I was 18 the first time I left the country. Having grown up in a single parent household with tight finances, cross border travel was never really an option. But had finances permitted, or necessity necessitated, I would have been able to get the documentation required to exit South Africa for whatever reason. In fact, when I decided that I wanted to see the world beyond the bustling town of Pietermaritzburg, I applied for a passport and promptly left the country to clean the houses of the wealthy in the UK. The documentation was a non-event. Finding the finances to make a trip a different story but I was a South African citizen, with a birth certificate and an ID, and the natural ease with which the passport followed required little mental application.
I’ve written about the struggles we’re having with documentation for so many of our children – adoptions being held up because of pending death certificates and birth certificates and about any which document in between. Kids stuck in what can only be described as bureaucratic idiocy, their lives ticking away while people shuffle papers, many which don’t even contain sensical information. Like the report that was submitted to court where a child was a different gender on each page. Or the documents checked by more people than I can count on one hand, only to be submitted with expired certifications. Or the application with the wrong name contained in it. The list goes on.
It’s quite obvious to me, although many remind me, that I “can’t adopt them all” – but it would seem that getting an adoption over the line becomes the only way to actually create permanence for children that gives rise to them actually being able to enjoy those human rights which are supposedly bestowed on all citizens of our country. I call it the Pinocchio effect – ‘you’re a real boy now” that you’ve been adopted. While you’re in foster or alternate care, you’re just a file with limited allowances.
But I digress from the exciting topic I had actually hoped to share with you, funny how the all-consuming devastation of the legal status of our children does that to me. In early August, we celebrated an incredibly exciting milestone when we were actually able to get documentation for rider #264 (the one who is ‘too sixty four his bike’… and yes he really thinks that the lyric to the Right Said Fred song) enabling him to leave the country with us on a very exciting trip to Botswana where he, and three team mates, were able to participate in The Muddy Face Botswana Rally.
It may seem a stretch to qualify cross border travel as a right. I understand with absolute cognition that it is a privilege. But one cannot ignore that there is inherent freedom, enshrined in our constitution, in having access to documentation which makes this travel possible.
Those of us for whom access to simple identifying documentation has been a right of passage and quite simply a non-event in life have little to no understanding of the magnitude of the challenges that no documentation pose. Prior to having to navigate this space with my children I’d never really thought about in any way that warranted much attention.
Anyway, Rider #264 got to travel with his team. And it was all kinds of wholesome. And it reminded me of the importance of fighting to get every one of these children documented in such a way that the limitations on their movements are no longer the documents the remainder of us take for granted each day.