towards him. I visited Thabo every now and then after that and he got into a bit of trouble here and there but generally was good and stayed at home. Not all of the “success” stories came so easily however.
One of the more difficult ones was with a thirteen year old kid named Dré. Dré had had a pretty rough life. He had lived with his mother in an area called Philippi.
When he was younger his little brother died and not long after that his mother also died. Soon after that, before the funeral, someone in his community pointed to a man and said, “That guy over there is your dad.”
He had never known his dad because he ran off when Dré was very young. His father came up to him and told him that he just wanted to take some of his mother’s things up to Transkei (about thirteen hours from Cape Town) and would be right back down to get him. Dré waited in the house, alone for several weeks, but his father never returned.
The story of how he made it into Cape Town is a bit sketchy but he eventually got into a shelter that is located downtown. He stayed in that shelter for many years and that is where I first met him.
In late 2001 he ran away from the shelter and went to the streets. I first became close with him one day when I took him to the dentist for a tooth that had totally rotted and was causing a great amount of pain. We had to be at the dentist early the next morning, so Dré stayed at my place the night before. We talked until late that night and he told me his whole life story.
Dré is really a smart kid and I also saw a lot of potential in him, as with Thabo. He also was not like the other kids and only smoked ganja and never used any other type of drug.
I asked him why he wanted to live on the streets and he said he didn’t really want to but he didn’t know where to go. He told me he would like to come off the streets but that there was NO WAY he was going back to that other shelter. He had lived in the shelter downtown for years and then when they opened a new home out in one of the communities, they moved him out there.
He became frustrated with the way things worked out there. He was small for his age and the other bigger boys always pushed him around.
I told Dré I would begin looking for a place for him. I called every children’s home in Cape Town and they all either said that they were too full or that he was the wrong age. Some of them told me that they could take him in if he was referred by another home, but they were not allowed to just take a kid straight from the streets.
The ONLY place that was willing to take him was, of course, the ONE place he refused to go to. I told him about it and he said that he would rather just stay on the streets.
And that he did, at least for the next few weeks. The streets finally wore on him and he approached me and said he was ready to get away from them.
I went and spoke to the social worker at the shelter downtown (I had a pretty good relationship with her) and she said that Dré would in fact have to go back to their home in the community and that it would be a temporary placement until he could be referred to another shelter.
I also told her about the frustrations that he had told me about not having a family to go to for weekends and holidays, like the other boys. We agreed that I would act as his guest family and Dré would come to me every now and then for a weekend and for the bigger holidays.
While talking with the social worker I did find out that he still had a grandmother that lived in Philippi but he didn’t like to go there because she was really sick.
I approached Dré with the compromise and he agreed to it. I took him that day out to the home in the community. He got back into the swing of things and got back into school and was doing fine. He came to me about once a month for a weekend visit and we always had fun.
I would try and do fun things like going to the movies and stuff to kind of reward him for hanging in there. One Saturday we climbed completely over the mountain in Muizenberg. He still talks about that to this day.
One weekend I took him to a farm owned by some friends of mine, about four hours away from Cape Town. He loved it and rode a horse for the first time in his whole life. It was a great experience for him and he proudly hung the pictures of him on the horse up on the wall next to his bed in the home.
Time went on and the social worker at the home was not really keeping up her side of the bargain and was not looking for another place for Dré. I could see that he was getting frustrated but he really hung in there.
The Christmas holidays rolled around and the social worker decided that Dré should go visit his grandmother before he came to my house for the holiday. I agreed with her and we made a plan for me to drop him at his grandmother’s house so that I would know where it was, and then in a weeks time I would pick him back up and he would come to my house for a week.
I was shocked to find out that the social worker had not only not made contact with the grandmother in the period of months that Dré had been back there, but that she hadn’t been in contact with Dré’s grandmother in several years.
I drove Dré to his grandmother’s house and when we got closer he spotted his older brother, whom I didn’t know existed. His brother is in his twenties and seems to be a troublemaker of some sort and not a good influence for Dré.
The brother went with us to the grandmother’s house and we went inside and sat down. I thought we were waiting for the grandmother to return and then Dré’s brother said he had something to tell us. He then informed Dré that his grandmother had died a whole year ago.
Dré’s eyes filled up with tears and he started crying. I felt sorry for him and angry at the social worker for not doing proper follow-up work.
We talked with the brother for a little while longer and then I had to take Dré back to the home because I had things planned for that coming week. I informed the social worker and she was shocked. I think she could see my frustration with her.
I told her that I would pick Dré up again in a week’s time. I went home and then a week later I picked him up and he spent Christmas with me.
A few months after that, the social worker informed me that the shelter had made a new rule that the kids could only visit their actual families and Dré would no longer be allowed to come and visit me. She was not happy with the decision because she knew that my influence in Dré’s life was the only thing keeping him there, but there was nothing she could do about it.
So, it was almost a year later and they had not kept either part of their side of the deal. Nothing was really being done to find another place for Dré to stay and now he wasn’t allowed to visit me anymore.
He was EXTREMELY upset about the whole thing and I told him that I would try and work something out. He didn’t get to visit me for a while but he would call me often and I would also call him if I got a chance. But, he started misbehaving and acting up more often.
About a year and a half after he had been staying in the home, the social worker resigned. Not long after that, I got a call one day from one of the childcare workers.
He said that Dré had just totally lost control and that he knew Dré was a good kid but he didn’t know what was going on with him. He said that he knew Dré looked up to me and respected me and he asked me to talk to him.
I talked with Dré on the phone that day but it was a little difficult since I couldn’t see him, so a few days after that I went to the school he attends and waited outside for him to come out.
I talked with him that day and listened to his side of the story and tried to encourage him to get his act together.
Not too long after that, the childcare worker called me and asked if it would be possible for Dré to come to my house for a weekend. I agreed to it and he did. I saw Dré’s attitude change over the weekend.
When I first picked him up, I saw that he had a bad attitude, not really towards me but just in general, but then as the weekend went on I saw him transform to his old happy self. He was not looking forward to going back to the home on Sunday afternoon and I saw his attitude change for the worse again as we approached the building.
It is now two years later and he is still there and nothing is being done towards getting him into another pace. Dré still comes to visit me sometimes and he calls every now and then. I can only hope that he continues to hang in there.
Another story of a more difficult time trying to help a kid off the streets was with a thirteen year old kid named Thanduxolo. He had strolled in Cape Town for a few years. He is also an extremely intelligent kid.
At one point he would call me almost every night. Just to talk, or to say good night or to tell me about the day’s events. I would talk to him about coming off the street and one day he finally decided he had had enough of the street life and wanted to go home.
I drove him to the area in Philippi where his mother’s house is but we were shocked to see what we saw when we got there.
It was an unofficial settlement and they were busy tearing down the shacks and building government homes. The whole place was a mess and the exact spot where Thanduxolo’s mother’s house was, was an empty space of sand. We went to another area where his cousin lives to ask her if she knew where the mother lived.
When we got to that area, Thanduxolo was not exactly sure where exactly his cousin lived. We walked around, stopping from shack to shack asking if they knew where his cousin was. We didn’t have any luck and we decided to call it quits for the day.
Just as we were walking back to the car a lady asked, “Who are you looking for again?” Thanduxolo replied and the lady said that she did know that person and she lead us to his cousin’s house.
His cousin was happy to see him. Her place was a small shack, just big enough for a bed to fit in. We talked with her for a while and she told us that his mom had indeed moved but she didn’t know where the new house was. She also told us that Thanduxolo’s mom has a phone but she didn’t know the phone number.
She told us that she should see the mother in the week and she would get the number and then phone me. We exchanged numbers and Thanduxolo and I went on our way.
Since he had made the decision to come off the street, I didn’t want to just take him back and dump him in Cape Town, just because we had trouble finding his mom’s house. So I gave him the option to stay at my place for the week, until we found his mom.
He was very relieved and happy to stay at my place. The days went by and I didn’t hear anything from his cousin. Finally, near the end of the week, I called her and she said that she still hadn’t come in contact with his mother.
Finally, after a little more than a week, Thanduxolo and I decided to go back into Philippi and just look around some more. We went and he searched for more than an hour, but to no avail. I was in a difficult spot because he had stayed with me for a week, and because of that I had not been able to do everything I was supposed to do. He decided that he would go back to Cape Town until his cousin called me with his mother’s details.
He was back in Cape Town for a couple of weeks, and then a couple of weeks turned into a couple of months. I still did not hear anything from his cousin.
Finally, one day, out of the blue, she phoned me to say that she had heard from his mom and that she had moved to the Eastern Cape (about thirteen hours away from Cape Town). I told Thanduxolo the news and he seemed sad.
Not too long after that, his cousin called me back and said that if I went and got him and brought him to her house, she was leaving the next day for the Eastern Cape and he could come with her. I went to Cape Town, found Thanduxolo and told him the news and he decided to go.
I drove him to his cousin’s place and dropped him off. He called me later that night and told me that they were leaving the next day for the Eastern Cape and he would call me when they get there, to let me know he arrived safely.
Sure enough, a few days later, he called me to tell me that he had made it. He said he was happy to be there and was really excited to see his mom. Time went by and he told me that he was going to stay there and he even got back in school. I was, of course, excited to hear that.
At the same time I was surprised because the place where he was staying is a rural area and not near as exciting as the city life Cape Town has to offer.
He called me at least once or twice a week to keep me updated on things and the one time I asked him how to get there if I ever want to come visit him.
The directions he told me were as follows: “Ok, drive to Queenstown and ask where’s Cofimvaba. When you get to Cofimvaba ask where’s Qamata Basin. When you get to Qamata Basin, ask where’s Thanduxolo. That’s where I live.”
After he was there for about six months, I decided I wanted to go visit him. So, without telling him, some friends and I went on the LONG road trip and headed on our way to Qamata Basin.
I wondered if we were actually going to find him, with the directions that he gave us. We drove and did a few stops here and there visiting different people we knew along the way and then eventually made it to Qamata Basin.
We went straight to Qamata Basin, instead of first stopping and asking in the other places. We stopped in the first village and asked at a few different houses, “Where’s Thanduxolo” and after the third one didn’t know, we decided that he was either not as popular as he thought, or we were in the wrong place. We got directions for the next village over and we drove there.
When we pulled into the village, we saw a phone sitting in the middle of a field and I wondered if it was the phone he always called me from. I had the number with me, so I drove up beside the phone and dialed the number.
Sure enough, the pay phone started ringing!! We knew we were in the right place! We stopped at the first house and asked “Where’s Thanduxolo?” and a boy, who happened to be one of Thanduxolo’s good friends, jumped in the car with us and lead the way to him.
When Thanduxolo saw my car he looked absolutely shocked! He was really happy to see us!! He took us to meet his grandmother and told us that, ironically, his mother had gone to Cape Town for a visit.
Life in Qamata Basin is very different to Cape Town and I was amazed at how he had fit right into the culture. It is an extremely rural area and most of the houses do not have electricity and none of them have running water. There is not a single toilet in the whole village. You have to get drinking water from the river.
He showed us around a bit and we walked to the store to get food to cook for the night. A huge group of kids followed us around because they had not seen too many white people before. Thanduxolo told us that my friend and I were the first white people to ever come and stay amongst the people in that village.
I don’t know if that is true, but I am sure it is true for the time that he has been staying there.
We had a great stay and it was so interesting to see and live amongst that culture, even if it was only for a couple of days. That was the most rural pace I had been to in South Africa since I have lived here so it was a great experience for me.
Most of all, I was so pleased and surprised to find Thanduxolo doing so well and I was very proud at how he had fit into that community and culture so well. Thanduxolo told me that he didn’t really even miss Cape Town and he loved it in Qamata Basin. I was happy to hear that!
These are just a few stories of the kids that have managed to make it off of the streets. There have been others that I have seen, but as I said, they are few and far between.
I have seen many kids come off the street for long periods of time, only to return to the streets. It is hard to see, but the occasional kid that makes it off and stays off, encourages me to believe that it is possible for others too.
The following stories are of a few kids that did manage to make it away from the streets. For some of them it was easy and for others it was more difficult. They all, however, managed to successfully make that huge step of coming off the streets.
One of the most memorable stories is of a thirteen year old boy named Thabo. I met him the first day he came into Cape Town. He is a Xhosa-speaking kid from an area called Khayelitsha, but I was amazed at how well he could speak English.
Thabo is an extremely polite and gentle-natured kid. He always has the best manners and is extremely loving. He is also very animated and loves telling stories and I loved listening to them. I never really understood why he was on the streets.
He said there really wasn’t a problem at home and I looked at him and it hurt to see all that potential going to waste on the streets.
I spoke with him several times about going home and he was hesitant for an unknown reason. I saw him get sucked into the street life and begin to use drugs more heavily. He began to stop looking after himself and his general health and physical appearance were beginning to deteriorate.
One day, he seemed sick and I told him that he should at least consider going into a shelter until he gets better. He looked at me with a serious look on his face and said, “Okay!” and I said, “Okay? Okay what? You want to go?” and he said he did.
We started walking to my car and he stopped. I thought he was reconsidering his decision. He said, “Ryan, would you be able to just take me to my home?” I was of course happy to hear that and said I would love to take him to his home.
Sarah, a friend of mine, was with me that day so she rode with us as we went on our way to Thabo’s home. He already seemed to be feeling better when we got in the car. I was a little nervous, not really knowing what to expect when we got there.
I drove and he led me right up to a little shack. I stopped the car and we got out. Thabo, Sarah and I walked up to the door of the shack. Thabo knocked on the door. I heard a voice from the inside and then the door opened. His two older sisters were standing at the door and his mom was sitting back on a chair.
When the first sister saw him, she screamed. She grabbed him and squeezed him lifting him up off the ground. His body was limp as she hugged him and swung him back and forth.
The other sister and mom came to the door and also starting screaming in excitement. They all started crying in happiness. Right when his sister put him down she picked me up and started hugging me and the next sister picked up Thabo and started with the same procedure. They put us down and his mother picked up Thabo, the next sister picked me up and the other sister grabbed my friend Sarah.
We went around like that probably about three times!!
They were so excited to have him back and they asked me all sorts of questions about where he had been and what he had been up to. They had no clue where he was. We talked for a while and I promised to come back and visit. After we received more hugs, I said goodbye to Thabo and told him to be good, and Sarah and I went on our way.
It was such a refreshing experience for me because the family was so happy to have him back and was so loving towards him. I visited Thabo every now and then after that and he got into a bit of trouble here and there but generally was good and stayed at home. Not all of the “success” stories came so easily however.
One of the more difficult ones was with a thirteen year old kid named Dré. Dré had had a pretty rough life. He had lived with his mother in an area called Philippi.
When he was younger his little brother died and not long after that his mother also died. Soon after that, before the funeral, someone in his community pointed to a man and said, “That guy over there is your dad.”
He had never known his dad because he ran off when Dré was very young. His father came up to him and told him that he just wanted to take some of his mother’s things up to Transkei (about thirteen hours from Cape Town) and would be right back down to get him. Dré waited in the house, alone for several weeks, but his father never returned.
The story of how he made it into Cape Town is a bit sketchy but he eventually got into a shelter that is located downtown. He stayed in that shelter for many years and that is where I first met him.
In late 2001 he ran away from the shelter and went to the streets. I first became close with him one day when I took him to the dentist for a tooth that had totally rotted and was causing a great amount of pain. We had to be at the dentist early the next morning, so Dré stayed at my place the night before. We talked until late that night and he told me his whole life story.
Dré is really a smart kid and I also saw a lot of potential in him, as with Thabo. He also was not like the other kids and only smoked ganja and never used any other type of drug.
I asked him why he wanted to live on the streets and he said he didn’t really want to but he didn’t know where to go. He told me he would like to come off the streets but that there was NO WAY he was going back to that other shelter. He had lived in the shelter downtown for years and then when they opened a new home out in one of the communities, they moved him out there.
He became frustrated with the way things worked out there. He was small for his age and the other bigger boys always pushed him around.
I told Dré I would begin looking for a place for him. I called every children’s home in Cape Town and they all either said that they were too full or that he was the wrong age. Some of them told me that they could take him in if he was referred by another home, but they were not allowed to just take a kid straight from the streets.
The ONLY place that was willing to take him was, of course, the ONE place he refused to go to. I told him about it and he said that he would rather just stay on the streets.
And that he did, at least for the next few weeks. The streets finally wore on him and he approached me and said he was ready to get away from them.
I went and spoke to the social worker at the shelter downtown (I had a pretty good relationship with her) and she said that Dré would in fact have to go back to their home in the community and that it would be a temporary placement until he could be referred to another shelter.
I also told her about the frustrations that he had told me about not having a family to go to for weekends and holidays, like the other boys. We agreed that I would act as his guest family and Dré would come to me every now and then for a weekend and for the bigger holidays.
While talking with the social worker I did find out that he still had a grandmother that lived in Philippi but he didn’t like to go there because she was really sick.
I approached Dré with the compromise and he agreed to it. I took him that day out to the home in the community. He got back into the swing of things and got back into school and was doing fine. He came to me about once a month for a weekend visit and we always had fun.
I would try and do fun things like going to the movies and stuff to kind of reward him for hanging in there. One Saturday we climbed completely over the mountain in Muizenberg. He still talks about that to this day.
One weekend I took him to a farm owned by some friends of mine, about four hours away from Cape Town. He loved it and rode a horse for the first time in his whole life. It was a great experience for him and he proudly hung the pictures of him on the horse up on the wall next to his bed in the home.
Time went on and the social worker at the home was not really keeping up her side of the bargain and was not looking for another place for Dré. I could see that he was getting frustrated but he really hung in there.
The Christmas holidays rolled around and the social worker decided that Dré should go visit his grandmother before he came to my house for the holiday. I agreed with her and we made a plan for me to drop him at his grandmother’s house so that I would know where it was, and then in a weeks time I would pick him back up and he would come to my house for a week.
I was shocked to find out that the social worker had not only not made contact with the grandmother in the period of months that Dré had been back there, but that she hadn’t been in contact with Dré’s grandmother in several years.
I drove Dré to his grandmother’s house and when we got closer he spotted his older brother, whom I didn’t know existed. His brother is in his twenties and seems to be a troublemaker of some sort and not a good influence for Dré.
The brother went with us to the grandmother’s house and we went inside and sat down. I thought we were waiting for the grandmother to return and then Dré’s brother said he had something to tell us. He then informed Dré that his grandmother had died a whole year ago.
Dré’s eyes filled up with tears and he started crying. I felt sorry for him and angry at the social worker for not doing proper follow-up work.
We talked with the brother for a little while longer and then I had to take Dré back to the home because I had things planned for that coming week. I informed the social worker and she was shocked. I think she could see my frustration with her.
I told her that I would pick Dré up again in a week’s time. I went home and then a week later I picked him up and he spent Christmas with me.
A few months after that, the social worker informed me that the shelter had made a new rule that the kids could only visit their actual families and Dré would no longer be allowed to come and visit me. She was not happy with the decision because she knew that my influence in Dré’s life was the only thing keeping him there, but there was nothing she could do about it.
So, it was almost a year later and they had not kept either part of their side of the deal. Nothing was really being done to find another place for Dré to stay and now he wasn’t allowed to visit me anymore.
He was EXTREMELY upset about the whole thing and I told him that I would try and work something out. He didn’t get to visit me for a while but he would call me often and I would also call him if I got a chance. But, he started misbehaving and acting up more often.
About a year and a half after he had been staying in the home, the social worker resigned. Not long after that, I got a call one day from one of the childcare workers.
He said that Dré had just totally lost control and that he knew Dré was a good kid but he didn’t know what was going on with him. He said that he knew Dré looked up to me and respected me and he asked me to talk to him.
I talked with Dré on the phone that day but it was a little difficult since I couldn’t see him, so a few days after that I went to the school he attends and waited outside for him to come out.
I talked with him that day and listened to his side of the story and tried to encourage him to get his act together.
Not too long after that, the childcare worker called me and asked if it would be possible for Dré to come to my house for a weekend. I agreed to it and he did. I saw Dré’s attitude change over the weekend.
When I first picked him up, I saw that he had a bad attitude, not really towards me but just in general, but then as the weekend went on I saw him transform to his old happy self. He was not looking forward to going back to the home on Sunday afternoon and I saw his attitude change for the worse again as we approached the building.
It is now two years later and he is still there and nothing is being done towards getting him into another pace. Dré still comes to visit me sometimes and he calls every now and then. I can only hope that he continues to hang in there.
Another story of a more difficult time trying to help a kid off the streets was with a thirteen year old kid named Thanduxolo. He had strolled in Cape Town for a few years. He is also an extremely intelligent kid.
At one point he would call me almost every night. Just to talk, or to say good night or to tell me about the day’s events. I would talk to him about coming off the street and one day he finally decided he had had enough of the street life and wanted to go home.
I drove him to the area in Philippi where his mother’s house is but we were shocked to see what we saw when we got there.
It was an unofficial settlement and they were busy tearing down the shacks and building government homes. The whole place was a mess and the exact spot where Thanduxolo’s mother’s house was, was an empty space of sand. We went to another area where his cousin lives to ask her if she knew where the mother lived.
When we got to that area, Thanduxolo was not exactly sure where exactly his cousin lived. We walked around, stopping from shack to shack asking if they knew where his cousin was. We didn’t have any luck and we decided to call it quits for the day.
Just as we were walking back to the car a lady asked, “Who are you looking for again?” Thanduxolo replied and the lady said that she did know that person and she lead us to his cousin’s house.
His cousin was happy to see him. Her place was a small shack, just big enough for a bed to fit in. We talked with her for a while and she told us that his mom had indeed moved but she didn’t know where the new house was. She also told us that Thanduxolo’s mom has a phone but she didn’t know the phone number.
She told us that she should see the mother in the week and she would get the number and then phone me. We exchanged numbers and Thanduxolo and I went on our way.
Since he had made the decision to come off the street, I didn’t want to just take him back and dump him in Cape Town, just because we had trouble finding his mom’s house. So I gave him the option to stay at my place for the week, until we found his mom.
He was very relieved and happy to stay at my place. The days went by and I didn’t hear anything from his cousin. Finally, near the end of the week, I called her and she said that she still hadn’t come in contact with his mother.
Finally, after a little more than a week, Thanduxolo and I decided to go back into Philippi and just look around some more. We went and he searched for more than an hour, but to no avail. I was in a difficult spot because he had stayed with me for a week, and because of that I had not been able to do everything I was supposed to do. He decided that he would go back to Cape Town until his cousin called me with his mother’s details.
He was back in Cape Town for a couple of weeks, and then a couple of weeks turned into a couple of months. I still did not hear anything from his cousin.
Finally, one day, out of the blue, she phoned me to say that she had heard from his mom and that she had moved to the Eastern Cape (about thirteen hours away from Cape Town). I told Thanduxolo the news and he seemed sad.
Not too long after that, his cousin called me back and said that if I went and got him and brought him to her house, she was leaving the next day for the Eastern Cape and he could come with her. I went to Cape Town, found Thanduxolo and told him the news and he decided to go.
I drove him to his cousin’s place and dropped him off. He called me later that night and told me that they were leaving the next day for the Eastern Cape and he would call me when they get there, to let me know he arrived safely.
Sure enough, a few days later, he called me to tell me that he had made it. He said he was happy to be there and was really excited to see his mom. Time went by and he told me that he was going to stay there and he even got back in school. I was, of course, excited to hear that.
At the same time I was surprised because the place where he was staying is a rural area and not near as exciting as the city life Cape Town has to offer.
He called me at least once or twice a week to keep me updated on things and the one time I asked him how to get there if I ever want to come visit him.
The directions he told me were as follows: “Ok, drive to Queenstown and ask where’s Cofimvaba. When you get to Cofimvaba ask where’s Qamata Basin. When you get to Qamata Basin, ask where’s Thanduxolo. That’s where I live.”
After he was there for about six months, I decided I wanted to go visit him. So, without telling him, some friends and I went on the LONG road trip and headed on our way to Qamata Basin.
I wondered if we were actually going to find him, with the directions that he gave us. We drove and did a few stops here and there visiting different people we knew along the way and then eventually made it to Qamata Basin.
We went straight to Qamata Basin, instead of first stopping and asking in the other places. We stopped in the first village and asked at a few different houses, “Where’s Thanduxolo” and after the third one didn’t know, we decided that he was either not as popular as he thought, or we were in the wrong place. We got directions for the next village over and we drove there.
When we pulled into the village, we saw a phone sitting in the middle of a field and I wondered if it was the phone he always called me from. I had the number with me, so I drove up beside the phone and dialed the number.
Sure enough, the pay phone started ringing!! We knew we were in the right place! We stopped at the first house and asked “Where’s Thanduxolo?” and a boy, who happened to be one of Thanduxolo’s good friends, jumped in the car with us and lead the way to him.
When Thanduxolo saw my car he looked absolutely shocked! He was really happy to see us!! He took us to meet his grandmother and told us that, ironically, his mother had gone to Cape Town for a visit.
Life in Qamata Basin is very different to Cape Town and I was amazed at how he had fit right into the culture. It is an extremely rural area and most of the houses do not have electricity and none of them have running water. There is not a single toilet in the whole village. You have to get drinking water from the river.
He showed us around a bit and we walked to the store to get food to cook for the night. A huge group of kids followed us around because they had not seen too many white people before. Thanduxolo told us that my friend and I were the first white people to ever come and stay amongst the people in that village.
I don’t know if that is true, but I am sure it is true for the time that he has been staying there.
We had a great stay and it was so interesting to see and live amongst that culture, even if it was only for a couple of days. That was the most rural pace I had been to in South Africa since I have lived here so it was a great experience for me.
Most of all, I was so pleased and surprised to find Thanduxolo doing so well and I was very proud at how he had fit into that community and culture so well. Thanduxolo told me that he didn’t really even miss Cape Town and he loved it in Qamata Basin. I was happy to hear that!
These are just a few stories of the kids that have managed to make it off of the streets. There have been others that I have seen, but as I said, they are few and far between.
I have seen many kids come off the street for long periods of time, only to return to the streets. It is hard to see, but the occasional kid that makes it off and stays off, encourages me to believe that it is possible for others too.
20. The Bridge
In the beginning of 2001 I became extremely close with a group of boys that were staying under a bridge in downtown. The city eventually cleared out that area and built a Convention Center but some of my fondest memories in Cape Town took place with that group of kids under the bridge.
It was in that process of them being “cleared out” that I became close with the group. There was a group of about seven boys that were staying with a man and his girlfriend under the bridge. They lived in a shack that they had built, in a small community of several other street people that also had built shacks under the bridge. Most of the other people were drug dealers and prostitutes.
It was a rough little area. I met the boys at a nearby traffic light, where they washed car windows for money. They all had squeegees and bottles of soapy water. When a car pulled up, they would wash the window and then ask for money.
It was funny because I would always talk to them and I had built up a relationship with them and every time I pulled up to those traffic lights, they would ALL run to my car and begin washing. One would wash the windscreen, one would wash the back window while the others would do the side panels, side windows and even the hood of the car. I would pull away with a sparkling clean car.
One day they told me that there was a problem where they were staying and asked me to come and talk to Carl, the man they were staying with.
I went with them to speak with Carl and he explained to me that the police were threatening them, telling them that they had to move away. I gave Carl my number and told him to call me if he had any problems that I could help him out with.
Carl is a thirty year old gangster that has quite a reputation in Cape Town, which I didn’t know at that point. He told the boys, after I left that day, that he could tell I was scared of him. I wasn’t, and I didn’t know any reason I should be.
When the boys told me what he had said, I told them that I was not scared and that they could tell him that. A few days later I saw him and he just laughed because the message had reached him.
I didn’t know that I should have been scared of him and he was not used to people not being scared of him, so he found it funny. He respected the fact that I was not intimidated by him. From then on we had a close relationship.
Not too long after that, Carl called me because their shack had been trashed by the police. When I arrived on the scene their stuff was in ruins. Their stuff had been thrown everywhere, the shacks were totally torn down and the boys had been beaten by the cops.
I wrote up a report and took pictures and followed up the matter with the police. Some police officers came and apologized to them.
After that, I would stop by everyday on my way out of town just to hang out with them. Sometimes I would only stay for a few minutes. Other times I would stay late into the night.
One night when I was leaving, three police cars flew out of nowhere and blocked me in. They stopped and got out of the car with their guns drawn. One of the officers approached the car and asked to see my ID.
“What are you looking for under here boy?” He thought I was trying to buy drugs under the bridge. I explained to them that I worked with the street kids and was just hanging out with a group of kids that lived under the bridge.
They didn’t believe me and asked me more questions.
They asked me for identification from my organization and I didn’t have any on me but I quickly remembered that I had a business card from another organization that works with the kids so I showed it to them. They seemed satisfied enough and they eventually let me go. Carl and the boys found it extremely funny.
I would often take a soccer ball under the bridge and we would all play. Sometimes we would all load into my car and go to the beach. Carl and I would often go into the community that he is from and visit his grandmother and mother.
One day he got word that his brother had been stabbed and he wanted me to go with him to the hospital to visit him. Carl, his Uncle, Aunt, and I went to the hospital.
When we got there, they told us that he had just died and that his family needed to identify the body. Carl wanted me to come with him because I had met his brother before, and I think he just needed the support.
They took us to the body and we identified it as his brother. He had lost most of his color and he didn’t look very good. Carl’s aunt started crying really hard. I could tell that Carl was trying to hold back tears.
I felt a little awkward because I was not part of the family and I was not really sure what to do. I was glad that I could be there to support Carl though.
Later that day we ran around making funeral arrangements. I helped them raise money to cover the funeral. In the communities, because most of the time the people are not financially able to pay for funeral, funeral homes attach a form along with the general price information that has spaces for people to donate money and write their names.
The family only gets a few copies that have to be made official by the funeral director, because people try and illegally raise money with them.
The family gave me one and I carried it around with me everywhere I went for the next few days. I showed it to everyone I came into contact with and asked them for money. Carl was extremely appreciative of my support and help during that time and it made our relationship even stronger.
Not too long after that, trying to show his appreciation to me, he gave me a nice silver watch. I figured that it had been stolen and I normally don’t accept stolen gifts (though I have been offered all types of them from the kids) but I could not turn down his gesture of appreciation.
It wasn’t working when he gave it to me but Carl was sure that all it needed was a new battery. He took me immediately to a man at a little stand on the side of the road who fixes watches. He gave it to the man and told him to fix anything that needed to be fixed on it and the man told us to come pick it back up in an hour.
In the meantime, Carl bought us lunch and we sat and ate. After an hour we went back, and Carl paid the man and collected the watch. He then proudly put it on my arm for me. That watch really means a lot to me!
The group of boys that stayed with Carl was a fun and energetic group. They were always happy and full of smiles. We always had fun playing around and goofing off. I did however also experience some dramatic and traumatic times with those kids.
One day, Sipho, one of the boys, was arrested for something he hadn’t done. The police said that he had broken into a car, but it wasn’t true. Carl even knew the guy that had actually committed the crime. It was a big scene though: Sipho just happened to walk past a car that had been broken into and the police saw him and yelled at him.
He made the mistake of running away, even though he had done nothing wrong. The police chased him, tackled him and then hit him over the head with a walkie-talkie. He didn’t try to fight back and was extremely shocked by the whole experience. They then handcuffed him and took him in. It was really traumatic for the other boys.
I pulled up a few afternoons after that and saw Carl running down the street. I stopped and he told me he had just been chasing the guy that had actually broken into the car. He had also managed to inform two police officers sitting in a police car nearby and they began to chase the criminal.
While I was standing there talking to Carl the boys came up and not long after that a police car pulled up next to us. In the back of the car was the guy that had actually committed the crime that Sipho had been accused of.
Carl identified him and they took him away. Sipho was released later that day.
When all the excitement was over, I drove the boys to the traffic light and dropped them off and then drove back to talk to another street guy that I knew who had walked up during all the action.
The other guy and I stood there and talked for a while and then, as we were talking, I could see a crowd of street people gathering under the bridge. I didn’t know what was going on but the people seemed to be getting frantic.
Then I saw one of the kids that I had just dropped off at the traffic light and I wondered why he was back over there so quickly. I decided to go see what was going on.
As I got closer, the people started yelling, “RYAN!!! We didn’t know you were still here!! Come quickly!!!!!” When I got closer to the group of people I saw Dhumi, one of the younger boys, on the ground going into convulsions.
He had been standing at the traffic lights and started having a seizure and the other boys had carried him to the bridge. I quickly ran and jumped into my car and pulled up next to Dhumi.
We loaded him into the back seat with Carl and one of the other boys. I drove to the hospital as fast as I could.
As I was driving Dhumi went totally unconscious. I drove faster than I ever had before, and I drive pretty fast on a regular basis! I turned on my hazard lights and just held my hand on the horn as I drove. I got there in record time.
When we got to the hospital, I pulled right up to the emergency room doors and I jumped out and picked up Dhumi and ran into the hospital. Normally you have to sign in and wait for hours in the waiting room but I went right past the security guard and into the back, kicking open the doors to the emergency ward.
I put Dhumi down on a bed and I grabbed a nurse and pulled her over to him.
They began to try and stabilize him and immediately injected him with some medication. His seizure eventually stopped. After a while, he woke up out of his unconscious state and was confused. The doctors decided to keep him in the hospital so they could run further tests and treatments.
He was diagnosed as an epileptic. After about a week he was released and they prescribed medicine for him that he had to take every day. It was extremely difficult to get him to understand the dangers of continuing to live on the streets with his condition.
He was not interested in going home or getting off the streets, especially because he remembered nothing from the event except for waking up in the hospital. I tried to stress how important it was for him to take his medicine every day.
I told the boys how important it was for them to look after him when they were at the traffic lights. I kept imagining him standing at the traffic light and then having a seizure and falling under a moving car.
Carl and I tried to talk him into going home and he was very stubborn and was set on staying in Cape Town but eventually, he agreed to go home and he did. Since that time, he only comes into town every now and then but stays home for the most part.
Another memorable event that occurred under the bridge was when my mom came for a visit.
Carl and the boys were excited to meet my mom and Carl had told me that when she arrived he wanted to cook dinner for her one night. I had told my mom that in advance and so she brought along some shirts for all of the boys and Carl.
One night during her visit, we went under the bridge and Carl cooked potatoes, rice and chicken over the fire. We sat around the fire and ate, talked, and had a great time.
After we were finished eating, my mom gave them the shirts that she had brought. They were thrilled. It was then when I really realized that they had become like a family to me and it was so cool that my family from back home could meet and hang out with my family in Cape Town.
The City eventually cleared out that area completely and all the people had to move away. Carl and the boys all dispersed.
I still see them every now and then, but every time I pass the Convention Center, I think about the times that I spent under that bridge and I am so thankful for those memories.
It was in that process of them being “cleared out” that I became close with the group. There was a group of about seven boys that were staying with a man and his girlfriend under the bridge. They lived in a shack that they had built, in a small community of several other street people that also had built shacks under the bridge. Most of the other people were drug dealers and prostitutes.
It was a rough little area. I met the boys at a nearby traffic light, where they washed car windows for money. They all had squeegees and bottles of soapy water. When a car pulled up, they would wash the window and then ask for money.
It was funny because I would always talk to them and I had built up a relationship with them and every time I pulled up to those traffic lights, they would ALL run to my car and begin washing. One would wash the windscreen, one would wash the back window while the others would do the side panels, side windows and even the hood of the car. I would pull away with a sparkling clean car.
One day they told me that there was a problem where they were staying and asked me to come and talk to Carl, the man they were staying with.
I went with them to speak with Carl and he explained to me that the police were threatening them, telling them that they had to move away. I gave Carl my number and told him to call me if he had any problems that I could help him out with.
Carl is a thirty year old gangster that has quite a reputation in Cape Town, which I didn’t know at that point. He told the boys, after I left that day, that he could tell I was scared of him. I wasn’t, and I didn’t know any reason I should be.
When the boys told me what he had said, I told them that I was not scared and that they could tell him that. A few days later I saw him and he just laughed because the message had reached him.
I didn’t know that I should have been scared of him and he was not used to people not being scared of him, so he found it funny. He respected the fact that I was not intimidated by him. From then on we had a close relationship.
Not too long after that, Carl called me because their shack had been trashed by the police. When I arrived on the scene their stuff was in ruins. Their stuff had been thrown everywhere, the shacks were totally torn down and the boys had been beaten by the cops.
I wrote up a report and took pictures and followed up the matter with the police. Some police officers came and apologized to them.
After that, I would stop by everyday on my way out of town just to hang out with them. Sometimes I would only stay for a few minutes. Other times I would stay late into the night.
One night when I was leaving, three police cars flew out of nowhere and blocked me in. They stopped and got out of the car with their guns drawn. One of the officers approached the car and asked to see my ID.
“What are you looking for under here boy?” He thought I was trying to buy drugs under the bridge. I explained to them that I worked with the street kids and was just hanging out with a group of kids that lived under the bridge.
They didn’t believe me and asked me more questions.
They asked me for identification from my organization and I didn’t have any on me but I quickly remembered that I had a business card from another organization that works with the kids so I showed it to them. They seemed satisfied enough and they eventually let me go. Carl and the boys found it extremely funny.
I would often take a soccer ball under the bridge and we would all play. Sometimes we would all load into my car and go to the beach. Carl and I would often go into the community that he is from and visit his grandmother and mother.
One day he got word that his brother had been stabbed and he wanted me to go with him to the hospital to visit him. Carl, his Uncle, Aunt, and I went to the hospital.
When we got there, they told us that he had just died and that his family needed to identify the body. Carl wanted me to come with him because I had met his brother before, and I think he just needed the support.
They took us to the body and we identified it as his brother. He had lost most of his color and he didn’t look very good. Carl’s aunt started crying really hard. I could tell that Carl was trying to hold back tears.
I felt a little awkward because I was not part of the family and I was not really sure what to do. I was glad that I could be there to support Carl though.
Later that day we ran around making funeral arrangements. I helped them raise money to cover the funeral. In the communities, because most of the time the people are not financially able to pay for funeral, funeral homes attach a form along with the general price information that has spaces for people to donate money and write their names.
The family only gets a few copies that have to be made official by the funeral director, because people try and illegally raise money with them.
The family gave me one and I carried it around with me everywhere I went for the next few days. I showed it to everyone I came into contact with and asked them for money. Carl was extremely appreciative of my support and help during that time and it made our relationship even stronger.
Not too long after that, trying to show his appreciation to me, he gave me a nice silver watch. I figured that it had been stolen and I normally don’t accept stolen gifts (though I have been offered all types of them from the kids) but I could not turn down his gesture of appreciation.
It wasn’t working when he gave it to me but Carl was sure that all it needed was a new battery. He took me immediately to a man at a little stand on the side of the road who fixes watches. He gave it to the man and told him to fix anything that needed to be fixed on it and the man told us to come pick it back up in an hour.
In the meantime, Carl bought us lunch and we sat and ate. After an hour we went back, and Carl paid the man and collected the watch. He then proudly put it on my arm for me. That watch really means a lot to me!
The group of boys that stayed with Carl was a fun and energetic group. They were always happy and full of smiles. We always had fun playing around and goofing off. I did however also experience some dramatic and traumatic times with those kids.
One day, Sipho, one of the boys, was arrested for something he hadn’t done. The police said that he had broken into a car, but it wasn’t true. Carl even knew the guy that had actually committed the crime. It was a big scene though: Sipho just happened to walk past a car that had been broken into and the police saw him and yelled at him.
He made the mistake of running away, even though he had done nothing wrong. The police chased him, tackled him and then hit him over the head with a walkie-talkie. He didn’t try to fight back and was extremely shocked by the whole experience. They then handcuffed him and took him in. It was really traumatic for the other boys.
I pulled up a few afternoons after that and saw Carl running down the street. I stopped and he told me he had just been chasing the guy that had actually broken into the car. He had also managed to inform two police officers sitting in a police car nearby and they began to chase the criminal.
While I was standing there talking to Carl the boys came up and not long after that a police car pulled up next to us. In the back of the car was the guy that had actually committed the crime that Sipho had been accused of.
Carl identified him and they took him away. Sipho was released later that day.
When all the excitement was over, I drove the boys to the traffic light and dropped them off and then drove back to talk to another street guy that I knew who had walked up during all the action.
The other guy and I stood there and talked for a while and then, as we were talking, I could see a crowd of street people gathering under the bridge. I didn’t know what was going on but the people seemed to be getting frantic.
Then I saw one of the kids that I had just dropped off at the traffic light and I wondered why he was back over there so quickly. I decided to go see what was going on.
As I got closer, the people started yelling, “RYAN!!! We didn’t know you were still here!! Come quickly!!!!!” When I got closer to the group of people I saw Dhumi, one of the younger boys, on the ground going into convulsions.
He had been standing at the traffic lights and started having a seizure and the other boys had carried him to the bridge. I quickly ran and jumped into my car and pulled up next to Dhumi.
We loaded him into the back seat with Carl and one of the other boys. I drove to the hospital as fast as I could.
As I was driving Dhumi went totally unconscious. I drove faster than I ever had before, and I drive pretty fast on a regular basis! I turned on my hazard lights and just held my hand on the horn as I drove. I got there in record time.
When we got to the hospital, I pulled right up to the emergency room doors and I jumped out and picked up Dhumi and ran into the hospital. Normally you have to sign in and wait for hours in the waiting room but I went right past the security guard and into the back, kicking open the doors to the emergency ward.
I put Dhumi down on a bed and I grabbed a nurse and pulled her over to him.
They began to try and stabilize him and immediately injected him with some medication. His seizure eventually stopped. After a while, he woke up out of his unconscious state and was confused. The doctors decided to keep him in the hospital so they could run further tests and treatments.
He was diagnosed as an epileptic. After about a week he was released and they prescribed medicine for him that he had to take every day. It was extremely difficult to get him to understand the dangers of continuing to live on the streets with his condition.
He was not interested in going home or getting off the streets, especially because he remembered nothing from the event except for waking up in the hospital. I tried to stress how important it was for him to take his medicine every day.
I told the boys how important it was for them to look after him when they were at the traffic lights. I kept imagining him standing at the traffic light and then having a seizure and falling under a moving car.
Carl and I tried to talk him into going home and he was very stubborn and was set on staying in Cape Town but eventually, he agreed to go home and he did. Since that time, he only comes into town every now and then but stays home for the most part.
Another memorable event that occurred under the bridge was when my mom came for a visit.
Carl and the boys were excited to meet my mom and Carl had told me that when she arrived he wanted to cook dinner for her one night. I had told my mom that in advance and so she brought along some shirts for all of the boys and Carl.
One night during her visit, we went under the bridge and Carl cooked potatoes, rice and chicken over the fire. We sat around the fire and ate, talked, and had a great time.
After we were finished eating, my mom gave them the shirts that she had brought. They were thrilled. It was then when I really realized that they had become like a family to me and it was so cool that my family from back home could meet and hang out with my family in Cape Town.
The City eventually cleared out that area completely and all the people had to move away. Carl and the boys all dispersed.
I still see them every now and then, but every time I pass the Convention Center, I think about the times that I spent under that bridge and I am so thankful for those memories.
21. Treasure Box
I have a box. A box filled with treasure. At least it’s treasure to me: A hand knitted cap, a little black ball, a Bob Marley key chain, some seashells, a small green-haired troll doll, matches, broken jewellery, a watch that almost works, foreign coins, a blue whistle, a stuffed dog that was hand coloured just for me, a lollypop, a rock that looks like a crystal, a couple of pens, and much more!!
That stuff probably doesn’t sound like much of a treasure to you and I am sure if I just ran upon any random box of this stuff, I would merely pass it by. But the stuff in my box is special because they are all gifts from the kids.
To me, everything in that box represents their giving hearts. Each item has a face and a story behind it. The kids might not have much, but what they do have, they are willing to share with me.
Time after time, I have been taken back by the hearts of the kids. They have been turned away and let down by so many people, taken from, and used so many times, but somehow they manage to find it in their hearts to give to me?!
One of my first experiences of this was one time I had been in town all day, and had forgotten to bring money with me and hadn’t had anything to eat or drink the whole day.
By the end of the day, I said my “goodbyes” to the kids at the station and went on in to catch my train, only to find out that it wouldn’t be leaving for another forty-five minutes.
Tired, hungry, thirsty and feeling a bit weak, I went back out to hang with the kids until it was time for my train to leave. They could all see that I was a bit tired, hungry and thirsty and I could see their minds starting to work.
They huddled into a group and discussed something and then broke, almost like a sports team before a big play.
Then one of the boys announced to me that THEY were going to buy me a drink and that I should come with him and pick out which one I wanted.
They got their money together and gave it to the one boy and he guided me towards the shop. At first, I was hesitant because I didn’t want to take anything from them, but then I thought to turn them down might insult them, and I didn’t want to do that. So, I accepted their offer.
The boy and I proudly walked back to the group with an ice cold Coke and they all stood, full of pride, and watched respectfully as I drank the Coke. I offered to share with them, but they would not stand for it and insisted that I drink it all myself.
Another “first experience” of their giving hearts was one night when I was driving through town and I saw a group of boys on the side of the road and stopped to say hi. I didn’t have much time because a friend and I had to meet some people for dinner, but I wanted to see how they were and what they were up to. They all, about nine of them, jumped into my little white VW Golf, as they often do, and I offered to give them a lift to wherever they were going.
As we were driving I heard them whispering and plotting something in the back seat. I wasn’t sure what they were up to. All of a sudden, one of them said, “Ryan, will you please drive to McDonalds?”, so I followed his request and drove to McDonalds, thinking that they wanted to get out there or something.
When I got there they pointed out a parking place for me and told me to park.
One of the boys jumped out, but the rest of the group excitedly waited in the car. I wasn’t sure what was going on. Before I knew it, the one boy was running back out of McDonalds with an ice cream cone - only one.
He proudly handed it through my window and they all said that it was “just for me” and that I wasn’t allowed to share it. I drove them to their destination, while enjoying my ice cream.
I felt overwhelmed with joy but also humbled at the same time. They were all talking about how hungry they were but then, without asking me for anything, they buy me an ice cream and once again refused to allow me to share it!
Another memorable experience was one day right in the middle of a month when I didn’t have any money. Some unexpected expenses came up in the beginning of the month and a few days into it, I was flat broke.
I would just go, day by day, not really knowing where my meals would come from, and making do with what was around. Every day I would pray that the Lord would provide something for me and I learned not to despise a single thing, even if it was just a slice of bread, or something out of the trashcan.
One day I was sitting with a group of kids under a tree. We were just sitting there talking.
All of a sudden, out of the blue, Shawn, an eighteen year old kid that I have known since the beginning started talking about how much I mean to them.
He started saying, “You have helped us for all these years and you have given so much to us and we haven’t given you anything in return!” Unaware of my financial situation, he then reached in his sock and pulled out twenty Rand.
He tried to hand it to me and he said that he wanted to give that to me for all I have done for the kids.
I was hesitant to take it and I thanked him for his gesture but I told him I couldn’t take his money. He would not accept “no” for an answer and was persistent in trying to give me the money.
Eventually, a street girl who was sitting there grabbed it out of Shawn’s hand and said, “Well, if he doesn’t want it I’ll take it!!” Then she shoved it down her shirt and put it in her bra.
Shawn, determined to give me the money, without hesitating reached down the girl’s shirt, retrieved the twenty Rand, and put it in my hand and told me that I didn’t have a choice. I decided to accept it for a couple of reasons: I felt like I was starting to offend him by not taking it and I knew that if it got back in the hands of the girl, there was no telling where she would try to put it next, and I knew that Shawn would get it out of wherever it was she decided to put it.
I had also just been wondering where I was going to get my next meal so, it was an answer to my prayer.
I looked Shawn in the eye and thanked him and then told him, “You know, I don’t have ANY money right now so this really means a lot to me! I think it was God that told you to give this to me.” He proudly smiled from ear to ear and said, “Yeah…Yeah! I felt in my heart that God was wanting me to give it to you!!”
We talked a little while longer and then I went on my way, AND I was able to eat that day. For me, it was an incredible experience of the giving hearts of the kids!
These are just a few examples of the amazing hearts of the kids and since those first few experiences, things like that have happened on a weekly basis.
There have even been times when I have been low on money and the kids will put petrol in my car or even insist that I take some money from them.
They have humbled me and amazed me time after time!
We can learn so much from their giving. Sometimes we have so much, but give so little, and they don’t have much, but give all they have. Though their gifts might not be of much “worth” to most people, they are worth more than gold to me!
That stuff probably doesn’t sound like much of a treasure to you and I am sure if I just ran upon any random box of this stuff, I would merely pass it by. But the stuff in my box is special because they are all gifts from the kids.
To me, everything in that box represents their giving hearts. Each item has a face and a story behind it. The kids might not have much, but what they do have, they are willing to share with me.
Time after time, I have been taken back by the hearts of the kids. They have been turned away and let down by so many people, taken from, and used so many times, but somehow they manage to find it in their hearts to give to me?!
One of my first experiences of this was one time I had been in town all day, and had forgotten to bring money with me and hadn’t had anything to eat or drink the whole day.
By the end of the day, I said my “goodbyes” to the kids at the station and went on in to catch my train, only to find out that it wouldn’t be leaving for another forty-five minutes.
Tired, hungry, thirsty and feeling a bit weak, I went back out to hang with the kids until it was time for my train to leave. They could all see that I was a bit tired, hungry and thirsty and I could see their minds starting to work.
They huddled into a group and discussed something and then broke, almost like a sports team before a big play.
Then one of the boys announced to me that THEY were going to buy me a drink and that I should come with him and pick out which one I wanted.
They got their money together and gave it to the one boy and he guided me towards the shop. At first, I was hesitant because I didn’t want to take anything from them, but then I thought to turn them down might insult them, and I didn’t want to do that. So, I accepted their offer.
The boy and I proudly walked back to the group with an ice cold Coke and they all stood, full of pride, and watched respectfully as I drank the Coke. I offered to share with them, but they would not stand for it and insisted that I drink it all myself.
Another “first experience” of their giving hearts was one night when I was driving through town and I saw a group of boys on the side of the road and stopped to say hi. I didn’t have much time because a friend and I had to meet some people for dinner, but I wanted to see how they were and what they were up to. They all, about nine of them, jumped into my little white VW Golf, as they often do, and I offered to give them a lift to wherever they were going.
As we were driving I heard them whispering and plotting something in the back seat. I wasn’t sure what they were up to. All of a sudden, one of them said, “Ryan, will you please drive to McDonalds?”, so I followed his request and drove to McDonalds, thinking that they wanted to get out there or something.
When I got there they pointed out a parking place for me and told me to park.
One of the boys jumped out, but the rest of the group excitedly waited in the car. I wasn’t sure what was going on. Before I knew it, the one boy was running back out of McDonalds with an ice cream cone - only one.
He proudly handed it through my window and they all said that it was “just for me” and that I wasn’t allowed to share it. I drove them to their destination, while enjoying my ice cream.
I felt overwhelmed with joy but also humbled at the same time. They were all talking about how hungry they were but then, without asking me for anything, they buy me an ice cream and once again refused to allow me to share it!
Another memorable experience was one day right in the middle of a month when I didn’t have any money. Some unexpected expenses came up in the beginning of the month and a few days into it, I was flat broke.
I would just go, day by day, not really knowing where my meals would come from, and making do with what was around. Every day I would pray that the Lord would provide something for me and I learned not to despise a single thing, even if it was just a slice of bread, or something out of the trashcan.
One day I was sitting with a group of kids under a tree. We were just sitting there talking.
All of a sudden, out of the blue, Shawn, an eighteen year old kid that I have known since the beginning started talking about how much I mean to them.
He started saying, “You have helped us for all these years and you have given so much to us and we haven’t given you anything in return!” Unaware of my financial situation, he then reached in his sock and pulled out twenty Rand.
He tried to hand it to me and he said that he wanted to give that to me for all I have done for the kids.
I was hesitant to take it and I thanked him for his gesture but I told him I couldn’t take his money. He would not accept “no” for an answer and was persistent in trying to give me the money.
Eventually, a street girl who was sitting there grabbed it out of Shawn’s hand and said, “Well, if he doesn’t want it I’ll take it!!” Then she shoved it down her shirt and put it in her bra.
Shawn, determined to give me the money, without hesitating reached down the girl’s shirt, retrieved the twenty Rand, and put it in my hand and told me that I didn’t have a choice. I decided to accept it for a couple of reasons: I felt like I was starting to offend him by not taking it and I knew that if it got back in the hands of the girl, there was no telling where she would try to put it next, and I knew that Shawn would get it out of wherever it was she decided to put it.
I had also just been wondering where I was going to get my next meal so, it was an answer to my prayer.
I looked Shawn in the eye and thanked him and then told him, “You know, I don’t have ANY money right now so this really means a lot to me! I think it was God that told you to give this to me.” He proudly smiled from ear to ear and said, “Yeah…Yeah! I felt in my heart that God was wanting me to give it to you!!”
We talked a little while longer and then I went on my way, AND I was able to eat that day. For me, it was an incredible experience of the giving hearts of the kids!
These are just a few examples of the amazing hearts of the kids and since those first few experiences, things like that have happened on a weekly basis.
There have even been times when I have been low on money and the kids will put petrol in my car or even insist that I take some money from them.
They have humbled me and amazed me time after time!
We can learn so much from their giving. Sometimes we have so much, but give so little, and they don’t have much, but give all they have. Though their gifts might not be of much “worth” to most people, they are worth more than gold to me!
22. Hard Times
In September 2001 I went to the States for three weeks to visit friends and family. On my return to Cape Town I went through a series of hard times over the next few months.
I had just happened to be in the States during September 11th but it was actually pretty funny because, in my absence, there were all sorts of rumors going around Cape Town about me. Some of the kids thought that I was in one of the planes that had crashed into the twin towers.
The other funny rumor branched out of me getting a TB test while I was in the States and testing positive to being exposed to it.
I did have the test, and during the time that it took to get the chest x-ray results back, I had told one of my friends back in South Africa about it, and he told some of the kids and the rumor was out that I actually had TB.
Well, I tested negative but the talk going around Cape Town was that I had TB and wasn’t going to be able to come back. Some of the kids mixed up the two stories and thought that I had died from TB.
Anyway, I had a warm greeting when I walked back onto the streets of Cape Town. Kids ran up to me, almost as if I was a ghost and excitedly screamed, “YOU’RE ALIVE!!!!” It was very funny! I had to explain over and over again that I WAS NOT in the airplanes that crashed into the World Trade Center and I DID NOT have TB.
The funny thing is there are still some kids that still believe that I was in the airplanes and I just managed to survive somehow.
One day, two years after the whole thing, a kid proudly told a friend of his that I had never met before, about how I was there during all that stuff and how I was in the airplane, but I managed to escape. I guess they have pretty active imaginations!
With all of that said, I was happy to be back and it was nice to be so warmly received.
Near the end of September, I came into contact with a kid named Jonathan. Jonathan was about eighteen years old but he looked like he was about fourteen. This was mostly because he was extremely sick with a terrible case of TB that he had endured for years.
His biggest problem was that he had started and stopped the medication without finishing it so many times that he had become immune to the medication.
When I met him, he was living on the streets and was at a very bad stage of the illness. He was extremely weak, skinny and would get out of breath at the slightest exertion of energy. Because he started and stopped the medication so many times, most of the clinics and hospitals knew him well and were not too keen on taking him in.
His health got worse and worse and finally I decided to try and find some place for him to stay.
He said he had family in the Cape Town area so we decided to go and ask if he could stay with them. When we made contact with his family they told us that he didn’t care about himself and he didn’t take care of himself and it was his own fault that he was sick.
They would not let him stay there.
They even went as far as to tell me not to contact them if he died because they don’t even care.
With nowhere else to take him, I decided to let him stay at my place until we could find somewhere else for him to live. He lived with me for a little over two weeks and in that time I got to know him really well.
He was really an amazing kid that had experienced a lot in his life! He had the most peaceful and gentle disposition.
I remember the first night he was at my house. I had put a mattress out for him, in front of the TV and I went into my room to go to bed. Right as I laid down, I heard him start to cough.
The coughing soon turned into violent hacking, which then turned into terrible gagging noises. It sounded like he was dying!!
I jumped up and ran into the room and he was laying there as calm as ever, with beads of sweat all over his face. I asked him if he was okay and he said, “Yeah! I am fine!! This happens every night if I eat anything after 6:00.”
He smiled and then laughed at me for thinking that he was dying or something and then went on coughing and hacking, until he eventually threw up.
Then he was able to peacefully sleep. That was pretty much a nightly routine.
Because he was so weak, he would get out of breath at the slightest thing. We tried going for a walk around Muizenberg one day to kind of “get out” of the house a bit and he had to stop about every five steps to catch his breath. I finally just put him on my back and carried him around.
Needless to say, our walk was cut a little short that day.
He was incredibly weak and would get totally out of breath just walking up the short flight of steps to my flat. He was just like a little old man.
He had a great sense of humour though, and I teased him about how he was like a grandpa; his wisdom and life experience for his age only made him seem all the more older. That is when I started calling him “Madala”, which is the Xhosa word for “old man”.
From that day on he would tease with me in return and call me “my son” or “my boy”. It was pretty funny.
I really enjoyed Jonathan’s company and I loved listening to his stories. He told me about how he used to be a runner for one of the biggest gangs in Cape Town. Not only that, but he was one of the few people that could actually call up the infamous leader of the gang and talk to him.
The gang leader knew him by name.
He told me different stories about when he was a runner and showed me his scars where he had been shot several times. I can still hear him graphically describing how it feels to get shot and the sensation of having a warm bullet going through your body.
He also told me about the point when he decided to change his life. He said he asked Jesus into his life and that is when he decided he didn’t want to be a gangster anymore. He got out of the gangster life, and stayed out.
After almost three weeks of Jonathan staying at my house, we finally found a hospital that was willing to take him and he went to stay there.
I was glad that he was finally in a hospital where he could be properly looked after but I questioned how much longer he was going to live.
I had just happened to be in the States during September 11th but it was actually pretty funny because, in my absence, there were all sorts of rumors going around Cape Town about me. Some of the kids thought that I was in one of the planes that had crashed into the twin towers.
The other funny rumor branched out of me getting a TB test while I was in the States and testing positive to being exposed to it.
I did have the test, and during the time that it took to get the chest x-ray results back, I had told one of my friends back in South Africa about it, and he told some of the kids and the rumor was out that I actually had TB.
Well, I tested negative but the talk going around Cape Town was that I had TB and wasn’t going to be able to come back. Some of the kids mixed up the two stories and thought that I had died from TB.
Anyway, I had a warm greeting when I walked back onto the streets of Cape Town. Kids ran up to me, almost as if I was a ghost and excitedly screamed, “YOU’RE ALIVE!!!!” It was very funny! I had to explain over and over again that I WAS NOT in the airplanes that crashed into the World Trade Center and I DID NOT have TB.
The funny thing is there are still some kids that still believe that I was in the airplanes and I just managed to survive somehow.
One day, two years after the whole thing, a kid proudly told a friend of his that I had never met before, about how I was there during all that stuff and how I was in the airplane, but I managed to escape. I guess they have pretty active imaginations!
With all of that said, I was happy to be back and it was nice to be so warmly received.
Near the end of September, I came into contact with a kid named Jonathan. Jonathan was about eighteen years old but he looked like he was about fourteen. This was mostly because he was extremely sick with a terrible case of TB that he had endured for years.
His biggest problem was that he had started and stopped the medication without finishing it so many times that he had become immune to the medication.
When I met him, he was living on the streets and was at a very bad stage of the illness. He was extremely weak, skinny and would get out of breath at the slightest exertion of energy. Because he started and stopped the medication so many times, most of the clinics and hospitals knew him well and were not too keen on taking him in.
His health got worse and worse and finally I decided to try and find some place for him to stay.
He said he had family in the Cape Town area so we decided to go and ask if he could stay with them. When we made contact with his family they told us that he didn’t care about himself and he didn’t take care of himself and it was his own fault that he was sick.
They would not let him stay there.
They even went as far as to tell me not to contact them if he died because they don’t even care.
With nowhere else to take him, I decided to let him stay at my place until we could find somewhere else for him to live. He lived with me for a little over two weeks and in that time I got to know him really well.
He was really an amazing kid that had experienced a lot in his life! He had the most peaceful and gentle disposition.
I remember the first night he was at my house. I had put a mattress out for him, in front of the TV and I went into my room to go to bed. Right as I laid down, I heard him start to cough.
The coughing soon turned into violent hacking, which then turned into terrible gagging noises. It sounded like he was dying!!
I jumped up and ran into the room and he was laying there as calm as ever, with beads of sweat all over his face. I asked him if he was okay and he said, “Yeah! I am fine!! This happens every night if I eat anything after 6:00.”
He smiled and then laughed at me for thinking that he was dying or something and then went on coughing and hacking, until he eventually threw up.
Then he was able to peacefully sleep. That was pretty much a nightly routine.
Because he was so weak, he would get out of breath at the slightest thing. We tried going for a walk around Muizenberg one day to kind of “get out” of the house a bit and he had to stop about every five steps to catch his breath. I finally just put him on my back and carried him around.
Needless to say, our walk was cut a little short that day.
He was incredibly weak and would get totally out of breath just walking up the short flight of steps to my flat. He was just like a little old man.
He had a great sense of humour though, and I teased him about how he was like a grandpa; his wisdom and life experience for his age only made him seem all the more older. That is when I started calling him “Madala”, which is the Xhosa word for “old man”.
From that day on he would tease with me in return and call me “my son” or “my boy”. It was pretty funny.
I really enjoyed Jonathan’s company and I loved listening to his stories. He told me about how he used to be a runner for one of the biggest gangs in Cape Town. Not only that, but he was one of the few people that could actually call up the infamous leader of the gang and talk to him.
The gang leader knew him by name.
He told me different stories about when he was a runner and showed me his scars where he had been shot several times. I can still hear him graphically describing how it feels to get shot and the sensation of having a warm bullet going through your body.
He also told me about the point when he decided to change his life. He said he asked Jesus into his life and that is when he decided he didn’t want to be a gangster anymore. He got out of the gangster life, and stayed out.
After almost three weeks of Jonathan staying at my house, we finally found a hospital that was willing to take him and he went to stay there.
I was glad that he was finally in a hospital where he could be properly looked after but I questioned how much longer he was going to live.
23. Hard Times: Eric
The next month brought its fair share of struggles! It was around that same time that Daniel was supposed to go to court for his rape, murder, and breaking and entering case.
That was the point when I had agreed to be his legal guardian because his mom refused to go to court and he was staying in a new shelter in Claremont, a suburb of Cape Town.
When I got to the shelter on the morning of his trial the childcare worker informed me that he had run away the night before. I called the court and told them and they said it was no problem and they understood.
I didn’t see my trip to the shelter as a total waste though because I saw Eric, a kid that I hadn’t seen in about five months.
Eric was one of the first kids I met in Claremont. I had built a close relationship with him.
I loved hanging out with him because he was always smiling, full of jokes and joy. He never failed to bring a smile to my face. That morning when I saw him at the shelter, he was proud to tell me that the reason I hadn’t seen him for five months was because he was off the streets and had been living in another shelter but he had just come to live in the new shelter in Claremont that had just opened that week.
It was great to see Eric! He looked great and he seemed to be in top spirits. I never would have guessed that would be the last time that I would ever see him again.
Three days after I had seen Eric I heard a rumor that a kid had died in the shelter from a “freak accident”. I called and spoke with the lady in charge and I was shocked and appalled at her lack of knowledge of the event and about the kid that had died. I asked her what his name was and she gave me a Xhosa name that was on his papers.
Most of the street kids will change their names or go by nicknames and I didn’t recognize the name that she told me.
I asked her if it was Eric and she said she wasn’t sure. I said that if it was Eric she would probably know because he had strolled in that area for about five years and everybody knew him.
She said, “Oh, well then no, it isn’t him. This kid just came last week.”
And I said, “Well, yes. I also saw Eric last week on the day he came there, and he had been out of the area for five months. But he also came there last week.”
She then said, “Oh, it must be him then.” She said I could come in and bring a picture of him if I wanted to be sure and I agreed to do so.
I went to the shelter the next day with a picture of Eric and found out that it was, in fact, Eric. They told me the story of exactly what had happened. And it definitely was a “freak” accident!
What happened was that Eric and another boy had gotten into an argument and, as the kids normally do, Eric picked up the closest object to him, which happened to be a shoe and threw it at the other boy.
The boy, in return, picked up the closest object to him and threw it back at Eric. The object that the other boy threw at Eric happened to be a paint roller, without the actual fluffy roller part on it, so the long bare pin was exposed.
The roller had been lying around because the shelter was still being painted and renovated.
When the boy threw the roller at Eric it came at a fast pace and all he could do was turn his head. The pin of the roller went straight into the back of Eric’s neck.
The childcare worker that was on duty at the time said that Eric did not fall to the ground, but he just slowly went down to his knees and then laid on his back.
He said that Eric laid there with a smile on his face, and because Eric was always playing around and the childcare worker had not seen everything thing that had gone on, he thought Eric was just joking around.
It was only when he saw the growing puddle of blood under Eric’s head that he realized that it was serious.
The boy that had thrown the roller frantically ran over to Eric and tried to pull it out as he sobbed and screamed for Eric to wake up. The childcare worker stopped him and they called an ambulance.
He then went over to Eric and saw that he had already died but he said when he put his hands on him and looked down at his smiling face, he experienced a peaceful feeling that he had never felt before and he felt as if the whole room was filled up with whiteness.
This whole matter was frustrating to me for several reasons. Accidents happen, and I can accept that. It is not always the accident that is the problem but the way it is handled afterwards.
The lady in charge of the shelter tried to cover up the situation for fear that if word got out about the accident, the new shelter would be shut down.
She had the boy that threw the roller arrested and put all of the blame on him. I couldn’t believe it.
When I asked where he was so I could visit him, she said she didn’t know. I haven’t seen him since then.
I expressed my feeling that he had not done it on purpose and that he was probably traumatized and to have to go to jail on top of that would only make things worse.
She responded by saying, “Well, he will probably get off with manslaughter and not murder.”
I was furious!
She also told the other boys in the shelter that what had happened was over and that they were not to talk about it anymore.
All but two boys ran away from the shelter that week.
I went there the evening before Eric’s funeral and was shocked to find them all out sitting on the sidewalk. They told me that she had told them that they were not allowed to go to the funeral unless they stayed in the shelter.
These are kids that had lived on the streets with Eric for years. They were his family! I fit all 13 of them into my small car and we went for a drive.
It was night and I just drove around and I ended up driving to the beach and we got out and sat and talked on the beach.
In that time they asked me all sorts of questions that they had not been allowed to ask.
Some of them were as simple as, “Where is Eric’s body?”
I answered all of their questions as best as possible and told them that as many of them as could fit in my car could ride with me to the funeral the next day.
I was asked to speak at the funeral because in the Xhosa tradition they like to have people stand up and speak at the funeral.
There will usually be someone to report how the person died, another to talk specifically about the person and honor them, and then a preacher to give the message.
The childcare worker was asked to talk about how he died. One of his teachers was asked to talk about his participation in a program he had gone to for the past five months and I was asked to speak about him in general.
None of his family members had seen him for about eight years and his mom came up to me after the funeral with tears in her eyes and thanked me for everything I had done for Eric and for sharing about him in the funeral. It was truly a huge honor for me!
At the gravesite, all the men go and shovel the dirt on by hand, taking turns, while singing.
After the burial, while I was standing near the grave a man came up to me. He asked me if I remembered him and I said that he did look familiar but I couldn’t figure out where I knew him from.
He then said that I probably didn’t recognize him because he didn’t have on his uniform. Then he explained that he was a police officer in town. I immediately remembered and also remembered that I had had one of my infamous “run ins” with him and his partner not too long ago.
It was actually his partner that gave me such a hard time and actually had gotten physical with me.
He explained that he was Eric’s brother and that he was really touched that I could come and speak because no one from the family knew him well enough to share about his life. He said he now realized how important the work I do with the kids is.
He then apologized for his partner being rude to me. It is such a small world.
That was the point when I had agreed to be his legal guardian because his mom refused to go to court and he was staying in a new shelter in Claremont, a suburb of Cape Town.
When I got to the shelter on the morning of his trial the childcare worker informed me that he had run away the night before. I called the court and told them and they said it was no problem and they understood.
I didn’t see my trip to the shelter as a total waste though because I saw Eric, a kid that I hadn’t seen in about five months.
Eric was one of the first kids I met in Claremont. I had built a close relationship with him.
I loved hanging out with him because he was always smiling, full of jokes and joy. He never failed to bring a smile to my face. That morning when I saw him at the shelter, he was proud to tell me that the reason I hadn’t seen him for five months was because he was off the streets and had been living in another shelter but he had just come to live in the new shelter in Claremont that had just opened that week.
It was great to see Eric! He looked great and he seemed to be in top spirits. I never would have guessed that would be the last time that I would ever see him again.
Three days after I had seen Eric I heard a rumor that a kid had died in the shelter from a “freak accident”. I called and spoke with the lady in charge and I was shocked and appalled at her lack of knowledge of the event and about the kid that had died. I asked her what his name was and she gave me a Xhosa name that was on his papers.
Most of the street kids will change their names or go by nicknames and I didn’t recognize the name that she told me.
I asked her if it was Eric and she said she wasn’t sure. I said that if it was Eric she would probably know because he had strolled in that area for about five years and everybody knew him.
She said, “Oh, well then no, it isn’t him. This kid just came last week.”
And I said, “Well, yes. I also saw Eric last week on the day he came there, and he had been out of the area for five months. But he also came there last week.”
She then said, “Oh, it must be him then.” She said I could come in and bring a picture of him if I wanted to be sure and I agreed to do so.
I went to the shelter the next day with a picture of Eric and found out that it was, in fact, Eric. They told me the story of exactly what had happened. And it definitely was a “freak” accident!
What happened was that Eric and another boy had gotten into an argument and, as the kids normally do, Eric picked up the closest object to him, which happened to be a shoe and threw it at the other boy.
The boy, in return, picked up the closest object to him and threw it back at Eric. The object that the other boy threw at Eric happened to be a paint roller, without the actual fluffy roller part on it, so the long bare pin was exposed.
The roller had been lying around because the shelter was still being painted and renovated.
When the boy threw the roller at Eric it came at a fast pace and all he could do was turn his head. The pin of the roller went straight into the back of Eric’s neck.
The childcare worker that was on duty at the time said that Eric did not fall to the ground, but he just slowly went down to his knees and then laid on his back.
He said that Eric laid there with a smile on his face, and because Eric was always playing around and the childcare worker had not seen everything thing that had gone on, he thought Eric was just joking around.
It was only when he saw the growing puddle of blood under Eric’s head that he realized that it was serious.
The boy that had thrown the roller frantically ran over to Eric and tried to pull it out as he sobbed and screamed for Eric to wake up. The childcare worker stopped him and they called an ambulance.
He then went over to Eric and saw that he had already died but he said when he put his hands on him and looked down at his smiling face, he experienced a peaceful feeling that he had never felt before and he felt as if the whole room was filled up with whiteness.
This whole matter was frustrating to me for several reasons. Accidents happen, and I can accept that. It is not always the accident that is the problem but the way it is handled afterwards.
The lady in charge of the shelter tried to cover up the situation for fear that if word got out about the accident, the new shelter would be shut down.
She had the boy that threw the roller arrested and put all of the blame on him. I couldn’t believe it.
When I asked where he was so I could visit him, she said she didn’t know. I haven’t seen him since then.
I expressed my feeling that he had not done it on purpose and that he was probably traumatized and to have to go to jail on top of that would only make things worse.
She responded by saying, “Well, he will probably get off with manslaughter and not murder.”
I was furious!
She also told the other boys in the shelter that what had happened was over and that they were not to talk about it anymore.
All but two boys ran away from the shelter that week.
I went there the evening before Eric’s funeral and was shocked to find them all out sitting on the sidewalk. They told me that she had told them that they were not allowed to go to the funeral unless they stayed in the shelter.
These are kids that had lived on the streets with Eric for years. They were his family! I fit all 13 of them into my small car and we went for a drive.
It was night and I just drove around and I ended up driving to the beach and we got out and sat and talked on the beach.
In that time they asked me all sorts of questions that they had not been allowed to ask.
Some of them were as simple as, “Where is Eric’s body?”
I answered all of their questions as best as possible and told them that as many of them as could fit in my car could ride with me to the funeral the next day.
I was asked to speak at the funeral because in the Xhosa tradition they like to have people stand up and speak at the funeral.
There will usually be someone to report how the person died, another to talk specifically about the person and honor them, and then a preacher to give the message.
The childcare worker was asked to talk about how he died. One of his teachers was asked to talk about his participation in a program he had gone to for the past five months and I was asked to speak about him in general.
None of his family members had seen him for about eight years and his mom came up to me after the funeral with tears in her eyes and thanked me for everything I had done for Eric and for sharing about him in the funeral. It was truly a huge honor for me!
At the gravesite, all the men go and shovel the dirt on by hand, taking turns, while singing.
After the burial, while I was standing near the grave a man came up to me. He asked me if I remembered him and I said that he did look familiar but I couldn’t figure out where I knew him from.
He then said that I probably didn’t recognize him because he didn’t have on his uniform. Then he explained that he was a police officer in town. I immediately remembered and also remembered that I had had one of my infamous “run ins” with him and his partner not too long ago.
It was actually his partner that gave me such a hard time and actually had gotten physical with me.
He explained that he was Eric’s brother and that he was really touched that I could come and speak because no one from the family knew him well enough to share about his life. He said he now realized how important the work I do with the kids is.
He then apologized for his partner being rude to me. It is such a small world.
24. Hard Times: Hi Jack!
Eric’s death was pretty hard for me because he was the first kid that I was close to that I had lost. I would soon see that Eric’s death was only the beginning of a series of trials for me.
One on-going trial for me throughout the whole first year I had been here, from the very first month I bought it, was my car.
At that point, I had had the car for almost a year and it had basically broken down every month, at least once, in that whole year! I learned why it broke down constantly. The mechanic asked me if I had recently gotten into a really bad accident.
I told him I hadn’t but I had recently bought the car and didn’t know about the history.
He informed me that it had indeed been in a very bad accident where the whole front end had been demolished. He said that the previous owners actually had to weld the whole front end of the car on again and that all the parts they had put back in were pirate parts.
I, of course, looked under the hood before I bought it, like any good man would. That does not mean that I knew what the heck I was looking at. To me it looked fine. It also sounded great and the outside looked almost perfectly new. In my very ignorant opinion, it was a great car.
For that full year I saw that not only was it NOT a good car, but it was just a bad egg.
Anyway, when I was in the States in September I had made the decision to do one of two things. I could A) count my loss and sell it for half, or less than half, of what I bought it for. That would mean that not only would I lose out because I paid WAY too much for it in the first place, but because I had paid more than its worth in repairs, I would also lose that additional money.
Or I could B) spend one last heap of money and just get EVERYTHING on it fixed, which basically meant buying a totally new engine.
I went back and forth between the two and was having trouble deciding which one was the best option.
In October 2001, I finally decided it was time to make a decision and I gave myself the deadline of the next day to decide.
That morning, before I left the house, I prayed that the Lord would make it clear to me what I should do. I didn’t realize how loud of an answer I would get to that prayer request.
I had promised to take two kids home that afternoon so I went into town to find them. One was a girl who lived on the streets, but decided that she wanted to go home. The other was Sipho, one of the boys from under the bridge. He just wanted to go for a visit.
I found them both and we were off.
They live in communities that are about a twenty-minute drive from downtown. I first dropped the girl off at her house and then Sipho.
He lived in an area that was about a ten to fifteen minute drive, through an area that is known to be “dangerous”. Crime is common there and especially hijacking because one of the biggest ‘chopshops’ in the Cape Town area is there. But I often went to that area and had never experienced anything bad.
I had also become extremely comfortable in the areas that others considered dangerous. Maybe I had become a little too comfortable.
While sitting at a red light, with my window open on a hot day, my cell phone rang.
Now, I normally would not answer it driving around in those areas but it was the number of the Beautiful Gate AIDS facility. They are located right down the road from where I was sitting at the red light and I thought that they might be asking me to pick something up, so I decided to answer it.
Well, it wasn’t as quick a conversation as I thought it might be and the red light just didn’t seem to be changing.
All of a sudden, out of the corner of my eye I saw someone approaching my car, but I didn’t pay any attention. There are always people coming up to your car in Cape Town, begging for money, wanting to wash your window, trying to sell you something and lots of other reasons.
I then felt someone pull on my cell phone that I was busy talking on. Now, I am so used to talking on the phone in town with all the kids around that I had gotten used to talking and not being distracted, even when the kids are talking loudly or pulling on me or my cell phone.
So, I merely tightened my grip and pulled it back away, without looking over, and I kept talking.
I felt someone pull on it again, harder this time.
Again, without looking up, I pulled the phone back, laughed this time, thinking someone was just joking around with me, and kept talking. I then felt a sharp blow to my head.
It felt like some sort of hard metal object.
I was confused and I looked up at the person standing at my window, who had a gun pointed in my face.
Now, I am no expert on guns but I know what Smith and Wesson means!
Looking back, I am amazed at how my mind went into autopilot. There were a million things running through my brain but I couldn’t manage to grab on to one concrete thought-
“Is that a real gun? It felt real to me! Is it loaded? There’s only a few ways to find out! You think you can take him? He has a gun sticking in your ear!! What in the world does he want? YOUR PHONE STUPID!!”
Attention the captain has switched to auto pilot mode.
Amazingly, I remained extremely calm. I said, “Oh, do you want this? Here.” I handed the cell phone to him. I thought that was all he wanted. I looked over at Sipho and I noticed that there was another guy on that side of the car, holding a gun to his head.
I realized that they wanted more than my cell phone. They both started yelling, “Get out of the car!!! Get out of the car!!!!”
I calmly held up my hands in the most passive way I could and said, “Ok, I will get out. Don’t worry.”
I started getting out and then the friendly hijacker kindly helped open my door and pulled me out by my shirt. After we had gotten out of the car, four more guys, all with guns, came out from behind some shacks and started running for the car. Now I had no clue what to do.
I mean, I had never been hijacked before.
Was I supposed to just stand there until they drove off into the distance? Were they going to shoot me? Was I supposed to run away? I really had no clue.
I decided for a combination and decided to calmly back away, while keeping my eyes on them, and make it to the grassy median that was in the middle of the road.
I looked over and saw Sipho standing there in shock. I noticed that his shirt, that used to be white, was turning red and then I realized that his head was bleeding.
I didn’t know that one of the hijackers had hit him on the head with a gun because he was arguing with them and asking them why they were robbing a guy that is trying to help people.
I thought to myself, “Did he get shot? No, you would have definitely heard it. Maybe they stabbed him.”
I called Sipho over to the median and we watched as the six amateur hijackers tried to make their quick getaway.
All six of the guys had jumped into the car at that point and the driver tried to squeal away. Unfortunately for him, the car jumped a bit and then died.
I couldn’t help but laugh. So I did.
He frantically tried to start it up again. The car hesitantly started up and when he tried to pull away, the car again hopped a bit and then died.
I laughed harder and thought how important it is to learn how to drive a car BEFORE you try and hijack someone. Panic-stricken, he gave it a last try, but this time the car refused to start.
He started shouting hysterically to the other guys in the car and two of them jumped out of the back, with their guns waving in the air. I thought that they were going to either make me get in and be the getaway driver or shoot me for giving them the piece of junk.
Or, even worse, hold me at gunpoint and make me take the car back!
They did none of the above. They went to the back of the car and started pushing. Both hijackers kept one hand on the car as they pushed. They held their other hands that were holding their guns in the air so everyone could see them.
I watched them roll away into the distance.
As the hijackers were making their slow getaway, a lady slowed down her car on the other side of the road and yelled for me to get in.
I was glad because I was just standing there wondering what in the world I was going to do next. She didn’t stop completely and kept the car moving at idle speed.
I jogged beside the car, opened the door and jumped in. I must say, my getaway was much more sleek than the hijackers’.
Sipho also started running for the car and the lady slammed on the gas, almost giving me whiplash, thinking he was one of the hijackers.
I told her he was with me and she slammed on the brakes, once again almost giving me whiplash.
Then she kept the car moving at idle speed and Sipho jumped in.
She gave us a ride to the police station and lectured me the whole way telling me that I am white and I should not be coming into the black areas because they are too dangerous for white people.
I told her that I was actually amazed because I had been coming into these areas for almost a year and that was the first negative thing that had happened. Those statistics seemed pretty good to me considering people get killed and robbed in these areas on a daily basis.
The police station was packed full, as usual on a Friday afternoon. I was the afternoon entertainment being the only white face in the crowd.
Everyone in the station listened curiously as the inspector went through the questions. By the end of the charge sheet, he was talking loud enough for everyone to hear and would even stop at times to allow the people to laugh.
One pause in particular was when he had to fill in the “race” question.
He said, “Excuse me, are you black?”
Everyone found that extremely funny!!
The only person that was not finding that afternoon very funny was Sipho. He was terribly upset. He could not believe that someone would rob me.
When the officer was done, Sipho and I sat down and waited for a lift from a friend I had called. Sipho was totally traumatized! The part that upset him the most was that they had robbed ME.
The part that I found funny was that Sipho, this fourteen year old kid, had robbed people and had allegedly even hijacked cars back in his own community and had never felt remorse for it. But now he had the opportunity to see how it felt to be on the other side.
I talked to him about Eric dying the week before and I told him that I was just happy that we were both alive and that I needed to get rid of that car anyway.
I looked at the gash on his head and it wasn’t too bad but his whole shirt was covered with blood because head wounds bleed a lot. I took off one of my shirts (I always wear two and have done so for most of my life for some strange reason) and gave it to him to put on.
Our lift came and we dropped Sipho back off in town.
Eric’s death, the week before, truly put things into perspective for me. I kept thinking that I was still in shock or something and that all of a sudden it would hit me and I would freak out about the hijacking experience.
But I never did.
One of my friends was more upset about the whole thing than I was and I had to try and comfort HIM.
After everything was said and done, it was only a car and a cheap cell phone that was taken. No one died in the process. I had to go a few months without a car while waiting for the insurance papers to go through, but after about a two month wait, I was able to collect the insurance money and get a car that was way better than the other one.
Someone told me, “Man, that was a blessing in disguise!!” and I replied, “You know, when I saw them PUSHING the car away, I realized that there was no disguise to it. It was just a BLESSING!!”
The Lord answered my prayer. October ended and November rolled in with its own set of trials.
One on-going trial for me throughout the whole first year I had been here, from the very first month I bought it, was my car.
At that point, I had had the car for almost a year and it had basically broken down every month, at least once, in that whole year! I learned why it broke down constantly. The mechanic asked me if I had recently gotten into a really bad accident.
I told him I hadn’t but I had recently bought the car and didn’t know about the history.
He informed me that it had indeed been in a very bad accident where the whole front end had been demolished. He said that the previous owners actually had to weld the whole front end of the car on again and that all the parts they had put back in were pirate parts.
I, of course, looked under the hood before I bought it, like any good man would. That does not mean that I knew what the heck I was looking at. To me it looked fine. It also sounded great and the outside looked almost perfectly new. In my very ignorant opinion, it was a great car.
For that full year I saw that not only was it NOT a good car, but it was just a bad egg.
Anyway, when I was in the States in September I had made the decision to do one of two things. I could A) count my loss and sell it for half, or less than half, of what I bought it for. That would mean that not only would I lose out because I paid WAY too much for it in the first place, but because I had paid more than its worth in repairs, I would also lose that additional money.
Or I could B) spend one last heap of money and just get EVERYTHING on it fixed, which basically meant buying a totally new engine.
I went back and forth between the two and was having trouble deciding which one was the best option.
In October 2001, I finally decided it was time to make a decision and I gave myself the deadline of the next day to decide.
That morning, before I left the house, I prayed that the Lord would make it clear to me what I should do. I didn’t realize how loud of an answer I would get to that prayer request.
I had promised to take two kids home that afternoon so I went into town to find them. One was a girl who lived on the streets, but decided that she wanted to go home. The other was Sipho, one of the boys from under the bridge. He just wanted to go for a visit.
I found them both and we were off.
They live in communities that are about a twenty-minute drive from downtown. I first dropped the girl off at her house and then Sipho.
He lived in an area that was about a ten to fifteen minute drive, through an area that is known to be “dangerous”. Crime is common there and especially hijacking because one of the biggest ‘chopshops’ in the Cape Town area is there. But I often went to that area and had never experienced anything bad.
I had also become extremely comfortable in the areas that others considered dangerous. Maybe I had become a little too comfortable.
While sitting at a red light, with my window open on a hot day, my cell phone rang.
Now, I normally would not answer it driving around in those areas but it was the number of the Beautiful Gate AIDS facility. They are located right down the road from where I was sitting at the red light and I thought that they might be asking me to pick something up, so I decided to answer it.
Well, it wasn’t as quick a conversation as I thought it might be and the red light just didn’t seem to be changing.
All of a sudden, out of the corner of my eye I saw someone approaching my car, but I didn’t pay any attention. There are always people coming up to your car in Cape Town, begging for money, wanting to wash your window, trying to sell you something and lots of other reasons.
I then felt someone pull on my cell phone that I was busy talking on. Now, I am so used to talking on the phone in town with all the kids around that I had gotten used to talking and not being distracted, even when the kids are talking loudly or pulling on me or my cell phone.
So, I merely tightened my grip and pulled it back away, without looking over, and I kept talking.
I felt someone pull on it again, harder this time.
Again, without looking up, I pulled the phone back, laughed this time, thinking someone was just joking around with me, and kept talking. I then felt a sharp blow to my head.
It felt like some sort of hard metal object.
I was confused and I looked up at the person standing at my window, who had a gun pointed in my face.
Now, I am no expert on guns but I know what Smith and Wesson means!
Looking back, I am amazed at how my mind went into autopilot. There were a million things running through my brain but I couldn’t manage to grab on to one concrete thought-
“Is that a real gun? It felt real to me! Is it loaded? There’s only a few ways to find out! You think you can take him? He has a gun sticking in your ear!! What in the world does he want? YOUR PHONE STUPID!!”
Attention the captain has switched to auto pilot mode.
Amazingly, I remained extremely calm. I said, “Oh, do you want this? Here.” I handed the cell phone to him. I thought that was all he wanted. I looked over at Sipho and I noticed that there was another guy on that side of the car, holding a gun to his head.
I realized that they wanted more than my cell phone. They both started yelling, “Get out of the car!!! Get out of the car!!!!”
I calmly held up my hands in the most passive way I could and said, “Ok, I will get out. Don’t worry.”
I started getting out and then the friendly hijacker kindly helped open my door and pulled me out by my shirt. After we had gotten out of the car, four more guys, all with guns, came out from behind some shacks and started running for the car. Now I had no clue what to do.
I mean, I had never been hijacked before.
Was I supposed to just stand there until they drove off into the distance? Were they going to shoot me? Was I supposed to run away? I really had no clue.
I decided for a combination and decided to calmly back away, while keeping my eyes on them, and make it to the grassy median that was in the middle of the road.
I looked over and saw Sipho standing there in shock. I noticed that his shirt, that used to be white, was turning red and then I realized that his head was bleeding.
I didn’t know that one of the hijackers had hit him on the head with a gun because he was arguing with them and asking them why they were robbing a guy that is trying to help people.
I thought to myself, “Did he get shot? No, you would have definitely heard it. Maybe they stabbed him.”
I called Sipho over to the median and we watched as the six amateur hijackers tried to make their quick getaway.
All six of the guys had jumped into the car at that point and the driver tried to squeal away. Unfortunately for him, the car jumped a bit and then died.
I couldn’t help but laugh. So I did.
He frantically tried to start it up again. The car hesitantly started up and when he tried to pull away, the car again hopped a bit and then died.
I laughed harder and thought how important it is to learn how to drive a car BEFORE you try and hijack someone. Panic-stricken, he gave it a last try, but this time the car refused to start.
He started shouting hysterically to the other guys in the car and two of them jumped out of the back, with their guns waving in the air. I thought that they were going to either make me get in and be the getaway driver or shoot me for giving them the piece of junk.
Or, even worse, hold me at gunpoint and make me take the car back!
They did none of the above. They went to the back of the car and started pushing. Both hijackers kept one hand on the car as they pushed. They held their other hands that were holding their guns in the air so everyone could see them.
I watched them roll away into the distance.
As the hijackers were making their slow getaway, a lady slowed down her car on the other side of the road and yelled for me to get in.
I was glad because I was just standing there wondering what in the world I was going to do next. She didn’t stop completely and kept the car moving at idle speed.
I jogged beside the car, opened the door and jumped in. I must say, my getaway was much more sleek than the hijackers’.
Sipho also started running for the car and the lady slammed on the gas, almost giving me whiplash, thinking he was one of the hijackers.
I told her he was with me and she slammed on the brakes, once again almost giving me whiplash.
Then she kept the car moving at idle speed and Sipho jumped in.
She gave us a ride to the police station and lectured me the whole way telling me that I am white and I should not be coming into the black areas because they are too dangerous for white people.
I told her that I was actually amazed because I had been coming into these areas for almost a year and that was the first negative thing that had happened. Those statistics seemed pretty good to me considering people get killed and robbed in these areas on a daily basis.
The police station was packed full, as usual on a Friday afternoon. I was the afternoon entertainment being the only white face in the crowd.
Everyone in the station listened curiously as the inspector went through the questions. By the end of the charge sheet, he was talking loud enough for everyone to hear and would even stop at times to allow the people to laugh.
One pause in particular was when he had to fill in the “race” question.
He said, “Excuse me, are you black?”
Everyone found that extremely funny!!
The only person that was not finding that afternoon very funny was Sipho. He was terribly upset. He could not believe that someone would rob me.
When the officer was done, Sipho and I sat down and waited for a lift from a friend I had called. Sipho was totally traumatized! The part that upset him the most was that they had robbed ME.
The part that I found funny was that Sipho, this fourteen year old kid, had robbed people and had allegedly even hijacked cars back in his own community and had never felt remorse for it. But now he had the opportunity to see how it felt to be on the other side.
I talked to him about Eric dying the week before and I told him that I was just happy that we were both alive and that I needed to get rid of that car anyway.
I looked at the gash on his head and it wasn’t too bad but his whole shirt was covered with blood because head wounds bleed a lot. I took off one of my shirts (I always wear two and have done so for most of my life for some strange reason) and gave it to him to put on.
Our lift came and we dropped Sipho back off in town.
Eric’s death, the week before, truly put things into perspective for me. I kept thinking that I was still in shock or something and that all of a sudden it would hit me and I would freak out about the hijacking experience.
But I never did.
One of my friends was more upset about the whole thing than I was and I had to try and comfort HIM.
After everything was said and done, it was only a car and a cheap cell phone that was taken. No one died in the process. I had to go a few months without a car while waiting for the insurance papers to go through, but after about a two month wait, I was able to collect the insurance money and get a car that was way better than the other one.
Someone told me, “Man, that was a blessing in disguise!!” and I replied, “You know, when I saw them PUSHING the car away, I realized that there was no disguise to it. It was just a BLESSING!!”
The Lord answered my prayer. October ended and November rolled in with its own set of trials.
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