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ListenThe title of this article speaks to the contradictory notion of the “global village” and the great benefits associated with the sharing of knowledge-a key advantage to our shared globalized context. This Commentary seeks to articulate some of the lessons we are discovering in South Africa related to children, families and close relations, in the hope that some may be applicable elsewhere in the world.
We live in one world and yet our “worlds” are so very different. But wherever we live, we live in a globalized world. In the words of Irish philosopher John O’Donahue, “the ‘global village’ has no roads or neighbours; it is a faceless, impersonal landscape from which all individuality has been erased.” Belonging, in this context, is more elusive than ever before. Daily entire cultures are lost with the demise of languages, and the empty icons of international business become what we all know and share. In the context of the impersonal connectedness offered by technology, many people yearn for a sense of connectedness-something which cannot be manufactured or simulated. Recent brain research suggests that the part of the brain which tells us that we feel connected and at one with others is that very part stimulated by deep and consistent meditation-the way of the lamas now spread through the Western world by the occupation of Tibet. In decades to come we may know more about how to bring about a sense of belonging through methods currently inconceivable.
We are all familiar with the African saying “It takes a village to raise a child.” If the adage is true, how do we do what is needed for children-when the village has been replaced by the “global village.” South African lessons on work with vulnerable, orphaned, and at-risk children and youth must be contextualized in order to draw out their usefulness to other countries. Two elements of our context have particular relevance. First, South Africa enjoys the dubious pleasure of being the world’s leader on the Gatt index – the instrument that measures income discrepancy between highest and lowest earners. Secondly, we have the world’s highest HIV infection rate, and the highest number of children affected by the pandemic. In a population of 46 million, there are 2 million children orphaned. A phenomenon related to this is the increasing number of child-headed households-a concept unthinkable a few years ago-that we now provide services to. HIV/AIDS impacts whole families as children care for dying parents and grandparents take on parenting roles for many children.
It is in this complex and at times tenuous social and economic context of the post-apartheid South Africa that I share 10 lessons from direct experience on what have we learned about raising children that may be of use in the global village.
Progressive Policy
The democratic South Africa was faced with an enormous law reform process requiring dismantling apartheid legislation and constructing new democratic legislation governing a society inclusive of all. In relation to services to children, a thorough overhaul of legislation was necessary. An interim amendment to the legislation on children from the apartheid era served to maintain existing services; the past decade was then used to develop an integrated, national legislative framework for services to children, one that takes into account the limited resource context, as well as the extent of the need for services, given that 60% of our country’s children live in poverty.
This process has been exacting, but the lesson learned is that participation does indeed work! Over the decade of its gestation, the Children’s Act and the Children’s Amendment Act have been shaped with input from not only academics and politicians, but also grassroots workers across the breadth of South Africa, and indeed the children whom the legislation most affects-those at-risk, vulnerable, and orphaned. In a country where citizens have been deprived of a voice, this consultative process has been of immeasurable value in creating commitment to policy and service delivery change; in including practice wisdom in legislation; and in creating a unified commitment to the fundamental principles of the legislation. Complex debates have raged over these past ten years as a human rights framework was set against cultural imperatives, resulting in controversies in many areas, but especially in relation to the cultural practice of virginity testing and corporal punishment (a comprehensive ban on which was excised from the Children’s Bill by parliamentarians in an eleventh hour compromise as being too far too soon for the South African public). Social service workers feel a sense of pride in relation to this legislation, and the process of participation has brought about a commitment to massive policy shifts in a relatively short time. We have learned, then, that resources spent on ensuring policy and legislative change have broad base support, are resources well spent.
The Limits of Residential Care
The apartheid government, like many other governments committed to social control of many by few, invested in residential care – mainly for children considered White, Indian and Colored. The democratic South Africa thus inherited many children’s homes – but few community-based services for children in difficult circumstances. One of the policy decisions within the legislative reform process was the limiting of residential care services, and concomitant promotion of community-based services at early intervention and as well as at treatment levels. Commitment to this policy was complicated by vested interests of some in the business of residential care. It was further complicated by the challenge of developing non-residential services without any blueprints or historical precedents.
Ironically as this process of dismantling the dominance of residential care was taking place, the enormity of the HIV/AIDS predictions became real to South Africans as the numbers of children orphaned clearly could not be accommodated in residential care – even if this had been considered desirable. The lesson we have learned from this process is that it is only possible to promote a move away from reliance in policy on residential care if community-based service delivery models are available to be seen and experienced.
The Transformation of Residential Care
The shift to a more limited use of residential care which is at the same time in line with a child rights framework is still in progress in South Africa.
This transformation process has involved a shift in the understanding of the function of services to being short-term, goal directed, and treatment oriented. It has required the introduction of minimum norms and standards, mentoring of organizational reform, and (most importantly in resource-poor environments) a shift in focus from the appearance of facilities to a focus on the care of children-the staffing and program component which determines quality of care.
At the facility level, this transformation process includes bringing about a paradigm shift in facility management from a control and punishment approach to a developmental care approach contextualized within a child rights framework. Additionally, at the facility level creating therapeutic environments which respect cultural diversity has been of fundamental importance in South Africa, where two short decades ago children’s homes were not permitted to offer services to children who were not from the racial group for which they were registered to offer services. This process has included ensuring that adequate and appropriate indigenized training takes place, and that workers have access to the international residential care literature.
Further focus has been on organizational change in resource-poor settings, where the following elements of transformation are of value:
Individualizing care in the context of large groups is a further challenge overcome by the application of some of the following:
The Impact of a Capitalist Context
The globalised world is impacted very strongly by capitalism where consumerism feeds the need for novelty, change, and the lure of something better.
Borrowing concepts from the world of business has helped to introduce new and different services. The Isibindi model for the care of children affected by the HIV/ AIDS pandemic (www.naccw.org.za/isibindi), for instance, is run on a “social franchise” basis where:
This has facilitated the rapid development of Isibindi projects in areas where there is little in the way of infrastructure to support the emergence of projects.
Wresting funds from government and donor bodies alike is aided by packaging and re-packaging service delivery models to appeal as new and interesting. Constant development and innovation is essential in order to maintain ongoing interest at the local, provincial, and national levels. We have learned, therefore, that a pragmatic approach that incorporates some core capitalist principles can expand our capacity to deliver services to children and youth who otherwise might not receive any assistance.
The Value of Lifespace Work
Social services in apartheid South Africa were dominated by the social work profession; one of the recent lessons learned has been the value of life space work-direct care services offered by people called Child and Youth Care workers in South Africa and other parts of the world, including Canada and the United States, and social educators and social pedagogues in parts of Europe. Life space work is about working with children, youth, and families where they live, in their own communities, and in the context of their everyday activities, challenges, and experiences. Remaining invisible to many who miss the subtlety of Child and Youth Care work, a challenge in the South African context is the appropriate articulation of the work, its complexity, professional requirements, and what would be missed in children’s lives without this kind of intervention. The value of life space work in the context of the large numbers of children needing social services in our country is speaking for itself. The training of Child and Youth Care workers has quadrupled over the past decade, with auxiliary level qualifications being introduced to allow drawing into the profession people previously deprived of access to education in our country. The value of Child and Youth Care workers lies in the specialist/generalist capacity of the workers who are trained to operate within a child rights framework to work and who deal with all areas of a child’s life in poorly-resourced contexts.
The Value of the “Wounded Healer”
Imagine yourself as a skilled social service practitioner coming across the Smith family during a door-to-door search for families in need of assistance in an informal settlement. You find the family of five living in under a corrugated iron lean-to (in an area where temperatures range from 48 degrees Celsius in the summer to minus 8 in the winter) with virtually no income at all. Mother is very ill with TB, an opportunistic infection often associated with AIDS, and three children huddle around her, the youngest obviously ill, all of them not attending school as there is no money to buy school uniforms and the fear of leaving the sick mother is too great. The eldest girl of twelve has lost an eye through medical neglect, and the father, himself also showing signs of being ill, is drinking alcohol with any money he earns through itinerant work.
Where would you start working with this family? Nomsa, a trained Child and Youth Care worker from the very community where the Smith family lives, was not daunted by the overwhelming and apparently intractable hopelessness of this family’s circumstances, and she set to work right away. Food parcels were accessed to relieve immediate hunger; the matter of possible infection was approached with Mother Smith and she was taken to the clinic, treated for TB, and then placed on antiretroviral (ARV) medication; Father and baby were also placed on medication, and Nomsa, herself infected with the virus and familiar with the regime of antiretroviral treatment, supported the family in successfully administering their medication; the children were placed in school, and Nomsa found a donor to supply school uniforms. Over the months she pressed authorities from the department of housing and managed to secure a brick house for the Smith family. Social security was accessed, and the family now lives together in circumstances manageable and safe. Three children still have parents as a result of Nomsa’s commitment to the concept of preventing orphanhood.
The lesson in this story is that people who know the communities in which they work often demonstrate a capacity to work in circumstances that to others may have appeared impossible-and are therefore very significant in taking service delivery to the most difficult to access areas.
Valuing the resourcefulness of Child and Youth Care Workers
A Child and Youth Care worker in a very poor province visited a family whom she had recently got to know, only to find the mother in a state of hopelessness. The child and youth worker learned that the mother’s hopelessness was linked to the hardship of poverty. It was her young child’s birthday that day, and the mother had not even told the child it was her birthday as she had nothing-literally nothing-to give to the child and no way to celebrate. The Child and Youth Care worker was initially also flummoxed. The home was far from the agency, which may have been able to help with something to celebrate the child’s birthday, but there was no way of being in touch with the center at that point in the day. But this was a child’s second birthday, and she came up with an idea. A party was held for the little one and instead of the real but unattainable thing, mud cakes were made! The “cake” was decorated, the “table” was laid out, friends from the neighborhood were invited to join the celebrations, the child was sung to, and felt special and noticed. The worker knew that for a child of this age imagination and reality blur, and the most important thing was to celebrate the occasion of the birth of this child-not to have the actual cake. The day went by well, the mother was less ashamed of her poverty and the little girl knew she was valued, despite the material hardship of her life.
Stories like this abound in community-based projects where Child and Youth Care workers are working in family homes. These are stories of such small actions that help to link children to the adults who are trying so very hard to care for them in situations of material hardship, stories of imagination that are the result of the training that fosters the individual spirit of the worker-whilst training them on childhood development, methods of communication and the importance of belonging to family and other people.
Community-based services and working with families
Malfunctioning of service delivery systems is not uncommon. Cases are dropped or misplaced, or are passed on from social worker to social worker resulting in children and families losing faith in “the system” that is there to help them. But workers skilled in moving into the life space of children and~ families are often successful where “the system” has failed.
One worker connected with an intergenerational household (headed by a grandmother) in this way. Noticing that this grandmother was struggling to make ends meet through doing odd bits of beadwork in the community, the worker approached Granny in her home. She was chased away by Granny who told her that she had been to the “welfare” too many times-only to be let down. Persistence and skill led to the worker eventually sitting down with Granny to find out what had happened. As she took up the broom to help Granny sweep the yard, the worker learned that Granny had applied for the child support grant, not once, but twice. The first time her application was lost, and the second time the social worker herself had died and there was no one to take her place. She thought her application was jinxed, so did not want to incur further bad luck by applying again.Repeated visits from the Child and Youth Care worker built Granny’s hope and trust through helping her with the load of everyday living. She helped the children with homework which illiterate Granny could not do. She helped prepare the evening meal and tidy the house, chores that the elder Granny was struggling to do. The worker knew that when life was more manageable, the thought of incurring bad luck would be more remote, and one day she broached the subject again. To Granny it now seemed that the process of filling in all of the forms, getting identity documents, and traveling the many miles to and from the social service offices in an overcrowded taxi seemed impossible. It was only the thought of the worker’s support that convinced her to try-and as a result of the worker’s skillful intervention, within a few weeks Granny was able to devote her life to caring for her granddaughters-on the tiny, but manageable child support grant.
There would have been no way of working with this Granny outside of her home. She had accepted her fate in life and was trying her best to keep her granddaughters-in the face of her limited capacity and the added burden of the grief of having lost her three children to AIDS. The value of work in the family context is that it allows the Child and Youth Care worker to build relationships rooted in doing ordinary things together, to move at the family’s pace and gradually introduce measures to enhance family functioning.
The Cultural Context
South Africa, Desmond Tutu’s rainbow nation, is a place of many peoples, where centuries of cultural imperialism and apartheid have left a nation very sensitive to the dictates of culture. Social service workers must be sensitive to culture-in a manner that leaves them not naive and open to manipulation by children and families. Cultural competence of workers is essential in order to protect children. Illustrating this point is a story of a family of seven orphaned children. Contrary to customary responses, the extended family was not present in the time of the parent’s illness. Rather they entered the world of the children after their parents had died, when the meager (but for them substantial) funds from the social security grants for the seven children came through. Anxious to use the funds to their own advantage, many cleansing and thanking rituals were deemed by the family to be essential rituals all involving the slaughtering of animals and celebrations that would have been very costly. This situation required a combination of skills from the community Child and Youth Care worker, who had built up a position of authority in the family through being with the children through the terrible time of the parents dying. She needed to be able to hold a family group conference, know when to talk and when to allow her elders to speak, but carefully steer family decisions in the best interests of her clients, the seven children. In order to do this she needed not merely a working knowledge of the rituals of the Zulu culture, but an intimate understanding of which rituals were essential for the ongoing well-being of the children in the community and which rituals would simply be desirable for extended family members for the status they would bring for themselves. This would ensure that precious funds would be preserved for the children’s basic essentials such as beds and school uniforms. In a culture where so much has been denigrated, it was only a worker with strong cultural competence who could have held the needs of the extended family in balance with those of the children.
Emphasizing Integrated Service Delivery
Increasingly we see the roles of social workers, Child and Youth Care workers, and others being used to orchestrate care in community-based settings-care that is made possible through the application of skills associated with the integration of different social service professions.
Nowhere has this been as obvious as in a recently-developed child protection program for children from under resourced rural areas who had been sexually abused. In bringing these children together from across the province of Kwazulu-Natal, Child and Youth Care workers created a therapeutic life space experience for these 25 children while social workers and therapists provided one-on-one counseling, and analyzed family circumstances in order to create protective mechanisms for the children when they returned home at the conclusion of the program. Even in resource-poor settings the value of integrated work is obvious.
Thus we learned that in a world of increasing specialization, the roles of different social service professionals must be integrated in order to ensure that children and families are afforded the kind of services that they need.
Final thoughts: keeping “Spirit” in Caring
The word “spirit” is often frowned upon in the context of social service delivery. It is uncomfortable for many who see us functioning in the context of the social sciences, and for those legitimately afraid of undue influence of personal belief systems of workers on children and families. But in the context of work in South Africa, the concept of spirit is paramount for clients and workers alike. Perhaps this is true in many other countries. Where suffering is as it is in the context of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the spirits of those who work in that desperation every day, who must also face this in their own families-these spirits must be carefully nurtured. Concepts like burn-out seem trite in the context of the rawness of work faced by those in the life space of children and families. Feeding the spirits of workers is essential and must be done through mentoring, through supervision, and through review and celebration of achievements. Informally it is done through gathering together with others, through song, and through dance.
And so in the context of understanding the role of families and other people in creating a better future for children today, the “global village” cannot recreate the village to raise a child. But our connections across cultures and nations leave us with possibilities gained from the realities of others to apply in our areas of responsibility in the global village. Central to all of these lessons is the knowledge that we can only help children and families to connect, belong and to survive, if we connect with them. At the center of all our work is the connection that we have with others. In the words of Desmond Tutu, “Africans have this thing called Ubuntu. It means I am because you are.” It is the spirit of Ubuntu that is driving good service delivery to children and families in South Africa. And it is this spirit of Ubuntu that may be helpfully shared as we collectively confront the challenges of raising children in a “global village.”
From: Child and Youth Services, Vol.32, No.2, pp. 78-87.
