Tania.co.za

Never thought of telling my parents, Part 3: I was molested by an adult

Well, I wrote the story in all its detail and then I couldn't bring myself to post it. The next day I asked myself why, and this reflection revealed, inter alia, several reasons why one sometimes chooses to protect the offender, and also his family; so I wrote that story. But I couldn't post that one either.

Never thought of telling my parents, Part 2: Fear of being caned

My brother would perhaps want to correct me if I have the story slightly wrong, but here is how I remember it.

The corporal punishment system

Anton and I went to school in the days of corporal punishment. What it amounted to at our school was that if a boy was naughty, the teacher, headmaster or housemaster could take him into his office and beat his bottom with a stick. The physics teacher, Mr. Victor (also known as Skowwe or Skovo), had the reputation of imparting the most pain. Allegedly he had calculated which part of his stick provided the optimal amount of vibration for maximum impact, and delivered the blows accordingly. I think the stick even had a name.

The punishment was metered out in increments of two whacks, and the maximum that you could get for a single misdemeanour was six. For example, a number of matric boys in my brother's class were caught drinking booze after the Matric dance in 1985, and they were all given "six of the best". Since they were all hit (or "jacked", as we used to say in school slang) by the same teacher in one scheduled session, they arranged for a fellow-pupil with a camera to meet them in a suitable place afterwards. There they lined up, pulled down their pants, put their arms around each other and recorded the row of bruise-striped bums on camera. A second picture, taken pants-up from the front, showed the identities of the culprits. There was no digital photography in those days; the photographer printed black-and-white samples in the school's photographic lab, and these were secretly circulated amongst their schoolmates, who placed orders for larger prints. When the teachers found out that the boys who were supposed to have been shamed by their punishment were in fact acquiring status as celebrities, they were livid. My mother, who was also a teacher there (but teaching at the junior school during that time), was secretly and unofficially slightly amused by the story, and my brother (who was not amongst the boys who got jacked, but who was friends with all of them) has the pictures in his album to this day.

The alternatives

I cannot remember ever having spoken to any schoolmate who thought that corposal punishment was wrong per se. (Now the fag system, in which younger boys in boarding school were "apprenticed" to older boys according to a tradition of ritual abuse and slavery -- albeit with "protection" from other older boys by their fagmasters -- was indeed opposed by many who experienced it. Typically, the abused later perpetuated the abuse against a new generation once they grew older.) At our school, and I imagine it was the same at other co-ed schools at the time, girls were often given detention (extra homework, done under supervision, for example, on a Saturday) or gated (denied permission to go out, if they were boarders) in punishment for the types of activities which would have got boys jacked. The majority of girls objected to what we saw as unfair and unequal treatment, and collectively pressed the teachers for the right to be jacked instead, the same as the boys. We would rather have borne the pain on our backsides than go through the tedium of three weeks of detention or a month of being gated.

Our request was not granted.

Fear of going to school

All that happened much later, when we were older. But it was not so funny at first. When Anton was about seven years old, my parents discovered that he was afraid of going to school. My mother asked him why, and he said he was afraid of being caned (the word "caned" lost vogue and was replaced by "jacked" a year or two later). My mother assured him that if he was well-behaved, this wouldn't happen, and after establishing that he had not done anything which would warrant a caning, she left it at that. It was only after some time that my mother's reassurances had no effect; his fear of school was increasing, with an effect on his schoolwork. Now, my father occasionally gave us a hiding, but we were not uncommonly scared of him, so my mother concluded that my brother was probably afraid of something more than a mere hiding, and she probed a little deeper.
"Why are you so afraid that the headmaster would hit you?" she asked.
"If it was just hitting, it would not be so bad," Anton replied, "but I am scared of being caned."
"But caning is hitting," she said.
"No, it isn't!" he cried.
"Well, what do you think caning is, then?" she asked.
"They hit you with an iron ball with spikes!" he replied.
"Who told you that?"
"Robert."

Robert was a year older than Anton. He had bullied him, and had somehow threatened him into believing that if he "split" (i.e. if he reported the bullying), he would ensure that Anton was "caned"; and he provided him with a definition of caning that would serve as a definite deterrent.

My mother restrained herself from hitting Robert and his mother using an iron ball with spikes.

Never thought of telling my parents, Part 1: Fear of the 9 o'clock siren

Introduction: The little blood-filled boot

When bad things happen to them, some children would rather not share their experiences with their parents simply because they don't trust their parents to be very supportive. As a child of Ukrainian refugees in post-WWII rural England, my former husband had to do manual farm labour from a very early age. One day when he was four years old and they were building haystacks, he accidentally pushed the pitchfork right through his foot. His boot filled up with blood, but he kept on working in spite of the pain, and it was only when his godmother noticed that he was limping that she managed to extract from him what was wrong. He had been too afraid to tell his mother of the accident, because they were very poor, and he thought she would be angry with him if she found out that he had made a hole in his boot. He was surprised when his mother, upon being told of the injury, showed far more concern for his foot than for the boot! (Nearly 50 years later he still has the scar.)

When parents don't know

But fear of a parent's reaction is not the only reason why children don't confide in them. Sometimes, kids just don't realise that their parents are unaware of the way they see things, and therefore the notion of telling them doesn't seem relevant. As young children, both my brother and I struggled with fears we believed were known to everyone and for which we believed there was no remedy. What follows is an account of a fear I had as a toddler. Over the next few days, I will write the account of my brother's fear of going to school and finally also the final account is of an incident of sexual abuse by an adult which I experienced when I was around 12 or 13 and somehow never thought of communicating to my parents at the time. My reflection on these experiences has made me realise that it could be good if parents were to occasionally ask their children in a supportive manner what they fear and hate and what makes them angry or sad, because these questions may reveal things with which children are needlessly struggling.

The man with the axe

I have recollections of very early childhood. According to my mother, some incidents which I have described to her took place prior to my second birthday. I do not know in which year this practice was abolished, but when I was very little, there was a curfew in place in South Africa which required Black people to leave the White areas and go back to the location (i.e. what today would be called a township) every evening. At 9 p.m., a siren would sound indicating that the curfew was now in force and that any Black person who was found out and about was going to be in trouble. Being very small, I somehow got the story wrong, and that made a big difference to my bedtime.

Now I wasn't like other children of my age who would run around all afternoon in the garden getting dirty, and then fall sound asleep after a bath at 7 p.m. I preferred drawing, and later also writing, and playing school-school, and after 7 p.m. my mind was still full of vivacious anticipation of another round of bed-time stories and songs. My poor exhausted mother had to supply to my demands. Suffering from post-natal depression, dizziness and occasional amnesia following the birth of my brother, she would sometimes fall asleep in the middle of a fairytale, but she would keep talking in her sleep. "Neeeee!" I would complain, "Dis verkeerd!" ("Noooo! That's wrong!") as her account of whatever she was dreaming would interfere with the plot. Sometimes by 9 p.m. I was still wide awake, and, eager to draw the line somewhere so that she could finally go to bed, she would say, "Luister, daar is die beuel, dis nou nege-uur, kinders behoort al te slaap." ("Listen, there's the bugle, it's nine o'clock now, children should already be asleep.") This usually filled me with sufficient fear to at least pretend to be asleep, although I thought it was really quite unfair, because trying to actually sleep just wasn't going to work, and in my heart, I thought that the government was mean to impose such a rule on people for something they could not change. What I did not realise was what the rule really was, and that it was being imposed on Black people, not on White children, and not on me. See, in Afrikaans, the word for bugle (beuel) and the word for executioner (beul) sound the same. So what I understood was, "Listen, there's the executioner, it's nine o'clock now, children should already be asleep." In my mind, therefore, this meant that a man dressed in a black raiment and wielding an axe would come from door to door to check whether children were dutifully sleeping. Since this was his profession, he was probably already quite skilled in establishing which ones were faking it. And one day, he might come for me.

When as an adult I once mentioned to my mother that this was what I had believed as a child, she asked, "But why didn't you ever tell me?" The thing is, as a little girl, I thought she knew. I thought she believed it too and accepted it as a fact of life. What was the point of telling her if I had no hope that she would protect me from the executioner?

Liefdesbriefie

Jy sal seker nie in die nabye toekoms hierdie woorde lees nie, maar wanneer jy dit eendag lees, sal jy weet dit was net vir jou bedoel: Ek het jou lief, vir altyd. En jy sal wonder wat dan so spesiaal was aan 7 Augustus. Die antwoord is: niks. Niks is besonder anders as gister nie. Dis maar net een van die baie dae waarop ek jou liefhet, liefgehad het en sal liefhê.

Big stuff

I am fascinated by large industrial structures. More fascinated, I am beginning to think, by the scale and the shape than by what these things do precisely, although the fact that they do actually perform a process function contributes to my fascination. (I am definitely not equally excited by large monuments.)

I am currently teaching a couple of engineers and their planning assistant the nitty gritty of project planning and tracking using scheduling software, including how to allocate resources, view the budget and cashflow, how to handle a resource that works at different rates under different conditions, best practices for deadline-driven scheduling, and so on. My client is Sandvik, and the picture below shows what the team I am teaching is working on. The stacker reclaimer they are building is located in Saldanha and it is made to do the stockpiling of the three different grades of iron ore brought by the 3 km long train from the open pit mine at Sishen near Kathu in the Northern Cape. (I've actually taught people at that mine too — and at a zinc mine a couple of hundred kilometres to the west.)

One of the interesting aspects of my work is that the scale of the projects on which our various customers work differ so greatly from customer to customer, and the management considerations differ accordingly. Some budgets are in the thousands and others are in the hundreds of millions. For some of the people with whom we work, the cost of time is the greatest factor to be considered in day-to-day Project Management; for others, money and time are not as important a consideration as is delivering precisely the right thing.

We have different courses and different lecturers to meet the variety of customer needs, and MC and I are currently the two who do most of the traveling. There is a growing and pressing need for Project Management training throughout Africa, and we are busy expanding our operations to meet that need.

Part of that involves taking on new people. Christopher Swart, whom I have known as a friend for some time and who has a good success record in EPWP-type projects, is finally joining us as a full-time associate later this month, initially to drive our own SAQA and PRINCE2 accreditation projects, and later to focus specifically on Project Management training for the Extended Public Works Programme and to act as liaison officer for the Programme in Project Management for Local Government.

Part of it also means radically changing suboptimal business processes, including those which involve external partners. What this will also mean is that we will have to develop a new integrated PRM and CRM system. The "we" in this case mostly means "me"... I have a strong feeling that the build-or-buy decision is going to result in "build", and I am going to have to be very careful about the Project Management process that I follow. The RADD offered by Lotus Notes has worked very well for us in the past in the balance between time, money, quality, process and resources required to actually do the job and maintain the infrastructure.

To Jerith, on the off-chance that you ever just happen to stumble upon this paragraph amongst the myriad paragraphs on the Internet: Before you think of passing any comment, even just in sotto voce to yourself, you are jolly well first coming to my office to see a slice of my life!

Part of it means introducing new courses. Some are industry-specific (such as our soon-to-be-launched Programme in IT Project Management on NQF level 7), whereas others are focused on a more general market (inter alia, I am currently putting together an intensive part-time course on NQF level 6 for general public booking, hopefully to be delivered in Q1 of 2009).

Part of it means scheduling courses in new places. We are once again going to have scheduled Project Management courses on NQF level 7 in Durban, Johannesburg and Bloemfontein in addition to Cape Town, Pretoria and Windhoek, and we've scheduled the first one in Nigeria for 2009. I also want to put together systems to better service our foreign students who come to South Africa for Project Management training.

The ProjectManagement.co.za Web site will provide details of these offerings as they become available.

My illustrious sporting achievment

I don't think I reached the second round in any sports event since the under-13 inter-schools athletics, but last night I managed to get through to the semi-finals of the...



...before being beaten by a student.

Project Management courses in Bloemfontein and Durban

Due to the still-growing demand, more courses have now been scheduled for this year. In addition to the courses in Cape Town, Pretoria and Johannesburg in the remaining months of 2008 there will also be a course in Durban in October and Bloemfontein in November. There will be courses in all those cities in 2009 as well, and also in Windhoek and Abuja. (Well, that's so far. If I have my way, we will also see courses in several other African cities towards the end of 2009.)

The African Hip-Hop Indaba 2008

I just got back. It was:

Hippy hoppy happy birthday to me!

I came back late from the Geek Dinner last night (wine sponsored by Perdeberg).

The venue was a very good choice, IMO -- a place on Greenmarket Square called Da Capo, which actually has big screens as a standard feature. I would hereby like to publically hint to all my comrades to urge for a Bladerunner Party at this venue, and to suggest the first commercial release of the movie as the version to be screened*. In fact, since I had a really horrible birthday this year, I think the world owes me a Bladerunner Party.

* I recommend this version for newbies, because the presence of the narrator helps to guide you through the plot. We can always have a movie analyst explaining the issue around the Director's Cut for those who don't know the history, to contextualise the ending. I noticed that there is now also something at Amazon called the Final Cut, which I guess may be a combination of the two -- would someone who has seen  all three like to offer an opinion here?

The Geek Dinner talks were entertaining. Kerry-Anne spoke about CapeTownDailyPhoto.com, the site she and husband Paul run as a hobby, proving herself to be as comfortable and witty in public speaking as she is in her writing.

There was also a talk by one Donna Metzlar which finally gave me a glimpse of understanding into (not sure that's the right preposition) why one might want to belong to a gender-specific professional association -- something which usually turns me off like anchovy-scented deodorant.

But my keenest ears were reserved for Andy's experiences in Nigeria, because now that I have managed to persuade my associates to schedule a Project Management course in Abuja, we have to actually pull it off!

Jerith, Graham, two of the Jonathans, etc. at the Geek Dinner.

This morning, still tired from the late night and from having been unable to remain asleep for the two hours before alarm time, I worked at an ineffectve pace on my preparations for the course for Sandvik, due to begin tomorrow. I'd already made peace with the fact that my work there meant I would have to miss the workshops and dance battle at the African Hip-Hop Indaba.

And then at the eleventh hour, a most opportune misfortune befell my client, and they requested a postponement of the course. My neighbour (the drummer to whom I referred at the Geek Dinner last night in the context of calculating interest on barter loans) was here loafing about whilst musing through his plans for the first anniversary of his dating relationship, while I gaily sang songs from old musicals in the shower in exuberance over my fortune. It was with pure delight that I waited in the queue at Computicket, chattering away to some young woman who was far more keen to spend three times the amount on a ticket for the Wine Festival, and thereafter went off to visit my former flatmate, sharing my joy over a cup of tea and a game of Crazy Eights. God is kind.