Khadija Magardie
Ahmed Ebrahim Ali appears to have a permanently pained expression on his face when he speaks. Though the teenager who fled war-ravaged Somalia in December last year is “on safe soil”, his eyes do little to mask his fear.
Suffering with severe gastric ulcers, he is afraid to leave his tiny room in Fordsburg, Johannesburg, except to cross the road to work at a local restaurant, where he waits tables in return for food and a place to stay. The teenager does not hang around street corners and talk with other boys his age. He doesn’t even go to school. He knows, from experience, that walking on the street could get him arrested.
Ali is a refugee, who fled for his life from his homeland after his father was butchered before his eyes. Normally, he would be eligible to apply for a Section 20 permit that would guarantee him refugee status. But with no family to stand as “guarantors” he has no papers, and would be classified as an “illegal immigrant”. Ali is only 16 years old.
South Africa faces a growing problem with refugee children who arrive in the country without parents or relatives. Some of these “unaccompanied minors” flee the conflict with small groups of adults, and the adults move on and leave them when they arrive in a country for asylum. Others come on their own.
Between August 1994 and last year, a total of 1822 children applied for refugee status in South Africa. The children, all under the age of 18, came from countries ranging from Algeria to Romania to Zambia.
The law currently states that children under the age of 18 cannot apply for asylum on their own, they have to be vouched for by an adult, either a parent or legal guardian.
In the chaos of war, children can easily become separated from their parents or guardians. Either parents concerned for their safety send them to friends and relatives outside the conflict area or, during large-scale evacuation programmes, children may become separated from families.
Problems do not end for the children when they arrive in a new country. Most of their woes are financially related. Access to education is a big problem. In terms of government policy, no child should be deprived of a basic education, but in many cases this does not translate into reality for refugee children. Many are turned away from school because parents cannot pay: in those cases where there is money, parents may have to decide which of their children to send. There are also adjustment problems at school. Many refugee children cannot speak English, while others have spent several years out of school and are far older than their classmates.
The presence of a family can serve as a familiar comfort. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) guidelines recommend that whole families be moved together. Attempts to trace families through the Red Cross sometimes yield positive results. But in other cases, they prove futile.
Kabongo Ngoy, 24, smiles wryly when asked what it feels like to be a father, “not biologically, but in every other sense”. He cares for eight children, ranging from three to 12 years old, all family relatives from back home in Zaire. The children’s parents abandoned them over a year and a half ago. Back then, Ngoy says, things were better. There was still a trickle of money into the house, and the children went to school. But hope dried up as soon as the money did. The children’s mother stopped sending money, and unpaid school fees meant the children were kicked out of their school in Yeoville, Johannesburg.
Now the children spend their days in the house, playing on a pair of worn, urine-soaked mattresses. A thick crust around the kitchen sink indicates water hasn’t flowed through it for days. The water and electricity have been cut because there was no money to pay. Although the house is in one of the city’s more affluent suburbs its interior is almost empty. Ngoy says he had to sell most of the contents, one by one, to put food on the table.
As dire as the children’s circumstances are, they are lucky to still have a guardian, meaning they are protected by refugee law. Agencies such as the Jesuit Refugee Services (JRS), tasked with caring for refugees, can identify them and still help them.
The JRS, which is given money by the UNHCR to assist refugees, is the main body working with refugee protection in South Africa.
The organisation has two shelters in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, where orphaned, abandoned and other vulnerable refugee children are housed until suitable “substitute families” can be found for them. In addition, the JRS facilitates the provision of food, clothing and other necessities, from baby toys for young refugee mothers, to school books, for the children.
Sister Cathy Murugan, the Project Director of the JRS’s Johannesburg office, acknowledges that the biggest problem facing refugee children is securing guardianship, and thus proper documentation for them. Murugan says the laws governing refugee children applying for asylum create numerous problems. Firstly, difficulties arise where children have no legal guardian when they arrive in the country. Secondly, they may force refugee children to lie about their age to get papers. Then there is the problem of guardianship. Every effort is made to place the children in as familiar an environment as possible, to “maintain the child’s emotional security and cultural and linguistic ties”. In most cases, the children are placed with other refugee families. But in terms of the law, refugee adults are not accepted as legal foster parents by the state and are thus not entitled to a grant.
According to Murugan, though the short-term goal is placement of children with other refugee families, the long-term goal is to have refugee children guaranteed protection by the Child Care Act, which places all children without parents or relatives under the wardship of the state. “There needs to be more synergy between the departments of Home Affairs and Welfare and Social Development when it comes to these children,” she says. Instead of the creation of separate mechanisms for the protection of refugee children, the law should be revised so refugee communities, and the NGOs assisting them, “know where to go, and how to access a process and system that’s already in place”.
As a body dealing with the problems of refugees every day, the JRS, Murugan says, “would like to see the state taking greater responsibility for these children, or at the very least making provision for their care”.
“Granted the situation is not ideal, but sometimes we just don’t have the means to make it ideal.”
Anyone wishing to assist the children being cared for by Kabongo Ngoy should contact the Jesuit Refugee Services at (011) 338-5311
01