Someone's Reality

What if your reality was waking up each day to come to school and sleep. You would sleep because you were exhausted since you had to keep one eye open in the night to be prepared for bullies or even worse you'd sleep at  school to stay out of the way, avoid being beaten up during class since your class mates are out of control. This is the life for some of the students I work with at CMES. Since many of the students are former street children, they don't have what many of us would consider a normal life. Although their new home tries to instill some ounce of normalcy it's difficult to be on guard all the time and often the younger kids live in the same fear they would if they were on the streets because the older boys bully them or fight with them. They say it's for fun but it doesn't look fun for me. Most recently I watched two boys struggle in the classroom over a pencil case. The one bigger boy got so involved that he almost hurt me when I tried to intervene. The concept of consequence is far diminished because there are so many issues that need to be fixed before one could even think about what an appropriate, meaningful punishment would be. The next day the smaller boy came to school and all he wanted to do was sleep. He said that he would be out of the way and if he was sleeping then the bigger boys in his class would have no reason to fight with him. It was almost as if he'd prefer to be at school where is was safe but for him to be safe he needed to become invisible. It's difficult to watch some of these children live this way. In their new home discipline is infrequent because they are busy filing police reports, catching up with social workers, and making sure all the boys are accounted for. These tasks take up so much time that when a real issue arises nobody had the energy to deal with it. When the police do come they dismiss these incidents just like the many others and tell the boys to not do it again. Youth in South Africa are rarely incarcerated which I believe is a good thing but there are no alternative measures taken to educate them on proper behavior and decision. This is especially apparent with the learners at City Mission where there is an abundance of former street kids (strollers they call them) attending the school.

Since there is testing these next few weeks it's been a bit of a weird schedule. The learners are often unaware of which exam they are taking and then they become defiant when there is a miscommunication. Furthermore the students are dismissed early but many rely on arranged transportation so they spend hours our on the streets or around Bridgetown playing around with the potential to get in trouble. Today when I arrived I noticed yet again one of the smaller boys, from the Homestead home, was sleeping and he refused to take his exam. I took this learner out of the room today and helped him with his exam. I have been noticing how frustrating it has been getting for him to look at a test paper where he cannot read the words and be expected to perform well.  By rote he wrote his name and the date then with a blank stare looked up at me for assistance. Together, me reading and him writing, we completed the test. I had to read each word on the page and sometimes more than once but he was able to complete the assessment to the best of his ability. After we finished I asked him if he was proud of himself. He smiled and said he was. I knew that with a little extra push he would be able to complete it; I also had to tell him he could go back to sleep after. I wish there were more opportunities to empower these students and show them that they can do it but they have spent so much time being pushed down by the system that it is often hard to find it in themselves to be positive and believe they can succeed. This is someone's reality: going to school each day knowing you wont be able to read anything that is put in front of you, completing the work just to get to sleep, sleeping through the day because at night you must lie awake wondering if they'll pick a fight, being hungry, wondering what's better the home or the street, sitting in a classroom for the majority of the day being told to be quiet because every teacher is otherwise occupied, knowing there is something bigger and better out there but not having the resources to find it.

How can we change this?