Candy floss and jumping castles, sack races and puppets in the most unlikely setting – a dusty strip that masquerades as a school field where shouting children chase a dilapidated soccer ball after school. To mark Child Protection Week this weekend, Child Welfare’s Durban and District North Team and the Quarry Heights Primary School created an event that let children do what should come naturally – play.
“We gave these children three to four hours to just be children – something they might never experience again this year,” explained North Team manager Nafisa Hanssa.
For the majority of children living in the Quarry Heights informal settlement or low cost housing project just minutes away from the busy N2 highway that leads to affluent suburbs like La Lucia and Umhlanga, life is an endless round of poverty, abuse and neglect.
Many of the children crowded into the cluster of classrooms come to school for the single meal served at around 10.30. Teachers have no idea where many of the children disappear to at the end of the week. What they do know is that many of these children’s next meals are served at school the following Monday morning. Some children need ARV’s but, without food in their tummies, they cannot take the medication.
“People forget about these innocent children. They’ve learnt to be very secretive and accept abuse and suffering as part of their lives. Many have never seen anything beautiful. A lot of people cannot understand how a child with nowhere to sleep would never complain,” said school principal, Ntombi Madlala.
She believes the school, as a no fees facility with a feeding scheme, is a last resort for many. It was created by Madlala and three unqualified educators in 2008 to cater for small children who couldn’t afford public transport and, rather than walk up to 10 kilometres to school, remained outside the educational system. The number of pupils grew from 130 to 296 in just a year and has now reached over 600 with more children arriving even this late in the year. Madlala said she could not turn children away and leave them on the streets.
Yet, the school is struggling and is in desperate need of basic resources. It comprises six dilapidated prefabs, a minute garden shed that serves as the principal’s office, a derelict old container which serves as a kitchen and an even more run down shelter that houses a security guard. Ablutions are a small row of portable toilets and there is no electricity. The teacher pupil ratio is extremely high with 90 Grade R learners assigned to just one teacher.
“Three quarters of the children are our ‘clients’ and many of the parents know us as they are foster parents with whom we work. That’s an abnormal situation in itself – but what it does show is how many parents have died and how many others are providing alternative care,” explained senior social worker, Lydia Watson.
Madlala said that more than half of the learners were orphans. Although she does not have figures for this year, a survey last year showed that 248 out of 496 were orphans. She believes this number is growing all the time.
“Now that the whole middle generation is being wiped out (by HIV/AIDS), the bulk of children are raised by elderly grandmothers who are simply left to carry the can, bearing the burdens that should have belonged to two young parents and having to survive on an old age pension,” Watson said.
Hanssa added that many grandmothers were caring for grandchildren from three or four of their own children. “Even though a granny has to deal with her own losses and pain, she just has to go on without grieving. In an ideal society, we would place children with adults under 40. Here, we are forced to leave children with older care givers because there is no-one else and because we don’t want to break up families.”
However, many of the grandparents who took in children a few years ago are in their late sixties or seventies and are now dying because of old age, poor health or because they simply cannot carry on. The next option is foster care. However, many foster parents are also now dying. The North Team has had nine cases in just five months and is now resorting to placing children in households headed by older siblings.
Grace Ramiah, a senior social worker who specializes in family preservation, said that because finding alternative care for children was becoming more and more difficult, it was now more important than ever to support care givers. Caring for growing children who easily succumb to peer pressure in a very violent community was particularly difficult for the elderly and for young household heads who were still children themselves and had no parenting skills. As a result, while the children enjoyed the festival like atmosphere yesterday, caregivers benefitted from programmes aimed at improving parenting skills and communication.
However, not all children in Quarry Heights have caregivers who are prepared to go that extra mile. Madlala regularly confronts seemingly hopeless situations - a little girl who refused to return home because her mother’s boyfriend was abusing her, a little girl who has been raped twice this year, a little boy found living in a two bedroomed house with 17 adults and 11 children, a young girl whose mother, she said, turned up blind drunk when she was summoned to the school to discuss her child’s poor health. However, the most heartbreaking example involved a young boy whose father and his new partner withdrew ARV treatment and then beat him severely, allegedly hoping he would die. She called in the police as she has had to in many situations.
Child labour is also common in quarry Heights with young children walking about trying to sell items late into the night or older boys taking pre-dawn jobs often as taxi conductors before going to school. A week ago, Madlala received a call informing her that a nine year-old pupil spent his evenings going door to door carrying a 20 kg load mielies.
Madlala said child abuse was rife. According to another of the North Team’s senior social workers, Meena Harridas, cases of sexual abuse in Quarry Heights are disproportionately high. It is just one of sixteen Durban North areas that fall under the North team, yet it accounted for 18.75 percent of all cases reported between April 2010 and March 2011. Emotional and physical abuse and neglect each accounted for around nine percent of the overall case load. However, because a great deal of abuse is never reported and because parents and children see physical punishment as the norm – children are often whipped with sjamboks and pipes - there is no way of getting an accurate idea of what is happening behind closed doors.
Watson said that the sheer fight for survival often clouded abuse issues which were anything but a priority when families did not even know where the next meal was coming from. It was often only during awareness days such as yesterday’s that youngsters found out that that emotional and physical abuse were wrong.
“The worrying issue about Quarry Heights is that people live very close to each other and parents seem to take it for granted that a child is safe playing in the yard. The perpetrators are often living in the same neighbourhood,” Haridas explained.
She said the most vulnerable children were between the ages of six and eight, although the North Team encountered abused children that were as young as two. Those most in danger of being raped were “go-get” children who were often sent on errands, sometimes visiting tucks shops to by food or airtime at night. Recently, a young girl who was running her mother’s tuck shop was lured to a house to collect a cool drink bottle from a customer who had not handed it in as an exchange. When she arrived, a man locked her in and then called the customer. He left and, when the original customer arrived, he raped her. The same child has been raped three times in a few months.
In addition to problems with parents and abusers, educators and social workers also deal with severe behavioral problems amongst children themselves. Madlala said many learners between the ages of 10 and 13 had alcohol problems. In many instances, their parents and families drank heavily and they often had more access to alcohol than to food.
Watson and auxiliary social worker Promise Mkhize said children came to school with juice bottles containing mixtures of “gavine” (the street name for methylated spirits) and a soft drink like Sprite which they consumed during break times. Older children also used “kuber” a breath freshner that was sold at the many tuck shops in the area for around R5. Sexually active teenage girls and mothers often used this drug to heighten sexual pleasure, making it available to younger children. Glue sniffing was also common, they said.
Right now, it is clear that Child Welfare, Durban and District, the Quarry Heights Primary School and the community itself are stretched to breaking point. According to Ramiah, ridiculously heavy case loads and too few social workers mean that even the most dire cases did not receive the attention they deserved. “I wish we had the luxury of really being there for families, seeing them through their hardships and knowing that the situation is stable when we leave,” agreed Hansa.
The only alternative is to try to reach as many as possible through community programmes similar to the one held at the Quarry Heights Primary School this weekend. Ramiah said that while the main objective was to provide an opportunity for uninhibited play, they also wanted to spread the message that children needed to be protected from abuse to “hit home” and to provide some parenting skills and support for struggling care givers and parents.
An added bonus would be to raise awareness of the dire conditions in Quarry Heights among municipal and provincial authorities. All involved would like to see the creation of safe parks where children can play. Right now, there isn’t so much as a swing.
