I have no name, I have no existence, I have no birth certificate and therefore I am ignored and have no rights in the country in which I was born.
I'm really a non person, a non entity, can you imagine this? Whether I live or die makes no mark or change to the country's statistics- that is if anyone is bothering to count.
If I am murdered, who am I? How could anyone identify me or find the one
who murdered me? Who was I? I don't know, I don't have a name. I walk through
the world as quietly and thin as a shadow.
There are people, social workers who are meant to document me and give me a birth certificate. These are my rights under the Country's Constitution. I am to be protected, given succor and education. I don't even have the right to go to jail or die, because I have no name, no parents and no birth date. My burial spot will be a mass grave from the same place I dine daily.
Why do these people not help me? Why do they hate me so? I am of their kind, I am their color, I am human by definition, but I am ignored and they care not about me as an individual, department or country.
My home is the Restaurant in Middelburg, South Africa. Not the place where you might go to eat, but for my kind, the garbage dump is where we go to feed. It is outside the parameter of the town in a dried creek bed.
They say it smells terribly, however I must have gotten used to it as I cannot smell myself. A few times, I was washed with soap and water by a kind person and my skin seemed to lighten but I missed the ingrained smell that is in my skin. To me it is the smell of home for me.
I eat what others discard. If it doesn't smell to bad I eat it. Occasionally a local with compassion or someone unable to block out their guilt of this horrible vision will give me fresh food, but mostly we fight for scraps like gulls at the beach.
Few people will take me into their home since I reek of garbage, the smell having impregnated into my thickened and scarred skin, this from the numerous skin infections, scabies, lice and ingrained dirt
I can't really appreciate the clean smell of the country, the colour of a flower, or the blue of the sky as these seem so foreign and removed from my insignificant life at the dump. The dump is where I belong. It's the place where people put their unwanted and discarded stuff, like me.
I live in the remains of an old rusted car, using bits of insulation , newspaper or the side of a cardboard box to keep me warm on cold nights. I had a blanket once, but it was stolen by someone who had a greater need for it.
I dress in boys clothes, and shun the occasional wash in the hope that being grimy and hiding my budding breasts and roundness of my hips, will help me avoid being repeatedly raped and upping my odds of getting HIV or some other venereal diseases that I am ripe to receive. .
What future do have I? Do any of you have when you treat your children this way?
Perhaps someone will kill me and end my years of torture or maybe I will dance a slow torturous death with AIDs, and watch myself gradually be unable to fend for myself in the garbage dump and dye of hunger, illness and pain.
I would like to kill myself but I really do not know the difference between existence, life and death. I have the basic instinct from some animal in my DNA to survive, I know that I am not all human but neither am I feral. A part of me still questions life
Who do I blame for this? I am not certain who I might have been had someone bothered to care, or count me in. I don't even know who I am right now let alone who I will be tomorrow. However I do know that breath is quick, death is final and this is my life I am living. I know not of condemnation for it has not been part of my experience, only degradation and dehumanization. On this, I am an expert.
Will no one save me for myself, or for the person I could be? What about for themselves their own egos' or even in their belief of God or belief in goodness?
Can I be saved? Do I want to be saved? Do I want to die?
I wonder how those people who put food out for animals do not see me nor show me any of the same compassion? How can you not SEE ME!!
If I decide to live, what life will I have? Will I become jealous of others? Will I become vindictive? Will I become a terrorist?
Whose fault will it be? I am a nonentity, I am dehumanized and this is NOT my fault, there is no way out for me! Remember I don't exist. No name, no birth certificate, no nothing!.
Frankie Picasso and Dr. Alan L Russell
Posted 2nd June 2008
