LOCKDOWN LESSONS...CHILD AND YOUTH CARE IN SOUTH AFRICA

I didn't get it until now really - lockdown May 2020. So far, 45 days and more to follow. On my own, isolation.

About 4 times daily, I walk my driveway to the motor-gate and back. It's a relief from 'cabin fever'. In these mini walks, through the boundary fence, I see my neighbours clearly experiencing lockdown differently from me. There they are  - a family of six. They sit, talk, cook barbeque, eat, laugh. From the driveway, I can feel a family connection, for which, in lockdown, I long.

Some times they call me to the spiked paling fence. "We baked some cake. We thought you may enjoy. If there is anything you need, please, just tell us".
"I'm fine. Thankyou. If I need anything, I will ask". My real "anything" can't be asked. If my need was asked, it would be: "Please can you invite me in for a moment of company, connection, talk, sharing. These things called 'social distancing', 'lockdown' erect a barrier and doesn't allow that. And anyway, they are, what many call,"tight". I would be an intrusion. 

He must have been 17 years old at the time. Seventeen is a scary age to be a young person in a facility. It's the final year of legal placement in residential care. 

I was in my office at my desk. It was a room about 1/3rd of the way down a long outdoor corridor. From the left came the sound of smashing glass. Window after window. I stood up and moved toward my inner office door. Just as well as, wham, shatter, there went my office windows, then the secretary's, the Deputy Director's office windows. Smash, smash, smash,windows the full length of the office block. The Deputy Director gave chase and found him in a nearby vacant plot.

Obvious next move, drag him into my office, deposit him and leave him to me. Once the usual verbal and emotional hype had calmed, he said, "Do you know how much I hate you. I'm in Swale House. I look down from my dorm window next to my bed, right into your back garden. You have a barbeque place there. I see you with your wife and your children sitting there. You sit, you cook, talk, laugh, eat together. I don't have any of that. I get so jealous. I want what you have. I want what your children have. I hate you. So, I smashed your windows.

My lockdown need was and is, unspoken. This young person chose an inappropriate but desperate way of getting his message across. Now I had to hear . Damage to property like that  was categorised organisationally as a 'critical incident' demanding critical and immediate multi - disciplinary team response of which the young person is part. Dilemma. We weren't in an imposed lockdown, yet there were still some  social no go areas. Like my neighbours, some moments of family intimacy are protected. I couldn't introduce him into my family to give him the  experience he needed to lift his lockdown. In any event, apart from being a poor solution in permanently meeting his need, it is regarded as unethical and for good reason. It has to do with role confusion.  Apart from repairing damage, the main focus for us, as professionals was to do some serious introspection about how we had possibly contributed to his social distance from his significant others.Intensive critical work had to be done with his own family and with his transitioning. We had not addressed his socio-emotional familial lockdown sufficiently nor timeously .

Now I really get it, the pain of his lockdown. I look over my fence, He looked down through his dormitory window into my family garden. Hopelessness bred in him a build-up of "I couldn't care less, what do I have to lose?" 

Another time, place, another 17 year old young person. Honestly, I can't remember what he did. It was anti-social. He was in serious trouble with the law and facing expulsion from the school  First stop...my office.( as usual),  This time with the facility's social worker. 

Context! Context! Context! One month earlier his mother and his sisters had all died in a car smash. One shot - all his family gone!  Looking over the fence, lookng through the window, now there was nothing, no-one anymore, forever. Isolated and in his final year at both school and in the facility, not just a quarantine period, quarantined forever. It was the first (but not the last) time I  heard  a young person say, "I don't care. What do I have to live for?" This was another kind of lockdown response, expressed also, like the window fellow, as an angry act against society. The social worker cried.

Social media in this period of world wide lockdown has shown pics of some people visiting their mothers and seeing her by looking through a glass window pane. To see, but not to have real connection, no embrace by family. In one such moment, text said "the care- giver cried, the that got me going too". 

It's starting to become almost banal, unoriginal, repetitious to say that things will never be the same after the pandemic and the lockdowns. The "Aha"experiences, the first- hand lessons of the quarantine lockdowns and defences up (pun intended), are certain to change our perceptions. Now, our real experiences through the fence, through the window, through the fatalities of this novel viral pandemic are certain to change our child and youth care practice. Surely we must "get it" for real now. We must surely as child and youth care workers emerge from this with a deeper empathetic grasp, of young people's familial separation, lack of meaningful contact, family barriers and loss.