IN 1996, WHEN I WAS fifteen I was moved from Ons Plek shelter in town to Siviwe shelter in Woodstock, near Salt River Road. Siviwe was a more stable shelter – their main aim was to reunite street kids with their families. It was cleaner and had nicer facilities. I was moved there because the guardians felt I needed more stability.
It meant I was not living with Lea any more, but I saw her most Friday nights, when the Ons Plek girls and the Siviwe girls gathered together for a social time.
Siviwe ran a programme at the Salt River community centre to get us kids involved in activities – painting or acting classes, and things like that. It was there that I bumped into my dad’s brother Donald again. He was now an HIV activist working at the centre. I’d given up on Donald a long time before, and I didn’t want a friendship with him now, but there was something he could tell me – he knew where my dad was.
I kept that information for a long time before I found the courage to go to my dad’s house.
I kept my dad’s address to myself until a certain Friday. When the new shelter mother arrived for her shift late in the day, I lied to her and told her that I’d already got permission to see my dad for the weekend. She gave me money for the train to go and to come back, and told me that I had to call the shelter when I got there.
I had planned to go on a Friday evening because I believed I would sleep at my dad’s place. I thought he would happy to see me.
It was a weekend I lived to regret.
Extension 3A in Gugulethu. That’s where I found my dad’s house and learnt that he had set up a shebeen there with a new girlfriend, Beverly. They had one son, Storm.
My dad was high when I arrived. There was a feeling of resistance. I had always had so much hope that he would take me back. But he was now with Beverley, and he was cold towards me. I felt it deeply. It was clear that they didn’t want me to stay there. I think my dad had the same attitude as my mom: that if I stayed with him, I would mess up his family life with Beverly.
We ate together that night, but as time passed I felt that he needed to go somewhere and that I needed to leave. He made it sound like he’d always known where I was. He said he’d come visit me at the shelter.
And then my dad left.
I couldn’t travel back to the shelter so late on a Fiday night – it’s dangerous travelling alone on trains, especially at night. So I decided to hang around in Gugulethu. I smelt some weed and followed the smell to a house where some guys were smoking. They let me sleep there.
My dad’s house was not far from the house of the singer Ringo Madlingozi. The next morning, I sat for a while and listened to him playing his music in front of the Rasta vegetarian shop.
When I went back to the house, I met Beverly and Storm. Beverly was angry with me. She locked the house and told me I must wait outside. And then she also left. I don’t know what happened. I waited the whole day, until it was very late, and no one came back.
I got the picture – I was not wanted.
Even though it was already dark, I decided to back to town, to spend the rest of the weekend under the bridge. Then I could return to Siviwe and pretend it had all gone OK.
I was raped on the train coming back.
I could not fight my attacker. Rather raped than killed, I thought. I never told anyone what happened on the train coming back from my dad’s house. The only person I felt I could relate to was Lea.
At Siviwe, I started misbehaving, and so I was moved back to Ons Plek. I’d be there for a few months and then I’d be sent back to Siviwe, where I still had a bed. They kept my bed because they felt there was hope for me, that I was just going through a bad patch.
But the pain of my dad not wanting me pushed me right back. He had a home – why didn’t he want me there? I was once his child … and now he has another family? How in the hell does that happen so quickly, I questioned.
I felt discarded. I just didn’t understand why he would dump me in the shelter to start another family, have another kid. Another kid who he was looking after. Why couldn’t he do the same for me?