MORE LOCKDOWN AND AFTER..CHILD AND YOUTH CARE IN SOUTH AFRICA

Now in South Africa, we have been there for real.

 The experience of lockdown must be a window of opportunity for change in Child and Youth Care and in child and youth care work.

Facebook during lockdown was loaded with comment on child and youth care work being an essential service. Asif it was a suprise! Like we didn't know. It has been legally an essential service  for a very long time.. many, many years. Some comment was "Read the Children's Act 38 of 2005 with Amendments". It is there clearly stated that child and youth care workers in residential facilities are essential service practitioners.

 This we learnt has scary implications personally, organisationally and professionally. 

 Personally - it is a huge personal risk and requires huge dedication to our professional practice and to the children and young people in our care.

Organisationally - shift systems, especially became an organisational headache. Some child and youth care workers regarded some organisational solutions to be unfair. They said that in some facilities (not all), some staff, including Managers and professionals who saw themselves as  not necessary in face to face contact with the young people, did not come into  the facility whilst child and youth are workers were exposed

 As a profession - A huge concern of mine is that child and youth care workers have not been recognised nor acknowledged as front-line essentilal service workers in the lockdown pandemic period.

The South African President and other State Ministerial officials' voice of appreciation is heard for health workers, social workers, police, army and 'care workers'.'Care workers' are not child and youth care workers who never receive mention. Not once ! Not once in public by officers at that high level, have I heard child and youth care workers thanked, noticed, spotlighted, the profession mentioned by name.  

 This lack  of recognition for our essential work has to be changed..Now! We have to use this window of opportunity to make our value, professionalism and dedication known and recognised.

 So then, after lockdown we are to be appreciated for who we are, what we do and how essential we are .

 Covid 19 and lockdown highlighted inequalities which after lockdown cannot continue. Now we really know what it means to be in a front-line profession and so must others.

 There are other essential changes post lockdown.

  In the COVID 19 lockdown I was caught off guard when I was told that  schools would open ! Some before the end of the lockdown period "No, - it's e-learning" I was told with concern that some communities would suffer, that there would be problems in some communities... For sure ! 

After the Soweto uprising in 1976, The then Apartheid government in South Africa initiated an enquiry into Black Education, then a system called 'Bantu Education'. It was called the van Zyl Commission of Enquiry. I was on the Curriculum Investigative team. We came up with a report that included a model that we found in Isreal. Schools there were being used as, what were called Ambos. It was a model in which the school was a community resource, with the community, adults, its children and young people having access to the facility to be provided with empowerment in whatever the community experienced as a need at the time. The 21 large separate reports were submitted to the then government who then conveniently just shelved them. 

But the Ambo idea has always lived with me. After lockdown our Child and Youth Care Centres are needed to become a community Ambo. A community resource. In the e-learning and digital lockdown period we are now experiencing, the in-house young people must be 4th Industrial Revolution literate, and so must our communities. We are ideally situated to outreach as a community resource as do many non-government Organisations.

There was a fire in the urban shack dwelling  informal settlement one block away from the church. Many of the pre-schoolers attended our full day Early Childhood Development (ECD) programme. Three young adults died in that fire. It flattened everything on the tightly packed inner-city residentially sized site. 300 people ..homeless. Many children. In the morning we went to the ash filled site to see how we might help. Dwellers were hunting through the remains for anything that could be salvaged Some were rescuing wooden poles that could possibly be used to make shelters They needed identity documents, food, tents, tools, blankets, grief and trauma counselling, psychological support. 

The social workers at the scene directed me to the police and the Fire Department Disaster Team and within two hours things started to happen, Medical supplies, food, tents, helping hands. We took the children into the ECD and made sure that they received two meals a day through the church.

We learnt a lot from this disaster. Together with the other churches, denominations, and faiths in the area we            co-operatively established a food bank which stored also other essentials should there be another disaster of this type or any other type in the community. It was a matter of being prepared. We had become an Ambo of sorts, a resource for community needs. Again, our residential child Care Centres seem to be ideally situated to be open enough with all its resources, with all its professional capacity to be a beacon of care in their communities.

In my blog called "Lockdown in a Shack" I proposed that our present lockdown situation in poorer communities, under provisioned, under stimulated children and young people could have stimulation needs met by child and youth care workers in a system of mobile activity units. These could setup temporary 'Safe Parks' on arrival, distribute stimulation packs, provide empowerment to parents on things like child stimulation and more effective parenting assistance with virtual learning . So if the Centre can't cope with opening itself Ambo style, then the Centre can still be a hub from which Child and Youth Care can go to where the children and the community is. Especially in times of risk and need. 

For the coming of the 'after lockdown. we must be prepared.  to be more relevant, more creative,more co-operative, more essential.