Czech social system reportedly producing another generation of orphans

The interview below was conducted with Barbora Spalová and Karel Spal for Romano voďi magazine about their experience hosting Romani children who are wards of the Czech state in their home. Barbora Spalová graduated with degrees in ethnology and social anthropology from Charles University in Prague. Her primary research field is the anthropology of religion, Christianity in particular. She lives in Lužické hory and is involved n the issue of foster child care. She is the chair of the civic association Média 007 and editor of the magazine Biograf. Karel Spal graduated with a degree in the study of religion from the University of Pardubice and focuses professionally on the Byzantine church and the position of Islam in Europe. He works for Média 007 as an expert in its “Religious Section”.

Q: When did you decide to be come host parents and what was your initial motivation? I know that you were rather young yourselves at the time, weren’t you afraid it would be too much for you?

A: At the time we were 24 and 30 years old. We had already spent a year-long honeymoon in India, after which we spent some time in Prague before moving here to Krompach. We spent about half a year poking about here and settling in, and soon it seemed somehow logical to us to visit the local orphanage and offer the children some of what we know how to do and like doing. In September 2000 we started a recreational program there – Bára offered dance classes and Karel offered carpentry. A year and a half later, around Christmas time, Bára’s grandmother asked if we wanted to invite some children over for Christmas Eve – we always celebrate it as a family at her grandparents’ cottage in the Krkonoše. We said that was an excellent idea and went to the orphanage to ask which children stay there during the holidays, because quite a lot of them do visit family members at Christmas. We learned there would be about 10 or 12 children staying at the orphanage that year, including three siblings from the S. family. Bára knew the little girls from her dance class, but we hadn’t known of their brother. We said that would be fine. Prior to our first Christmas together, Bára was motivating the children to behave during class (they are often rather wild) by giving them beads when they did well. Once every three months the children who won the most beads got to take a field trip with us somewhere. The S. girls really made a lot of effort and frequently went on those trips.

Q: Why did you choose the “host” form of childcare instead of becoming foster parents or directly adopting some children?

A: “Host” families are a kind of care that doesn’t have a legal basis, but we are convinced that it’s a system with a good foundation that should be promoted more and that orphanages should participate in it. Here in Krompach we were rather pioneering in that respect – not that we were the first, there were some “aunties” who worked at the orphanage and who, after they retired, sometimes hosted the children in their homes, as well as some locals who work in the forest here. Those arrangements took the form of an exchange: Older children would help their hosts with work and get a chance to leave the orphanage and be in a family somewhere. It was, in a certain respect, mutually beneficial. We did our best to describe our “way” to the orphanage and those around us as a certain structural advantage for children who are otherwise constantly in the orphanage, who have practically no social contact with the outside world, but who through “hosting” can get some other experiences, other opportunities, which will then be useful to everyone. Our initial “Christmas” model finally settled into a pattern of the children visiting us almost every weekend at one point. It also very much depended on their wishes – at one point they wanted to be with us every weekend, and then just every 14 days. As they grew up, they started spending more and more weekends elsewhere after a while, and they visited us only once every three months. Nevertheless, they were here for Christmas regularly, plus we hosted them for a week in the summer, or for 14 days – we’d all go to the Krkonoše with our parents. For the children, by the way, that was, in our view, another valuable experience, to experience a family with a grandfather and grandmother.

For a while we considered becoming the girls’ foster parents; we couldn’t adopt them because their mother and father were still in the picture. In the end, however, we didn’t venture into a foster relationship. At the time they told us we would have to take all three children and that we could not split up the siblings. The boy was already pretty big at the time and we didn’t have any children of our own – we didn’t really know how to go about it. The interview at the time revolved around the need to prepare the children to start living independently so that each one of them would find his or her own apartment and a job, which seemed like rather a lot to us. In the end, therefore, we chose “hosting”. We had to undergo an evaluation process which in most respects is not different from the interviews that precede adoption.

Q: So basically from the beginning your entire extended family accepted the children?

A: Precisely, and we believe it was just fine for them. Later the girls told us that they had never had any experience, for example, with older people in a family, they didn’t know what it meant, they were amazed when we took into consideration the fact that grandpa likes to nap after lunch, for example. They compared his age to that of the Pope. It seemed to us that the experience spoke to them somehow – even the fact, for example, that they could see relationships between a man and a woman at that age, they basically were constantly investigating everything..

Q: What did you think of the administrative and preparatory procedures prior to this care beginning? What did you have to undergo? Did anybody try to trip you up, or were your decisions welcomed with enthusiasm?

A: The preparatory procedure involves a medical test, a psychological test, tax returns – you prove you have enough of an income to support the children – and also visits by the social workers, who look over the place where the children will sleep. Another thing is that social workers investigate the building where you are living, so if you want to take the the children on vacation, you must contact social services in the place where you are going. So we had to contact Prague social services, or when we were going to the cottage in the Krkonoše, the social services there (who of course never go up into the mountains)… . It’s a very complex procedure, even for the social workers themselves, who moreover are also supposed to perform random investigations, and that makes it enormously difficult to come to some sort of agreement with them. For example, Bára was not home three times when they randomly dropped by. Once she was in Prague, one time she was in Liberec, and once she was in France, and the lady from social services lost it and shouted at us on the phone that she would not release the children into our care.

It’s all set up in a horribly impractical way, but it’s hard to say how to improve it. The preparatory procedure was otherwise a formality, to a certain degree, and focused on monitoring the hosts – but no one ever wanted to discuss with us what exactly we wanted to do with the children and so forth, we never experienced any support of that sort. It wasn’t until later that we found out that a civic association exists called “Children Belong in Homes” (Děti patří domů) where they offer help to people in such situations. A staffer who has experience both with foster and with host care follows the host during the entire process of the children and the hosts getting to know each other, comes to visit once in a while and talks with both the adults and the children. We don’t know how much money they have or how realistic it would be to expect them to be willing to travel, for example, from Brno to Krompach, but thank God that at least the idea that this is how it should be done exists here. Nothing of the sort is likely to occur to state social workers, and they wouldn’t have the time to do it even if it did.

Q: Did anyone try to talk you out of your decision? Your family evidently did not, but did any of your acquaintances or someone from Krompach – or staffers at the orphanage?

A: Not the people from the orphanage, they were glad the children got out for a while, that they were “assigned” to someone, but the fact is that we later had quite a few disputes with them because the children lived differently in our home than they did at the orphanage. We had to negotiate the limits with them. For example, with one “auntie” we managed to arrange that we would always discuss what had gone on in our home when we brought the children back, and there was a certain complementary cooperation there, but on the other hand many of the “aunties” viewed us as competition. They expected us to take the children into foster care, they though this all was just a trial period. The fact that we never became foster parents was perceived negatively. In part that frustration came directly from the children, who obviously were a bit manipulated in that sense. For example, D., who was five at the time, has the kind of nature that takes kindly to people terribly fast, and it was hard for her to see the relationship the way we did – that we are their friends, trying to give them something the orphanage can’t, but that we are not a Mom and Dad. Later we agreed with others that hosting is appropriate for children from the age of 12, who more or less have the parental question settled for themselves by then. Understandably, we know that a person who grows up in an orphanage probably never stops looking for parental figures, but it can be better explained to older children from the start what kind of relationship the hosting is.

Q: Were you able to hold to that strictly?

A: Not at all. We didn’t let them call us “Mom” or “Dad”, but the relationship was more or less parental. We all went on trips together, so it was like a relationship between older and younger siblings. However, we believe that is part of hosting and that what is positive about it is precisely that the children experience some sort of position within the framework of a family, even if only for a moment.

Q: Nevertheless, the children were hosted by you until they became adults, if I understand correctly …

A: Yes. The boy, T., moved to London, involuntarily ending his trade school studies. His mother took him there before he could re-sit the exams in September. As far as the girls are concerned, one visited us until she turned 17 and the other last visited us when she was 16. They are now having “their own time”, but we don’t believe the relationships have broken down forever. At this moment, simply put, they don’t have anything to say to us. T. wrote us about a year ago on Facebook that he was remembering us a great deal, that we were important in his life, that we gave him love – it was a very nice message, it made us blush. We had a little more time in which to raise the girls, and we got a lot of grief from the orphanage because of it. For example, in the case of D. specifically, we wanted her to finish high school, but she didn’t. Puberty came and isn’t over yet. The communication with the orphanage and the effort to harmonize what we were doing with the staff there was one of the most complicated aspects of hosting for us. Bára didn’t mince words back then, she had a pretty clear idea of how things were supposed to work, and when she saw some incompetence on the part of the orphanage it upset her terribly. The children are a priori handicapped in many respects, and if people who were unprofessional tried to take advantage of that in order to lighten their own workloads or just because they were lazy, it was seriously enraging.

As we said, this type of childcare, “hosting”, is not codified in law here, and as a result one is at a disadvantage with respect to the orphanages. Then there is the need to seek compromises, which the children often bear the brunt of, and that is frustrating. Later we even wrote a project with the Summer House in support of hosting, we created a kind of network of hosting families. One of the main points of the project was the need to find someone who would mediate contact between the host families and the orphanages, to negotiate the purpose of the whole enterprise for both sides and to pay attention to the continual shaping of that aim.

Q: What, in your view, is the state’s greatest failure with respect to its overall strategy for addressing the institutional care of abandoned children?

A: In our view, the preventive work done in the field by social services departments is failing, and not just the work they do, but also the work of the NGOs involved in community plans. The NGOS do good work for the most part, but they cover a terribly small part of the need. For the entire town of Most there is only one NGO available that is supposed to do preventive work in the field, and it takes care of only eight families. Municipal social workers, naturally, are also supposed to work in the field, but given their options they absolutely cannot do quality work in that area. Ordinarily they even have 300 families per social worker, who therefore gets to see them in the field once a year, Lord willing – not to mention the fact that, for example, there are children here in Krompach who are actually from Prague, so even they have been assigned to Prague social services! By law, the social workers are obligated to visit “their” children in the orphanages. At the same time, they are involved in divorce cases, preventive work, work with so-called troubled children in the schools, an unbelievable package of things to handle administratively. That leads to the fact that children are over-enrolled into the orphanages, mostly after the situation in their homes escalates to an unsustainable level – since no one was looking out for these people prior to that. The family gets into bigger and bigger problems and no one has the time to research what sort of conditions actually predominate there, to say nothing of how to address them effectively. It would be terribly painstaking work – visiting the families, addressing their situations with employment, housing, paperwork, etc. One organization involved in this problem is People in Need (Člověk v tísni), which does a rather comprehensive job, but which also only has a few branches.

We see this as an area into which the maximum amount of financing should be invested, because it would eventually save a great deal of money. If it does come to pass that children are taken away from their families, then most of the families fall apart completely. This basically involves a total social intervention. Parents are usually able to manage somehow for their children, but when the children are taken away, the parents fall into a completely apathetic state. In the orphanages it usually depends completely on the power of the director – their powers both in the schools and in the orphanages are so enormous that they are able to create their own, completely different worlds.

Many orphanages, including “ours”, are located in very remote places where the children have no contact with the outside world – simply put, they are living in the forest here. That means they are not independent, they never go anywhere – at the most their caretakers them for walks, or a few of them ride into the village to attend primary school. Because there is a special needs school at the orphanage, there is an effort to keep the children there, but we believe many of them could be integrated into a classic primary school. They acquire yet another very serious handicap at the orphanage: No one emphasizes their education and independence or the integration of each child into some kind of social network. Until the age of 16 or 18 they live in the orphanage, and then they just leave. That’s when another problem comes up, another “hole” in the system. Even if, during the preceding phase, a child manages to be placed in a Halfway House,
there are terribly few of them. The closest ones are all the way in Dobříš or Nymburk. The children are removed from the social environment in which they grew up and are placed in a Halfway House in a place they do not know, with no one to turn to. They’re just thrown into the water. It would be logical if they could somehow reap the rewards of the social capital they have earned, even if only by growing up in a village. Because these children have no families, they have no other capital than what exists locally. Sending them to the other end of the country means they suddenly have none at all.

The remoteness of the orphanages is also closely connected to the insufficiently qualified labor employed by them. It’s hard in such places to find someone not only qualified, but motivated to try things a bit differently. Moreover, the situation of these orphanages keeps deteriorating. Materially this is by and large a question of communication with sponsors. At first glance it often seems these places are improving, but investments are being made into things that are total nonsense. The children have PlayStations in their rooms, but it doesn’t occur to anyone to light the hallways they have to walk down every day. This isn’t just about “our” orphanage – we learned that the orphanage in Frýdlant recently fired its competent director after he built some small houses on the campus of the orphanage as training apartments so the children could spend time living like adults for a little while before leaving. Obviously, these programs are often an important source of money for a given region, so the lobbying in this area is mind-boggling.

Q: You cared for several Romani children – did you talk with them about the culture of people of their ethnicity, about the views that a sizable portion of Czech society holds about Romani people, about the manipulation of the image of Romani people in the media and so forth? Do the caretakers at the orphanages address such topics with them?

A: We’ve had rather funny experiences – for example, during the first Christmas the children spent with us, D. started shouting “gója, gója!” during the children’s film about Dařbuján and Pandrhola. Then we noticed that in the film they were eating white pudding. One of the girls was only three when she made it to the orphanage, so she hadn’t ever reflected on her origins. When she started attending primary school, she came home from school once and was frightened because in the alley through which they walked to get to school there were said to be “shades” or ghosts lurking. It was interesting to see that when the children were small, they did not identify with Romani-ness, they said the word “gypsy” or “Rom“ was the same as a social outsider – just one more curse word they heard at school. They did not understand at all why such words would be related to them in particular. We talked about it with them of they came to us, but mostly with older children at the orphanage who needed to be introduced to the Romani world. Suddenly they started talking about spirits and learning Romani words, but they still distanced themselves from Romani identity. Later, when they hit puberty and started surfing social networks, we discovered they were making it a priority to seek out Romani fora on all kinds of servers like lide.cz, etc.

Q: What has this life experience given you? Has it essentially changed your view of the world, of morality, of the specifics of children’s minds, or of yourselves and your own limits?

A: Generally speaking, taking care of children is a fine experience, and that applies to working in the orphanages as well. It was particularly mutually enriching. Naturally, it’s not a nonstop parade, there are also more demanding moments, but we had a lot of fun together. Bára’s disputes with the orphanage often drove her to tears and our view did change, in particular because we gradually got deeper and deeper into the issue. One gradually becomes aware that these children are handicapped from the beginning because they are living without any parents and that our social system is set up in a terribly unfair way. The system is de facto creating yet another generation – or rather, is not preventing the creation of yet another generation of children growing up in state care. It’s a kind of self-perpetuating system which, moreover, is terribly ineffective. If these children are to ever turn out well, somebody else must always come along to take care of them. The orphanage keeps them from starving to death or from being abused, but does not have the chance to do much more than that for them. Understandably, children also have nice experiences at the orphanages, they aren’t being tortured there, but when one follows their entry into real life, one can see how much they still lack.