Teaching teens tooth brushing, toilet cleaning a ‘real privilege’
BY KIRRALEE NICOLLE
Today is World Social Work Day, and this year’s theme is ‘Strengthening Intergenerational Solidarity for Enduring Wellbeing’. This focus highlights the crucial need to cultivate care and respect across generations in order to build resilient communities, sustain the environment and share wisdom for a better future.
The Salvation Army’s work with youth and young adults experiencing housing insecurity in the Mornington Peninsula, Victoria, offers a hopeful vision of what such interdependence across different generations could mean.
Peninsula Youth Services’ Living and Life Skills trainer Hayley Fualau spends her weekdays with young people who, due to the circumstances of their childhoods, have missed out on key life skills. As part of this work, Hayley teaches such young people how to prepare simple, nutritious meals. Sometimes, she encounters barriers grounded in heartbreaking realities.
“I had a conversation with a young person last night,” Hayley says. “She was opening up a little bit more and I was trying to understand her food preferences. She’s like, ‘I don’t do lamb, I don’t do pork, I don’t do fish’. She said the reason why is because [she] grew up poor. [She] used to faint walking to school because [her] mum and dad [bought] drugs over food.”
Hayley gradually learned that apart from simple foods like chicken nuggets, the young woman hadn’t tried many meats and found the textures and tastes too unfamiliar. In instances like this, Hayley uses compromise and a little bit of mystery to help the young people experience new foods.
“So [with] the cooking, I'll get them to choose something [one week], and I'll also then suggest something a week after so they try something different as well,” Hayley says. “A lot of the times you try, you're not sneaky [about it], but you might not say what's in it. And then they're like, ‘Oh my God, that's so yum!’”
Rice paper rolls and homemade pizzas may not seem extraordinary to some, but it’s through these simple dishes that Hayley does her work of coming alongside young people who have missed out on mentoring from parents or other caregivers. Other skills Hayley has taught have included toilet cleaning, filling out forms, washing clothes and even brushing teeth correctly. Much of this work happens at T21, the Transition to Independence Unit transitional support program staffed by The Salvation Army, and the rest happens in various community-based settings, including the Peninsula Youth Services hub in Frankston.
But it isn’t always successful. Hayley says she often has to pick up unwanted food from the floor, or help those who feel too embarrassed to admit in front of others that they don’t know how to clean their units and later find themselves in too deep.
In the transitional accommodation centre, young people at risk of homelessness will generally stay for 12 months, during which they will gain these skills and obtain longer-term housing before moving out and beginning an independent life.
In talking to Hayley, it’s clear that she approaches her work with abundant compassion, empathy and love for the individual.
“They don’t know what they don’t know,” she says.
“[My] hope is just to see them happy and to [help them to] understand that their circumstances or where they've come from doesn't define them and that they are worthy of a good life, and that they deserve a good life. I am someone who will just tell them that and motivate them and do whatever I can to get them to believe in themselves again.
“You can’t help but feel emotionally affected by their success.”
“When it’s their birthday, we’ll take them out for a meal. A lot of them have never been made to feel special on their birthday. There’s some young people who will just choose the most expensive thing because they’re out and it’s free, then there’s others that are like, ‘I’ll just get a side’.”
Hayley says she will also notice how fast they eat, whether they know how to speak to a waiter or use cutlery. She said these cues tell a lot about the level of poverty or neglect in which they might have been raised.
Hayley says despite the challenges of her work, she loves the continuity it affords when working in the transitional support program, and the moments that make it worthwhile are “really beautiful”.
“Working out of T21 in living and life skills, you get to watch them grow over a period of 12 months,” Hayley says. “[When] someone who moves in who has been homeless secures accommodation, they land and they feel safe. [Then] most people will fall. And then you get to help build them up.
“Success isn’t always linear. They might go backwards, but it is really beautiful when they leave, and they’ve secured themselves an interest-free loan, bought themselves a car and got their driver’s license and they drive out of the driveway.
“You can’t help but feel emotionally affected by their success.”
Hayley says that occasionally she sees the young people she’s worked with afterwards and is always amazed to see them still thriving.
“They’ll tell you, ‘I went overseas. I upgraded my car, and I’ve got a [partner] now, and I've got a different job’,” she says.
“With the one-on-one group stuff in schools or in the community, you’re kind of only getting these little snippets, and you don't get to really see the difference that you make, and you often see people at their worst and or when they’re in crisis, and you don’t get to see them grow. I really love that natural progression over time because a lot of workers don’t get to have that time with someone.”
Towards the end of the interview, Hayley says it simply, a smile spreading across her face.
“I love my job. It’s a real privilege, and I don’t take [it] for granted.”
