Children’s champions
Child Welfare Grahamstown celebrates its centenary today. The organisation celebrates its extraordinary staff, who work across the city, along with Grahamstown’s citizens, NGOs and businesses who support it. spoke to Woineshet Bischoff, who has led the organisation for the past 15 years, about its triumphs and challenges.
“How come these services are still required 100 years later?”
Woineshet Bischoff herself poses the question in her introduction to a special centenary edition magazine that the organisation will have ready for its official celebrations on 16 June.
When Bischoff started working at Child Welfare Grahamstown in 2002, most of the cases involved Xhosa-speaking and Afrikaans-speaking families, she told Grocott’s Mail.
“It’s not the case any more. We now have cases across the colour line. Lots of cases.
“I don’t know whether that tells you that things are getting bad – or that now for the first time other groups of people are coming out. It’s hard to tell which. But the point is, people mustn’t think that Child Welfare only has cases in the township. It doesn’t.”
Foster care and statutory work is their main focus.
Grahamstown’s Child Welfare’s seven social workers work with 15 or 20 cases a day – some old, some new - “anything to do with children from 0 to 10. Everyone sends children – even adults - here: ward councillors, development workers, the hospital, the police, the courts.”
The organisation struggles with minimal resources, so they’re often fighting fires, Bischoff says.
“We would like to employ more social workers so they can do in-depth work. Not just where you take that one, put that one.
“You know you’re skimming the surface and it’s unsustainable.”
The government subsidy they receive for salaries covers only 55% of the salaries of social workers.
“We have to fundraise the rest.”
Generosity
One thing that helps their morale is the extraordinary generosity of the community.
“Grahamstown – the way it is located is quite interesting,” she says. In Cape Town,
Johannesburg, you’re totally isolated.”
In Grahamstown you can’t pretend you didn’t know.
“Here you can sit anywhere and the town can see the township and vice versa. I think that promotes the realisation that we are all the same at the end of the day. It’s a healthier dynamic.”
The work is not easy emotionally.
“With the statutory work, there are children who are orphans and have no choice. They will grow up in an orphanage or in foster care.
“But there are children who are abused or neglected. You remove them and put them in foster care, or in a children’s home.”
But you can’t remove the children of a whole troubled community, and so this model is not sustainable or viable.
“We still need to make sure they have some kind of contact with their parents,” Bischoff said.
How they reunify the families of children whom they’ve had to remove is one of their biggest challenges.
“At the moment we have about 27 children in PE, King William’s Town, all over, whom we have removed. They have to come during the school holidays – we have to try to find host families so they can come back to their home, and then work with the parents, the families so the kids can come back eventually.
“The challenge is getting the parents to accept the responsibility. Many of the children might end up in foster care for a long period.”
The challenge is for social workers to be able to work intensively with the families – but resources are limited.
“You have a limited number of social workers for the whole of Grahamstown – seven – for a population of over 100 000. We need to be able to care for those children.”
Time
“If you really want results, you need to spend a lot of time. And we don’t have that time.” Grahamstown Child Welfare’s seven social workers have 116 children in their care.
“That’s a huge number of children with lots of problems, and with no backup. I don’t want to compare it with Britain – but there a social worker has 10 cases, and they have a backup panel including a psychologist.
“Here you are everything. We have to create our own resources to be able to assist a child.”
Rhodes University has come to Child Welfare’s aid, making senior Psychology students available to do counselling. But there are children who need more.
“We don’t have a place for children with psychological or psychiatric problems.”
The new facility in Port Elizabeth has a huge waiting list.
“There are not enough children’s homes or places of safe- ty. Sometimes we say, what can we do? We can’t remove the whole community.
“So we’re trying to find a way – how can we improve the situation where the children are, with their parents.
“How do we capacitate parents? There is poverty, there is unemployment.
“Do we go back to job creation? How much can we do to make the family function?
“Some things are beyond us.”
It’s tough for the social workers looking after Grahamstown’s children. Bischoff says she and fellow senior social worker Kim Wright frequently need to debrief younger staff and interns. As for herself? “I’m over 60 now so I’ve had a lifetime of experience.
“So what I do, I walk. Every morning I walk and that’s where I do my thinking, and that’s where I derive all my creativity.”
And why do we still need Child Welfare?
Bischoff answers the question – again in the centenary magazine:
As long a poverty prevails, as long as alcoholism prevails… as long as dysfunctional families prevail, Child Welfare will continue to be relevant in addressing the plight of children.
“Problems such as poverty and associated challenges need to be addressed… with the hope of ultimately eradicating these factors that impact on our communities.
“I have no doubt that this is the wish of all concerned about the well-being of children and families in our community.”
• Interview by Sue Maclennan