You know it’s one thing to hear a child’s tragic story from a distance, but it’s another entirely when you get to have a connection to that child. When you can put a face to a story and hug that child. That’s what it is really about. It’s that’s connection that makes all of this worthwhile. Everyday that we go to an intervention and I join a class, I get to become a part of it. I get one step closer to the direct contact with the kids; I get to pray that if they understand English that my words sink somewhere into their brains, that just my presence can have some effect on them.
These are sixth, seventh, and eighth graders that are just like any other sixth, seventh, and eighth grades across that globe. They may live under different circumstances, they may adhere to different cultural behaviors, but in the end just are just kids. Kids that because of their living circumstance may never have a chance to change their situation, to get out of their communities and see the world and learn about it, in fact they may never even be able to fathom the opportunities other children have. Opportunities most of us take for granted.
Today we did practice 6 from the curriculum at our intervention at Greenpoint (one of the township communities), forever my least favorite practice. Practice 6 is called “Our Stories” and the whole idea of the practice is to try to get the kids to open up and start talking about HIV/AIDS and their personal stories relating to resilience. Great idea in principal, but difficult to execute. The problem is that we work with 12-14 year olds and the last thing they want to do is take anything seriously. Most of my interaction with this practice has led me to lose faith in this practice and sometimes question the whole curriculum. It makes me crazy. The kids make up stories, most of which do not even make sense, they laugh at classmates, even when the classmate breaks down from a real, serious, and difficult story. I never see practice 6 have the effect it should have. However, every time we have done practice 6, all of the other coaches from the classes that of course I was not a part of tell these amazing stories about the kids opening up and sharing truly powerful stories. To me, most days, it is a waste of our time and the “American people’s money” as Mandla would say. (Side note: USAID is our largest funder. Other side note: On the USAID’s symbol, below USAID it reads “From the American People,” trust me another discussion for another time). Anyways…when I found out today that we would be doing practice 6 at a school where the kids mainly speak Afrikaans, I grabbed my book and had every intention of spending the afternoon reading about Zimbabwe in the car. Clifford, one of the coaches, had a better idea. I would join his class (he promised to translate and I couldn’t exactly voice that I hated practice 6). Some days I feel like I am a distraction to the classes when I am around, but I guess that is not always true because otherwise the coaches wouldn’t insist for me to be there. So I agreed/was pulled into the classroom.
I am not sure if I explained this previously, but for the kids to graduate the program they must attend 6 out of the 9 practices. Greenpoint has been proving to be a very difficult school to work with because the kids are out of control, they are not interested, and the administrators do not want to give us a lot of time because of the strike recovery plan. Yea, remember that one; it seems like forever ago now. Anyways as an office we decided that we are low on numbers this quarter and that we would just go to Greenpoint through practice 6. We would just graduate whatever kids showed up to all six so we could just get our numbers and be done with it. So today we had planned to do practice 6, type those names into the computer and send them over to Cape Town. Then there was a slight turn of events.
As always with practice 6, most of the kids in the class did not want to take it seriously, no one wanted to share, and those kids who had stories to tell they were too embarrassed or nervous to tell their stories in front of the whole class. So I just sat there for 25 minutes while the coaches explained the importance of sharing their stories, threatened to take away their certificates, and anything else they could do to make the kids participate, thinking about how much I still hated practice 6 and about how I really should talk to those curriculum and training people about this nonsense. After pleading with the kids, we decided that we would just let the kids go and if there was anyone who wanted to share their stories or talk to us privately that they could stay after to do so. 12 kids stayed after. I only spoke directly with two girls, but I heard about some of the other stories and they ranged from beatings, to rape to deaths of family members. One story was about a group of kids who had been followed by a black car. Sensing danger all of the boys ran away leaving a young girl in the dust. She was captured, raped, and died the next day in the hospital. One of the stories I heard was about a girl’s aunt who was HIV positive and pregnant. In 2007 the aunt died and left the baby (and everyone unsure of whether or not the baby was positive) and the rest of that story got lost in translation. The other 12-year-old girl shared a story about her mother who had TB. She told us that her mother drank a lot and didn’t take care of her and her sister and that her stepfather also drank a lot and would beat the mother and the girls. This 12- year-old girl had to assume the role of caretaker at a very young age. An age where she should be worried about playing with friends, not what to feed her sister. The girls have since moved out and live with their cousins and the mother passed away in August.
I was talking to my dad about it earlier and he was like “man, this is some real depressing stuff.” (I probably shouldn’t quote because I know those were not the exact words, but something along those lines). And that’s the truth, it is horrifyingly depressing, but here’s the thing, these are real people, just people exactly like you and me. And this is their real world. This is the reason that I am here. To you it may just be another story on a piece of paper or a computer screen, but for me, for the first time, it is a real story belonging to a girl, with a face and a name. Someone that I listened to, that I looked in the eyes and told that she was brave for telling her story, that I comforted, someone that I got to share a special connection with.
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