Radio 2020 FM
"We apologise for that. there was distortion on that last tune we played. It wasn't the disk. The disk is fine. It was the motor that drives it. It was irregular. It caused WOW. We'll fix it.
I knew the tune well. Not quite as I was accustomed to hear it. It's called the Unchained Melody.
A South African couple in London were eating takeaway cooked chicken as they walked through the streets. A stranger, a Londoner stopped them. "Are you from South Africa?" he asked. "Yes. How do you know?"
"Only South Africans eat chicken with their fingers walking in the streets and crunch on the chicken bones."
Wasn't the bones exactly, but those crunchy bits of bone at the joints.
It was not quite as Londoners were accustomed to see chicken eaten. It was another normal.
It was a policy change. "As at the new term, we won't have Junior and Senior Houses. Younger or older brother siblings will be in the same House." All were duly briefed and prepared.
Day one - more accurately, night one, of the new term.
Stones were thrown onto my roof. Being a galvanised metal roof, the hard metallic thuds could not be ignored.
It was Moleta. "Tomorrow morning we'll talk".
"We were always together in the streets. We came in together. We were together, our beds next to each other, in the dormitory. Now he's not next to me in the dorm. You took my friend from me and put him in another house. You have broken our friendship. It can't ever be same now".
I heard myself talking in my head.
"I have childhood and school friends. We live in different cities even different Provinces. We see each other seldom. We are still and will always be. This is distorted relationship behaviour".
I heard my professional self say
"Let's see what we can do. Your friend is with his brother, I can see, you too are his brother, Let's find a bed for you in that other house as well. And Moleta,if you want to talk anytime, you can knock on my door, even it's at night. I'll listen."
I had to make a sideways step.
"You had better come quickly. He's getting very aggressive, threatening. He says he'll beat us up now. He says he wants to talk with you.
He stood, feet firmly planted a little apart, his arms as if he had tennis- balls in his armpits. His pupils were narrow and his colour up...the fighting stance.
"You will take me home in the mini-bus"
It was his weekend to go to his mother after a long time on the streets and a lot of reunion work.
"We gave you money to get home in the taxi"
I'll @@@ you up if you don't take me home in the mini-bus."
There was a very long verbal toing and froing when suddenly the main man burst into tears. "I don't know how to do it."
It's not that he didn't know the taxi bus ranks. He didn't know which taxi-bus to board and what to do to pay and get home..
Two professional steps backwards. It was a WOW. So much unlearning to be done. Unlearning about streetwise, learned dependency, adolescent independence, hand-out living, ... the world owes me, . - lots of misconceptions for us to relearn. And so we did. ,.. slowly but surely.
He was said to be streetwise. It meant that he knew very well how to survive . His favourite haunt was the red-light area of Johannesburg.
It was on his mother's insistence that social workers place him in the facility. She said that he needed to be contained - not locked in, but to be managed, He needed to learn, she said, to live within some so-called normal societal behavioural constraints, to shift his behaviour from intolerable to be at least tolerable, acceptable to her and to most other people.
Sounded reasonable.
Do's and don'ts, institutional rules made little sense to him. "Why?"
US, "Because that's how it is".
HIM "" You got it all wrong. Boring, very boring. In the streets I'm free. I live by being clever. About four days later he would reappear, "I'm back." It was an unchained melody in notes that we were unaccustomed to hearing. It was another normal for us.
It was all an unlearning and relearning experience for us, It asked us to look at our young people and children's worlds through their spectacles. Our thinking took a major shift. Our programmes, our approach had to meet the young people's world and their needs...not the young people fit our mould..fit our cookie cutter.
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