Because of the extreme poverty and unemployment in the area, extended families are reluctant and often refuse to take in children belonging to their siblings.  In many cases, children are taken on by extended families so that the grant supplements their income and not because it is in the best interest of the child.

While all the legal processes and red tape continues to evolve, the children need to be housed, schooled and clothed.

The children in the CARE House are assisted in their recovery from their traumatized lives and where possible the family is involved in a rehabilitation process and assistance is given to obtain birth certificates and grants. In theory, children need to be re-united with rehabilitated parents in as short a time as possible.   However, in practice, this is more a dream than a reality. Apart from the extreme poverty suffered by parents, they also abuse alcohol, which in turn results in child neglect and abuse. A number of children who have been re-unified with their parents or who have been placed with extended families by the Department of Social Development have been returned to the safety of the CARE House because they have been found to be abused or neglected again.

Many of the children have never been to school and are too old to enter into main stream schooling and there are also those who are too ill to attend school regularly. Children who have never been to school are home schooled for a year.  We usually cover three to four grades in a year and then the child is able to go to school the following year in grade appropriate to their age.

Children who are HIV positive or whose parents have died from AIDS are neglected by the extended family due to the stigma or the fact that these families do not have the resources to feed another mouth. They are left to fend for themselves or are abused and their child grants misused. Children are found wondering the streets or living under plastic sheets in the middle of winter. In order to survive, most children (all children over the age of 5 years in the home) have swapped sexual favors for food.

The social services that are available do not have the ability to take care of this enormous problem. Compounding the social services problem is that the town of Middelburg is subject to the authority of Cradock. No decisions can be made by Social Workers without the authority of their Supervisor in Cradock. This means that there are unnecessary delays in processing  children’s legal status. This “rule” is an internal rule of the Department of Social Development, does not comply with the Child Care Act and often causes the child more trauma. This situation has been addressed with the relevant authorities but as yet has not been rectified. A further problem compounding social service delivery is the internal politics of the group of 5 social workers in the area. The area is divided up between the social workers and no social worker will work in someone else’s territory. This means that if a social worker goes on leave, their current cases are not attended to, nor is any work done on new cases that may come in, in their area.  Again, no social worker is available after hours, although in theory, someone is supposed to be available.
 

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