no appeal needed....the Amsterdam/Africa story.

Maybe someone can tell us if this is an urban legend.

If it is..... Then, so what!!  It's a wonderful, inspiring child and youth care story.

Many years ago, in Amsterdam, child and youth care workers decided to strike for better conditions of service. Supposedly, that would have meant for better salaries. They gave the strike period to be a probable three weeks, estimating that within that time the authorities would have met their demands.

Of course this put the residential homes for children in Amsterdam into a dilemma.. No,.. it put the children's homes into crisis. The children would need care for those three weeks, and who would do this?  So, they put out a big appeal in the press and everywhere, asking the people of Amsterdam to take a child or some children into their homes for three weeks - the estimated period of the strike.

Well, the story goes, three weeks passed and there was no resolution to the workers demands. The strike went well beyond the estimated dates. In fact, the story goes, it lasted six months.

At the end of six months the child care workers returned to their children's homes in Amsterdam.

But,when they re-opened, ONLY ONE CHILD was returned by the people of Amsterdam.

There is something very African about this Amsterdam story.

I can remember when there was a thought in this country that the AIDS pandemic. prevalent in Africa South of the Sahara,and especially in South Africa, would overload the residential services here.... that the old fashioned orphanages would reappear

I can remember when my Board of Management was saying to me that I was making a mistake, I was premature and short-sighted on being adamant that the 350 bed dormitory facility must go.

They said  "Mistake!! ... in a short while it will be needed because of the orphans and HIV and AIDS."

NO SIRS !!  Don't underestimate people, but especially, don't misunderstand or misjudge Africa !!!  Where are they these children?... and they do exist in their thousands if not in their tens of thousands in South Africa.

.....................absorbed into family; families......absorbed into and cared for in extended families, in sibling care, in child headed households and professionally serviced in community-based , African-styled professional care models - the most notable of which is the "Isibindi model".

The people of Amsterdam showed us that when we are appealed to, when there is an urgency and a crisis and we are appealed to, then children can and will be cared for in family-based systems

In Africa there was no appeal.

In Africa, no appeal will ever be necessary

Africa has a life, a culture and the heart to simply take children into family, care for them and make them their own........ no appeal necessary.