Listen to this

Barrie Lodge

Location: Hartebeespoort, South Africa

Biography
I started out as a teacher at the Durban High School teaching Art and English and during that time met and married my wife Valery. Two of my colleagues got lectureships at the then University College for Indians – an apartheid system structure for the separate education of Indian students. They asked me to apply for a lecturer’s post there in the field of Art Education which I didn’t get first-time round as I opposed the system at interview. I was however approached again and given the lectureship. My thinking was that I could improve the lot of Indian children “from the inside” as it were. Attached to the Faculty of Education was a Child Guidance and Research Centre and in addition to the usual load I started the journey towards becoming a registered Art and Play Therapist on a one to one basis and with groups of really troubled children. The University College became the University of Durban-Westville.

How I came to be in this field
One day quite casually in 1982 as I remember, I said to the Social Work Professor Jeanie Roberts, that I thought I could manage a children’s home. Out of the blue, I got a phone call from Brian Gannon who said that there was a children’s home in East London needing a head, “just go and have a look” he said – and that was me hooked! I of course wanted to run it like a clinic school ‘til very soon one of the boys said – “Take your teacher thing somewhere else – this is our home, we live here!” I did the about turn and started out into Child and Youth Care. I changed the system from dormitory to group home and from a primary care facility to a residential treatment centre.

The story continues: Unhappy with the impenetrable whites only policy of the home and urged by what I considered to be a second phase of my “calling” I started looking around when Brian Gannon phoned again – this time “go and look at it” was in Johannesburg and a very large place for boys, mainly boys in trouble with the law or in what we called the “twilight zone”. This was to follow the same changes as the East London venture – dormitory to group homes for boys and girls of all ethnicities, and to become a short-term treatment centre.
In 1996 I started as a missionary priest working directly in community-based projects with children and youth living in the urban slum conditions of inner-city Johannesburg where I too lived.

My thinking about child and youth care work
It’s the most difficult and the most rewarding of work. Even after years of work in teaching and lecturing at University – this was intellectually the most stimulating. I love the “thinking on your feet” aspect of the work and the infinite possibilities and relational challenges that arise from being “in the moment” “in the life space” of the child, young people and their families.

Some thoughts glancing backwards
My involvement with our professional association in South Africa : the National Association of Child Care Workers (NACCW) has been seminal in my personal and professional growth. I urge new-comers to our field – if there is a professional association then join it and contribute to it.
Coming from years of working in an academic world and plunging into the everyday tugs and pulls of living and working in child and youth care, I learnt that “there is nothing as practical as a good theory, and nothing as theoretical as good practice”. I love the reality of “praxis” in our work.
If ever I should write anything definitive about child and youth care work I already have the book title. Driving down the main street of East London one morning when the shopkeepers were just taking down the shutters and opening their smaller shops, a six year old Heidi stood next to me in the van on her way to school, looking out. Quietly she pleaded “Mr Lodge please buy me an adult!”.

What has influenced me in my work
Mainly my mistakes.

A whole stream of “aha” moments over a period of 20 years – some of them very seriously mind changing. Like the moment when a mother of one of the boys was released from jail after 8 years. She had stabbed to death her abusive husband with a kitchen knife in full view of the then little boy. She came to collect the teenager. I refused his release favouring foster care. Her stream of shouted invectives was peppered over and over again with “You don’t even give me a chance.” She turned out to be a great mother to the boy. All preconceived notions of persons jailed for violent crimes did an about turn.

A youngster was accused of stealing my son’s tracksuit top. I was hurt and angry and the youngster had been sat in my office by an outraged staff who eagerly awaited my reaction. Brian Gannon was visiting. I asked him “What do I do now?” Brian’s response was “I hate these moments – all I can say is, turn around and walk his journey with him for a while.” And so on, and so on, and so on.

My writing
Letter to a Kid has been published in Readings in Child and Youth Care for South African students, 2, NACCW and Pretext Publishers Cape Town and in the journal: Child and Youth Care, 17, 4. 1999.

It launched the writing side of what I do and was penned in frustration when I needed to give a short sighted obstinate board of management a fresh view of child and youth care work.

My favourite saying this week
(roughly) 'Be the world you want it to be' – Mahatma Ghandi.

….. and some last things
I’m working in rural villages of the North West Province, South Africa as a missionary priest and a child and youth care worker in private practice. My main thrust is to develop “drop-in” services in the villages for children, young people and their families especially those affected or infected with HIV/AIDS. I’m very wrapped up in training, and in African traditional spirituality as it can impact on child and youth care practice in South Africa. I am writing somewhat academically – and would like to contribute to the body of research in the African child and youth care context.