“When I am big, I want to be a criminal.” His face beamed and his smile stretched wide in his small round face.
“A Criminal? Why?” I asked with a frown bigger than his smile.
“Because the criminals live in big houses and they drive BMW’s.” His hands gestured the huge size of the houses he was talking about.
“Me too!” Another little boy said. He pulled a sad face and looked down at his feet. “My daddy works very hard. We never see him. He is always tired. And we are poor. We live in a shack.”
A shack is a structure built from corrugated iron and wood. Many times one room housed a whole family.
I looked at these grade one learners and I was sad.
“I hate my mother. She always hit me when I do something she doesn’t like. When I’m big, she’ll be so scared of me she’ll leave me to do what I want to do.” Little guy number one said. “She said I mustn’t play with bad boys.” He shrugged. “They’re my friends. I like them”
He was only eight years old. What will weigh the most in the end? What his mother are trying to teach him or what he observed from the broken, mixed up community he lives in?
Proper role models in the black community in South Africa were scarcer than chicken teeth. If you grew up without any form of religious education that helped to form your principles, norms and values, you look up at the role models society dish out. In the black community it was the criminals – the guys with the power who instilled fear into ordinary people’s hearts. To a lot of South Africans, fear equals respect. It’s the way their communities operated since the beginning of time. Fear motivates people to become the feared person.
I realised wow privileged children was who had proper role models – parents who really cared and modelled proper values, norms and principles.
What motivates you?
Money? Position or status? Norms, principles and values? Have you ever thought about it? Having this knowledge, this awareness, can help you to change lives, to change the world one person at a time into a better place – or can it? I tried and failed miserably in that community. I believe it will take a miracle to change children’s perspectives and beliefs. If they can get positive role models from within their own culture, within their own community, the miracle might happen.
Change is always a slow process. Out there and within us. I hope I see that change in my lifetime.