The “Too-Hard-Basket”

I heard the most amazing thing the other day. My colleague was telling me about her former life working with teenage pregnancies in semi-rural regions of West Australia. One instance she recalled, she went to check up on a teen mother’s progress, and found her feeding her baby (good) with a clean bottle (good) filled with Coca-Cola. (BAD). Tiesha: “what are you feeding her?” Teen mother: “Coke!” Tiesha: “Oh. Wow. You need to stop that right now.”

When I told my brother this, he goes, “What did she think was coming out of her breasts?!!! HAHAHAH.”

But really, it’s horrifically sad. What Tiesha was describing to me, was a state of naivety, of ignorance so ingrained that… well, the mind fairly boggles. WHO would feed a newborn Coca Cola??! To quote Tiesha: “Well, she thought, when she’s thirsty, she likes Coke, so she thought the baby would too.” The simplicity of the statement is just heartbreaking. Imagine living in a house where Coke replaces milk. A house where, if you didn’t feel like going to school, you might join mum on the couch for a day, popping her beers and snacking on Cheezels. A house which might change every few months. A house where you didn’t ever witness full-time employment; a childhood which disappeared quickly, where you grew older and panicked if you faced a simple table setting of cutlery and glassware.

Call me ignorant; I never knew this type of poverty existed. In my happy dream world of bunnies and marshmallows, truly poor people were only poor because they didn’t have enough work to sustain them; however, they were proud and mended their clothes and made sure their kids were at school every day, clean and awake, and were horribly ashamed to take handouts. All very Frank McCourt, no? I didn’t realize that in my own city, there was the kind of poverty where there was enough money to buy Coke, but not enough to educate a child as to how to feed her baby. I didn’t realize that there was a subculture where people considered welfare an income, and not a last means of support.

So, what do we do? How is this disparity in such a wealthy and stable country ever acceptable? As we become richer collectively, aren’t we aiming to close the gap? (The chasm, if you will). And is poverty really the issue here? Or is it something else?

It’s all a bit too-hard-basket for me today. I don’t know the answers. I don’t even know the questions. All I know is that Michael Jackson had a heart attack and now I want to go home.

On a more hopeful note, last week I assisted my workplace in hosting a day of ‘fun and scientific adventure’ for school children. As part of the corporate social responsibility register, the company works with the Beacon Foundation, a not-for-profit which works with at-risk youth to encourage a brighter future. A key strategy of Beacon is to initiate projects that demonstrate solutions to youth unemployment and encourage self-help at the local level. Beacon collaborates with businesses to provide a corporate link for the schools, and hence, wider opportunities for the students identified as most at-risk.

So. Last week, ten schools descended upon the Perth office so that 15 and 16 yr old kids and their teachers could swarm through the building and ask employees what they do day to day, how they got there, and what they love and hate.

I always forget how funny kids are. These ones were good value. After two hours of running around the office filling out log books, they ate a ridiculous volume of sandwiches and then constructed ‘buildings’ out of spaghetti and marshmallows. Good kids. Didn’t even steal the marshmallows to play chubby bunnies. It was hard to imagine that one of these kids could have been that teenager sitting at home with a baby bottle filled with Coca-Cola.

I really hope that if one of these girls gets to look around an office and realize there are opportunities she may not have previously considered, she might not fall into the trap of unplanned parenthood. If even one of these kids pulls him or herself out of the current cycle, it would be worth it. And in the meantime: how do we make sure that all teenage girls know that it’s not a good idea to feed a baby soda?

www.beaconfoundation.net