Sustenance and succour

Living cross-culturally is not easy. In fact, it's often very hard.

Hard for lots of reasons. For the diversity of views, the wondering what is going on, the unpreparedness for daily life.

Even walking to the shop can raise small challenges. Should I worry about that shouting, or just keep on walking? What if a car suddenly starts spinning, or an iron bar is picked up - am I safe? (rare as this does happen to me, thoughts like this will pop into my mind unbidden if there seems to be some upset about).

Mostly these daily issues are noted, dealt with and life continues apace. There is, however, rarely an easy familiarity.

The kind of familiarity you have with old friends. Family. Loved ones. The sort where you can wander into their living room and flop down on their couch. Shoes spread along the way. Feet tucked under. Maybe an unspoken but acted on request for a cup of tea and a biscuit.

Yet, after six years, I finally feel like I am starting to reach that point with a few families. After six years of being in the same space, with the same heart for living out here, with occasional intersections in our lives.

I find that (for a few) I can just wander into their open family camp area. Flop onto the dirt, feet tucked under. Have a laugh, joke, ask about family. Wander to the shop for sandwich and a drink. Back again, the pressures of whitefella time set aside.

Family drive in, flicking smokes, handling small items, checking whereabouts. Kids in sight, crouched over smartphones, facebooking. Ashes of a fire, ready for later in the day when lunch appears. Artefacts lined up for decorating.

We exchange news. Still in Blackstone. Yuwa, Eleanor-nya pulkarringu (she's got big!). Phone numbers handed over, the usual requests for photos. Reminiscing road trips long gone. Or the time I cried when a baby flew in, the grandmother and I wiping tears at the little devil with his upturned eyebrows.

Sweet, this easy familiarity. A rare sweetness to sustain. Succour for the soul, and our deep shared humanity.

You don't say...

The experiences of the last few weeks, tumultuous to say the least, have led me to ponder on the question of gossip. On reflection, however, I think the word gossip is too harsh a word. After all, essentially it is just a human desire to share stories. Storytelling, not the existence of it but the methods that are socially ordered, is a deep part of our culture psyche (whatever culture you belong to).

The idea of others talking about us can hold us back, or push us forward. It it easy to fall prey to concerns about what will be said as a reason for action that is not true to yourself or others. Or inaction. Worrying what others will think. Will they think badly of me? Will they change their opinion of me for the worse? And so on.

Clear lines of sight, near Blackstone

In the end, however, the only source of worry about whether I have acted well comes from those questions I ask of myself. Did I act with integrity? With honesty? What could I have done differently and at what point would it have helped to avoid harm? I am however, always responsible only for my actions.

One of the challenging aspects of living in a remote area is that, despite the enormous geographic distance that makes up the region of interest, it is still just like living in a little country town. Things change. People know (something). People, naturally, talk. There is no privacy. I have often reflected that this is the case for 'clients' in my work, but it is also true for those of us non-permanent residents.

What is a little different however is that, unlike in other small towns or big cities, you can't just leave your house without leaving your job, or visa versa. Staff housing is too tight. The job and the house are one. That adds an interesting layer of complication to sorting out personal issues. After all, it is not just a personal decision anymore, it's a total life decision. Am I happy? How can we best share care of the kids? Do I like my job? Do I want to keep on living here? How much needs to change? Those questions cannot be separated simply or easily.

In the end, early last year, I chose to leave my relationship but eventually not to leave my house or my job. An unconventional decision (but not necessarily an uncommon one... sometimes it is a matter of degrees). I also chose to keep my privacy as much as I could. Those who I am close to, knew. Those who I am not, made their own assumptions. I didn't feel the need to explain my personal situation at every juncture, but I was happy for the truth to be out there and told. I just didn't feel the need to do all the telling.

Now that there has been another shift in my personal situation, a wonderful man, I again feel the beginning of that niggling worry... what will they think? In the end, talk will happen. Some of it will be malicious, some of it will be kind. What people hear and think may well be based on assumptions they or others have made. There may even be deliberate untruths told, borne of the worry about 'what others will think'.

None of it matters. This small world shifts and re-settles, and inexorably moves on.

Openly, slowly, as humanly as possible

I was enormously privileged recently to win the WA Social Worker of the Year 2012, Rural & Remote Practitioner. On the night, as advised, I had a speech prepared 'just in case'. After winning the award I nervously pulled it out, realising I just might need to actually deliver it.

On the Award night, with Professor Susan Young (nominator)

Although I didn't win the overall award (and warm congratulations to Michelle Charlton who did!), I nevertheless felt a pang of disappointment that I had not had the chance to say what was so important to me about the work I do.

A few days later, I was due to deliver a short talk about my work at the Signs of Safety Gathering 2012, which draws together child protection practitioners from Australia and internationally to discuss this practice framework. With some modifications hastily prepared, I incorporated my main points from the undelivered speech. Here is the speech which I delivered at the conference:

Yuwa, yini Sophie-nga. My name is Sophie Staughton. I am a community child protection worker based in the remote Aboriginal community of Blackstone. The community I live in is just over 120 kilometres west of the border between Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory. Truly, the heart of the central desert of Australia. 

I live and work in the Ngaanyatjarra communities, where there is a very strong connection to country. Similarly, there is a very strong value on keeping kids safe and 'growing them up' well. 

One of the key lessons I have learned in the six years I have lived and work in this region, which is particularly true for child protection context, is that unless there is a genuine closeness and friendliness established between the department and community members, it can be impossible to leap the cultural divide between us. Aboriginal, non-Aboriginal. 

The Department for Child Protection is a Western institution, and we work in a Western legal and organisational context. In order to do our work well, therefore, we need to build relationships with community members and remain open to constantly challenging our own cultural worldviews. Self-reflection is absolutely critical to good practice. 

What does this mean, however? 'Building relationships'. At the heart, it is our ability to connect on a human level. This is not 'engagement'; it's more real than that. 

While you will all be familiar with what we do in child protection, I'd like to tell you the more important story about how we do the work.

The Department has four community child protection workers based in the Ngaanyatjarra Lands, one youth and family support worker, a field officer and a recently created project officer position. For the Ngaanyatjarra people of the central desert, these positions are relatively new. The first two workers to permanently live in the region only came in the last seven years. 

Our work has a strong focus on developmental ways of working to build community safety. This is not a common approach in child protection, but critical to effective work with Aboriginal communities. The core of developmental approaches is working with community strengths, where families and communities are at, and on their initiatives to improve child safety and wellbeing. 

Like any community, Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal, it isn't always easy to know what will work. We are all feeling our way, together. 

This developmental framework sits very well with the Signs of Safety approach used in the Department, which is also strengths-based but operates more on an individual and family basis in mainstream child protection work. When we do need to work intensively with particular families and children on the Ngaanyatjarra Lands, we have been creative in adapting the Signs of Safety framework to our practice. 

One of the main things we do in our work, however, is invest time in getting to know the families. It will take many visits for family members to feel that we have a genuine interest in them and their family. 

Essentially, it requires that we drop the 'professional veneer' and be you, me, us, together trying to sort through the challenges we see before us. Sometimes, often, we see different things, and this needs time to work out too. 

Time is of the essence, but it is time slowed down 

Too often, community members have seen the 'passing parade' of service providers drive in, talk briefly (often making little sense in their need to be heard) and then drive off. Never to be seen again. 

We turn up, again and again. We also sometimes have to come with a hard message, explaining where we might need to act if there are not changes. Explaining 'whitefella' law, if that is what is needed. It is about being honest, straight up, plain and direct in our language. No high English, no assumptions. 

Signs of Safety meetings happen wherever they need to, wherever the families are. Most often, it is on the verandah of a community house. Sometimes it is on the side of the road in the middle of the vast outback. Sometimes it is on neutral territory, like the front lawn of our office. In my experience, the meetings are least effective when they happen in a room with a whiteboard.

One of the challenges I have found in talking about Signs of Safety is that some of the tools do not resonate culturally. Out of the experience of trying to use 'Three Houses', which did not help the conversations, I created a new tool. {And Andrew [Turnell], I saw you looking at this earlier... it's copyright!}

This tool uses a road, with a fire in the centre. The road metaphor resonates with remote community life and traditional planning of the yiwarra (road) ahead. It also enables a discussion about what is 'behind' the family, as Aboriginal families in the central desert are reluctant to talk about the past. It's finished. 

Unlike the Western tradition, where fire is associated with passion, lack of control or even fear, in remote Aboriginal communities, the fire is a traditional symbol of strength and security. Talking around the fire is a positive experience, often associated with food and nurturing. It is a symbol of family life, and as such it helps us to draw out family strengths and focus on the positives that are in the life of every family. 

The use of this new tool is very much in its early stages, but it has been helpful to date as another way to help families, us, to talk about what happened, what is good now and what needs to happen next.

The more we invest in these ways of engaging with Aboriginal community members, as slowly and openly as possible, on their own terms as much as possible, as human-ly as possible (moving past our fear in how to start that conversation), the greater the chance we have of doing justice to the children of these families.

Imagine

Imagine a world where the one place you can buy diesel within 100 kilometres is open for only 2 - 4 hours a day. If you miss it, you miss it. No emergencies or last minute decisions out of hours please.

Where a roadside breakdown could mean your only method of communication is to activate an emergency beacon or to wait until someone comes along.

Or if the tyre is shredded, there is no means to fix it for 200 kilometres. And a replacement one will take 3 weeks to arrive and at least 3 phone calls to organise. Best to carry a spare, and a spare spare. And for some trips, just another to avoid the possibility of day's wait by the vehicle waiting for a tow.

If you're away from the office and want to make a phone call, you have to beg or ask a favour of another worker while standing on the other side of the counter.

Where every time you visit a service provider, you  have to meet someone new and introduce yourself (all over again). Even though you were just there last week...

Where getting payment for one essential item requires at least three phone calls (and that's the uncomplicated transactions).

And if you run out of black pens (oddly mandatory for certain forms), it is a two week wait to get some more unless you beg, borrow or steal from others!

Where the photocopier repair man refuses to come and service the machine, as he doesn't have a spare week for the journey (and his contract makes no provision for your machine, specifically). So the machine limps along for years on end because it's too hard to get a new one and too hard to fix the old one.

Sending a letter and getting a reply takes a minimum of at least two weeks, up to three.

Where you have to guess the weight of your article and construct an estimated postage value using stamps in standard envelope denominations of the past 3 years.

... I'm not complaining. I'm just explaining.

There are some frustrations, limitations and necessities that cannot be avoided living remote. It's not 'special treatment' that's required, just commonsense.

The heart of it

I've been reflecting a little lately on the heart of what it is that we do.

By this, I mean, the fundamental values that shape what we choose to 'do' (as in, how we spend much of our time, generally work but not necessarily paid) and what we in fact end up becoming.

And when the gulf between the two becomes obvious, the question is why and how did this come to be? How is it that a deeply valued worker can end up, over time, as just another bureaucrat? Another manager exemplar. Incremental creep? Or perhaps idealism meets realism.

There is something, however, about being a social worker (or, more correctly, one in training) that causes me to reflect on this topic perhaps harder than I otherwise have in the past.

After all, social work is actually quite a fiery passion. It sounds terribly 'do-goodish' and tree-huggy, but in fact it's underpinned by a deep and abiding commitment to social justice.

When I first started studying social work, I was a little suspicious of where all that bubbling, barely contained fervour for social justice might exactly be expected to take me. I'd spent many years in the Commonwealth public service responding to public scrutiny processes of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. I'd become more than a touch jaded and cynical about that organisation, especially with its symbiotic relationship to the media.

All that cynicism had, however, rather clouded my vision on a much more important matter.

The simplicity of meaning in 'human rights'. What that much used, but little examined, term means in day to day life. The way it infuses our everyday existence and interactions, at work, at home, socially. Our relationship to human rights exemplifies our values in a way perhaps nothing else does. Human rights at an individual level (treating others with respect, dignity, inherent worth), socially and culturally (access, equity) and collectively (acknowleding our shared humanity and the collective rights of Indigenous people).

I've now come around to the view that without a fiery commitment to human rights, a conscious focus on human rights in everyday practice, I can't really call myself a social worker. I don't want to be the kind of social worker that claims the name, but acts like a bureaucrat. That thinks more like a manager. That calculates on efficiency dividends and drives forward on critical performance measures.

I want to be the worker that goes to the heart of it, first.

Where it all starts

It's been a bit of a busy time lately. Eleanor started Kindy last week. She's a little too young for it, age-wise, but definitely not socially or intellectually. She's taken a keen interest in learning to read (her request), and has been working through all the fun alphabet-related resources she can find. Reading Eggs. Apps. Signs. I could be overstating things a little, as you'd expect, but she's a smart kid!

I spent the first week of Kindy mostly sitting in the class. It was an interesting experience for me on a number of levels. Interesting to see the ebb and flow of kids into and out of the classroom, the changing faces, the small numbers in attendance, the teasing and tears, the process of teaching kids at different ages in the one classroom. I am endlessly admiring of school teachers - it's a very hard job. Made even harder in a remote community, where school socialisation skills are the starting point for Kindy class, not an introduction to the alphabet and correct pen holding.

A lot of people are engaged with the idea of Indigenous education. Yet what is little understood is the many, layered ways in which children from Western background are subtly and gently prepared for the experience of Western schooling before they even arrive at the gates in their oversized, overly cute little uniforms. When I see the enormous differences between Eleanor and the other kids at school, and reflect on what we are doing at home that creates this gap, the long road ahead to Indigenous literacy seems a little clearer.

For one, we have a bookshelf of kids books that is, quite literally, overflowing in the lounge room. Plus various kids books are scattered throughout the house, lost under the couch, buried in the boot of her little car, tucked in the midst of toys, sitting next to the bed. There are magnet letters all over the fridge and freezer, which Eleanor plays with and rearranges and redeposits all over the house at various points. She has (and I'm sad to say this, but it's true) three separate App folders in Fred's iPad called Eleanor, School and Colouring. The school apps are dedicated to learning and recognising letters, shapes, colours and numbers, replete with fun ways to encourage and maintain interest like stickers and dancing monkeys.

More importantly, perhaps, she has two parents who not only make reading a daily part of the structure of the day, but also regularly point out letters. For the past year, Eleanor has been able to identify 'her' letter, 'my' letter and Fred's letter. At various points, we add new capital letters to the mix - Cassie's, Rosalie's, Donnie's, etc. Building an alphabet in her mind through social relationships, which came about organically and was built on over time.

Just last week, walking home from school, I called into the clinic. On the way in, at about Eleanor's level, there was an old wooden sign with the clinic name, the letters carved into the wood and painted in rainbow colours. Eleanor took an interest in the C (after all, it's Cassie's letter!) and so we stopped and worked our way through each of the letters, as she traced her finger over them. It took about 5 minutes.

It is this kind of gentle, subtle reinforcement of the significance of letters, the relationship between letters and things that interest her, that lays the foundation for literacy. It is the way in which I sometimes ignore Eleanor in preference for my latest book that shows there is much more to this reading thing to know and learn. It is my interest in letters, and my encouragement of her interest, that gets her ready for that moment in the classroom when the teacher says 'today we're learning about the letter A'.

This is not a commentary about the parenting of Indigenous kids; rather it's a commentary about the multiple ways in which reading and literacy are woven into the lives of non-Indigenous kids without their parents even realising what's going on (particularly) as they prepare their kids for school.

Closing the gap. It's about so much more than just improving attendance. In fact, it's almost unrelated to attendance. It's about all the things that make up a life. A life rich in social relationships, rich in connectedness and family. But not necessarily rich in the alphabet and the meaningfulness of that to everyday important things. The more that social connectedness is related to literacy (through useful tools like Facebook, music, and games) and there are more interesting things available to read, only then perhaps will we start to see the gap close!

ID hell

I spent today doing a mundane but necessary task that many of us do without much thought, but about which we realise the significance of devoting a few hours here and there to do.

Maintaining my filing.

I put away all my FY11-12 documents and papers that had been piling up on the blue chair (well, it worked as a system for a while...). I then re-organised all the papers I'd been pulling out of different odd locations in my cleaning blitz of December, and packed away all my social work books and assignments into their preordained corner. I was mildly interested to flick through a few assignments that I've kept from my uni days in the early 90s, and made the unexciting decision to keep on holding onto them for... god knows what. Posterity.

All in all, my documents take up 5 drawers in a filing cabinet. I'm 38, so that's nearly 8 years to fill one drawer. Not bad.

Of course, keeping old assignments is hardly important. I do know that just one folder holds the truly important documents. The folder I'd grab in an emergency, if I had time. The one with my birth certificate, Eleanor's birth certificate, our passports, and various other bits and pieces that prove I am who I say I am.

The reason this rather mundane event of today is worthy of this post is this: I have spent approximately 35 hours of my work time in the past two weeks helping six community members apply to be foster carers and to get a Working with Children Check.

While I can see that some genuine effort has been made by the designers of the various forms to reduce the overall imperviousness of government identity verification systems (for example, by allowing certain people to make a declaration that someone is who they say they are), overall the process is extraordinarily complicated.

Why?

1) Most people don't have birth certificates. To apply for one is a process in itself. To do this in the context of their birth, that of their parents and grandparents and so on never having been registered becomes almost impossible. And certainly a lengthy process.

2) Most people do not have photo ID, such as a driver's licence. After all, scrambling the birth certificate hurdle to get a driver's licence is hard enough.

3) Most people don't hold any cards, apart from a keycard (and sometimes not even that! demonstrating beautifully how the world turns on a different axis where money is concerned out here)

4) No one receives 'utilities bills' in community housing (electricity is supplied through pre-purchased cards, water runs free), often do not have a home phone, and if they do receive official correspondence do not see a strong reason why this needs to be kept and stored 

4) Don't even mention passports to me, okay!!

By contrast, my wallet is literally bulging with all forms of ID, including photo ID. Student cards, Medicare card, health insurance, driver's license, WWCC, credit cards, key cards, library cards. The list goes on. I am IDed to my eyeballs. I know where my birth certificate is. In fact, I've carried it around with me in that all important folder every since my  mother gave it to me back in 1990 and I've faithfully held onto it for 22 years since. And, not at all oddly, my father went down and registered my birth within a few days of it happening.... Facilitating the whole beautiful process of identification in a smooth transition from there on in.

None of which applies out here. Which means I spent time searching for any bits of paper with someone's address, asking (and re-checking) if the applicants happen to have just one card (any card.... try me), ringing around various places that might be a source of ID, helping ring the bank and negotiating the trials of telephone banking to get a statement faxed, finding authorised referees, taking photos that meet the regulations, certifying at least 80 different forms of identification that were scraped together, completing the requests for alternate lodgment because there is no handy post office nearby, and then carefully working out that each individual has satisfied the requirements.

And now to working out who will pay the costs for the ID, and how it will be paid.  That's a whole 'nother trial...

Water water

An essential of life. A self-evident truth of which we think about little.

Until we run out of water. Or it buckets down. Or refuses to act as it should.

I seem to be preoccupied with stories of water of late. A little girl dies of dehydration in the desert, a summer storm just three days hence drenching the countryside around her.

The water turns off in Blackstone, a small reminder (less severe) of the centrality of water to our existence. The every day inconveniences multiply as the day progresses, the taps still dry.

A bucket of precious water sitting in the laundry tub. Back up for essentials like clean teeth and a sponge bath before bed. A quick assessment of the water to hand. 10 litre containers at work, at the store, in the garage. Enough for now.

Yet it's drenched outside. The conventional view of summer deserts are baked dry earth, cracking and parched. In fact it's the opposite. Summer is the time of storms. Where winter clothes briefly re-appear as storm clouds unfold. Rapidly evaporating the next day.

Each summer I remember the summer previous. Roads blocked for weeks, too wet to pass. Store provisions rapidly declining, pantry stocks the centre of every meal.

I was reflecting the other day on the minor inconvenience of the cold water taps never running cold. In summer, no amount of running the taps to get the water, heated in the quiet pipes, to pass makes any difference. I drink warm water, reassured that it is meant to be better for rapid absorption in any case.

And now there is none. None until 6pm tonight ... maybe... while the tank is filled. I missed the (unpublicised) brief window this morning of running water. Missed my shower yesterday. It's going to be a high day.

Oh for the halcyon days of warm water never running cold.

Bellwether

The wind is filled with rage and sadness tonight. A little girl is dead. Found too late.

As I listen to the wind battling outside, battering the house, I recall my fleeting thoughts on funeral days. How the weather seems to carry grief and sadness too. How a still morning suddenly turns, and we feel the animate earth rise around us. Sudden rain, hot wind, a dust storm.

So too is today. A day of gathering clouds. Of events unfolding on fateful tracks. Her family's grief unleashed.

There is a deep connection here between spirit, earth and people. Somehow it seems possible to be true.

Her spirit picked up and her story told, in more ways than one.

Mama-ku Christmas

It was a quiet, merry Christmas today in Blackstone. Eleanor was presented with an enormous trampoline (it didn't look that big in the box), which now dominates the backyard. While I was initially worried that it would be out of bounds during the day with the heat blooming on the dark mat, I realised with one stroke that the hose would be enough to turn that problem around.

The view

So early morning, I finally got to properly see the view from the back yard. On tippy toes, it's always seemed good. But in one second bouncing bursts, trouser hems wet, it was even better. Enhanced by the view over our neighbour's yard and highlights of the community to the west. I was reminded of the joy of simple play as a child, and briefly recaptured the moment (only this time without fear of plummeting through the springs on landing).

I am yet to see if the trampoline was a good idea. Eleanor loves it, so it scores top marks there. The main concern is that it will attract lots of bored kids to jump the fence into our backyard when we're away. While I'm perfectly happy for kids to bounce, the problem is that generally it doesn't stay at that. Bouncing turns to disagreements, which becomes frustration and then anger. The nearest thing takes the brunt of all that miniature burst of pure energy, and there is much to vent one's feelings on in the backyard. Fingers crossed ...

The day progressed apiece. After ambling through only half of the food we'd prepared, much of it spontaneously generated with the useful help of Fred's new iPad and online recipes, we marshalled to join the local police sargeant who had opened the pool for the afternoon. A kind gesture by him to give of his time, and one much appreciated by the kids.

The first thing Al said to me when I arrived was 'you wouldn't have thought there were this many kids in the community!' Indeed, it was packed full of leaping, backflipping, dunking, laughing bodies. At least 25 or 30, with more coming in and out, enjoying the rare opportunity to use the pool so tantalisingly close but sadly locked most of the time.

Unfortunately there is no youth worker at Blackstone at present. There seems to be inordinate trouble getting youth workers, paying for them and then encouraging them to stay. When the Shire hurdles the former two, the latter normally knees them after six months. It's a thankless task being a youth worker. Working late shifts, always in demand, constantly needing to find something new to do with limited resources, remote management. Since the best youth workers are young themselves, the sense of adventure wears off after a few months and the job just doesn't seem that attractive anymore. The only ones I know who have stayed have either been community members or temporary visa holders seeking permanent residency.

This evening, as the night closed in, the sounds of the community church wandered over the sky. Hymn songs in language. The unique cadence of the chairman's voice by megaphone, drifting across to the edge of the community.

Christmas lights on solar softly twinkling, the summer glare put to good use. The day is done.