Editor’s Note: Waves for Change is a program in South Africa that uses surfing as therapy for children who are victims of the nation’s many hardships. Even with apartheid over 20 years in the rearview mirror, years of legalized racial segregation left a trail of deep poverty for some of its people. And with that poverty comes other challenges, dangers, and traumas. Sean’s story is an example of that battle and surfing’s power to influence change.
Photo: Waves for Change
When I think of Waves for Change, I think of Sean. I remember first meeting Sean by the gates of Masiphumlelele High School back in 2010. I’d been in South Africa a short time and was on my way to meet a friend. I was alone, walking on the red dirt path that crosses in front of the school gate. As I passed I saw Sean sitting alone on the grass verge wearing a school uniform cobbled together from what looked like various donations. He was alone. I asked him what he was up to.
“Nix,” he said, his English clipped by an accent that still felt unfamiliar.
I mentioned I was new to his country and not up to much. I’d been surfing with a crew of Masi surfers, and encouraged him to join. That afternoon, he did.
At the time we were a small crew hitting the water when we could. There was no program or an intention to create one. It was time spent learning from one and other and enjoying the freedom of the ocean. But as time progressed, so our relationships changed and the barriers that stood in the way of young South Africans growing up in township environments became apparent. My role as friend quickly changed to that of advocate and I was called into various situations for which I was in no way prepared, operating in an environment that was entirely foreign and at times highly uncomfortable.
This was especially so with Sean. As with many of South Africa’s ‘born free’ generation, Sean was born onto the streets of Nyanga township, a tangle of low income housing held together by a patchwork of overstretched and under-resourced public services. It was through this patchwork that Sean fell in his teenage years as his parents divorced and he was sent to live with his mother. In the absence of money, Sean’s elder brother dropped out of school and turned to petty crime to put food on the table and keep Sean in education. Two years before Sean and I met on the grass verge, gunmen entered Sean’s shack and shot and killed his brother as they sat watching television. Sean suspects that it was a revenge killing. No follow ups were made, no case opened, no counseling offered. Life was left to continue unchecked.
As he struggled to come to terms with the events surrounding his brother’s death, Sean began failing class. He found himself far behind his peers, surrounded by classmates several years his junior. There was little remedial care on offer. His teachers were burdened with overcrowded classrooms and the wait list to see the sole social worker, who visited every second month, left little chance of follow up. He would often tell me of his shame, an adult in a class of children. And of his loneliness, watching his friends advance towards adulthood whilst he remained surrounded by pre-pubescent teens. In Tik, he found an escape, a momentary release and a moment of power, a high that made him feel ‘the best, the most clever, the guy everyone wanted to be’. But in Tik, he found an addiction. An addiction he wore in his wiry frame, his clipped speech and his inked on tattoos, sitting on the grass verge after being kicked out of school.
When I think of Sean I remember the feelings of helplessness, trying to find an opening when so many doors were closed. Caught between Sean, his home and his school, trying to find a solution. The help he needed came at a price beyond his means, the help he could access was always oversubscribed. But in surfing he found a space to breathe. In me he found a supporter, but I couldn’t be there when he was most in need and he relapsed. Eventually, his mother moved him away from the township to the Eastern Cape to work on the farms. A means to an end, but not a solution. I still remember saying goodbye to Sean, wishing I could have done something more. It was then that I started researching what would become Waves for Change.
I recently saw Sean for the first time in several years. He was well, off Tik and back in night school at the age of 21. With him was a scrapbook, full of faded pictures from surfing magazines, photos of the Eastern Cape and certificates of completion from courses he’d taken over the years since we last met. In the middle of the book was a presentation he made to a support group in the Eastern Cape sometime last year. The presentation was about how surfing changed his life, and the friendships he made that gave him hope to carry on, to start the process of change.
