Wilson Johwa
17 November 2009
Johannesburg — THE alleged reluctance of the Central Methodist Church to facilitate the relocation of refugee children living in the institution has set the church against the Gauteng legislature.
On Friday, head of the inner-city church Bishop Paul Verryn walked out of a meeting meant to establish a task team to spearhead the removal of about 120 children from squalid conditions at the institution. This enraged the legislature's multiparty health and social development committee, whose chairwoman , Molebatsi Bopape, threatened to subpoena Verryn.
The committee set up the meeting, following a visit to the church last month. "The whole country is waiting for resolution of this issue that has been compounded by one person; it's simply unacceptable," Bopape says .
Verryn blames his early departure from the meeting on its late start, a longstanding engagement and inadequate notice. But Bopape says the meeting could not start without the Hansard stenographers being ready. "It's one of his tendencies to be disrespectful; he doesn't even care what the government is trying to do," she says .
Verryn's alleged unwillingness to endorse relocations has enraged childcare groups, despite the cleric being seen by many as a hero who opened the church to hundreds of desperate foreigners, particularly from Zimbabwe.
Ironically, the wrangle between Verryn and the authorities has helped focus attention on the plight of Zimbabwean refugees at a time of what appears to be growing fatigue within SA .
"The Bishop should be assisting us because we are moving the children to appropriate places; the church is not a legal shelter and the children should not be there," says Luke Lamprecht , chairman of the Johannesburg Child Advocacy Forum, set up early this year by a group of child protection and care agencies.
They say the church is a high- risk environment for infectious diseases, especially TB and measles. However, Lamprecht acknowledges that many in the church do not want to move as they feel Verryn is the only one who can protect them against police action and xenophobia.
Kim Alexander, a reverend at the church, says the concern is about whether the caregivers will be able to look after the children for the long term .
Last week Verryn dismissed claims that the church had turned away help, saying girls sent to a women's shelter came back , threatening to run away if sent away again. He said an organisation that looks after people living with HIV could not make good on its offer of accommodation. "We made the offer (to residents), nobody came forward," he said.
Yet the Central Methodist Church has been blamed for failing to protect some of its younger residents from abuse, allegedly by teachers at a school within the church. Rampant criminality, along with the general nuisance ascribed to the daily activities of the homeless, have hardened attitudes against the church.
"It is a noble idea that has gone wrong," says Bopape.
Verryn says several strategies are in place to deal with sexual abuse. These include the training of more than 20 childcare workers to closely monitor the children.
While fragmented donor and governmental initiatives, along with the continuing crisis in Zimbabwe, have failed to stem new arrivals at the church, a multidepartmental national task team has come up with a model that it hopes will deal with migration and homelessness in the inner city.
Led by the Department of Co- operative Government and Traditional Affairs, the model is for the homeless to get temporary shelter for up to six months until they can stand on their own feet, says task team spokesman Russell McGregor. "If it works, it would really point to an exciting way of dealing with the issue of homelessness."
The first such building was the old Moth Hall in Noord Street, renovated by the city to house about 700 people. But McGregor says the relocations have stalled due to a lack of money for a service provider. "This is not just a shelter for foreign migrants," he says .
Last week the Methodist church and Lawyers for Human Rights made a court application to prevent the arrests of poor and homeless people for "loitering".
The action is also meant to challenge the constitutionality of the city's "loitering" by-laws.
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