As long as I have been involved in institutional childcare – whether trying to improve conditions or trying to eradicate it -, meaning twelve years now, I have been asked the question ‘How do you do it?’ It seems fitting to start the new year with an attempt at answering this.
The question can refer to different things. However, more often than not it refers to how I deal with seeing children deprived of so much, and how I deal with seeing children sick, or even with witnessing their death. I quite understand why people would think that these are the hardest things to deal with, but for me, they aren’t really.
Don’t get me wrong, I do not enjoy seeing those things. In fact, my work, all this time, has been centred on preventing these things from occurring for as many children as I can. But they are not the things that make me want to tear my hair out or that make me – very briefly – consider from time to time whether I can still keep going. In fact, these are the things that mostly spur me on to do more.
For me the greatest difficulty in doing the work I do, the greatest frustration, lies not in seeing terrible circumstances, but in seeing completely unnecessary terrible circumstances as a result of someone’s lack of care or interest in the children. My greatest frustration is always the people who knowingly stand in the way of improvement for the children, whether it is for financial gain, out of pride, or out of sheer disinterest. THAT is what makes my stress levels rise and what can sometimes make me despair.
I can accept it when there is a lack of resources, but what is there is put to the best possible use. I can accept it when there is lack of knowledge, but people are trying to do their best. And I can accept that sometimes a child is ill or injured to the point that nothing can be done to cure them and all you can do is keep them comfortable and loved until the end. All those things I can live with and I take pride in helping people make the best out of these situations. Even just holding a child for the final hours can feel like an accomplishment.
What I struggle to accept – and in practice, when I come across it what I fight – is a doctor looking at catastrophically bad test results and saying ‘don’t worry’, without taking further action. Or a caregiver punishing a child for a situation of the caregiver’s own creation. Or a government closing its eyes to the permanent damage done by institutionalisation and the abuse taking place in their institutions and saying that they do not see a need for family-based solutions or that placing children in families is too great a risk.
Witnessing these things, and feeling powerless in the face of them, takes its toll. But it also rouses my fighting spirit. I remember that if I feel powerless and frustrated, then how are the children going to feel? I remember that if I don’t take a stand and fight for these children, then who will?
And THAT is how I do it. That is why I cannot not do it. I hold on to my motto: ‘I cannot change the world, but I can change the world for one child. And then another. And another…’.
So I keep fighting. And I hope that one day it will be enough.
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