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Welcome to episode 251 of Behind the Shield podcast.
As always, my name's James Gearing,
and this week I am so excited to bring to you Tom Hewitt.
Now, Tom is a fellow Brit who moved to South Africa,
and when he was there realized they had a real problem
with homelessness, specifically with children.
So as an avid surfer, he realized that there were ways
they could apply sports, including surfing,
to these kids to give them a positive outlet
and also a means to then provide
counseling and therapy as well.
So an extremely powerful interview.
The links to both the charities that we talk about,
Surfers Not Street Children and his recent one,
Girls Surf 2, will be on the show notes for this episode.
So if you go to jamesgearing.com,
J-A-M-E-S-G-E-E-R-I-N-G.com, click on podcast,
find this episode and all the links
will be there on the show notes.
So before we go to the interview,
please take a moment to go to your podcast app,
subscribe to the show, leave feedback,
and then leave a rating.
So the more five-star ratings we get,
the more visible we are to people that are looking
for a podcast just like this.
And then on top of that,
share these incredible men and women's stories.
So whether it's word of mouth, email, social media,
whatever means you can think of,
they have given an hour, two hours of their time.
Please use your outlets to share these stories
because I know there are men and women all over the planet
that need to hear some of these great people.
So with that being said,
I introduce to you Tom Hewitt.
Enjoy.
So Tom, I want to start by saying thank you so much
for coming on the Behind the Shield podcast.
Well, thanks for having me.
So geographically, where are we finding you
on planet earth today?
Today I'm in a little village in Devon in England, actually.
I'm in a place called Croied,
which is a village that's known for surfing,
believe it or not.
Absolutely.
I know actually my dad lives in Cornwall
and I'm from Bath originally,
so I'm familiar with that area.
All right, so I'd love to start at the beginning.
So where were you actually born
and what was your family unit like?
What did your parents do and how many siblings?
Yeah, I was born in the UK.
I'm British and I was born to parents
and have two brothers and one sister.
Beautiful.
What did your mom and dad do?
My father is a musician and they're both still alive.
And also a bit of a campaigner around social issues as well.
Awesome.
Okay, and then what about your mother?
She worked alongside my father,
but has done various other jobs as well.
Brilliant.
Okay, so then when you were young,
were you an athlete yourself?
Did you play football or any other sports?
When I was really young,
I didn't live by the coast until I was 11 or 12.
And I actually played soccer and cricket
and the average sports that you would play
or the usual sports you'd play in the UK.
And it was only later when I got into skateboarding
and surfing that everything changed.
Right, and whereabouts in England did you grow up?
I moved around, but I was in,
my high school years were in a place called Guilford in Surrey.
Okay, so yeah, geographically it doesn't sound
like the place you'd instantly be introduced
to skateboarding or surfing.
So how did you first find those?
Funny enough, on a trip to the US when I was about 12,
I started surfing and skateboarding.
I'd been skateboarding a little bit before that.
And there was a huge, in those days,
there was a big skate movement with guys like Tony Hawk
and the Bones Brigade, the Powell and Peralta
and all these huge skaters in the 80s.
And I was very much influenced when I went to the US
by this and kind of brought that whole vibe back
with me and although I lived in Surrey,
I was only actually 45 minutes from a beach.
The only downer was that the beach was flat all summer
and only had surf in the midst of an English winter.
So I became quite a, I started surfing right away
and would kind of hitch rides to the beach.
It was 45 minutes away.
And yeah, I did everything I could to get to the beach.
But yeah, it was a bit of a struggle to be a surfer,
that's for sure.
Right, well, speaking of that,
I know Kelly State surfed here where I am,
in Cocoa Beach in that area.
And I know that that area isn't known for incredible surf.
So is there something about surfing
in less than perfect conditions
that makes people better surfers?
I don't know.
I think being a good surfer,
there's a number of things that come together to make that.
And certainly I think if you have not grown up
next to an incredible beach,
you're hungry for what you see other people,
the waves other people are riding and places in the world.
I mean, I was a kid in the UK
who had just been so influenced
by the international surfing community
that if you'd walked into my bedroom in my teens,
it was all Hawaiian waves and international surfers.
Nobody in our area,
at that time there was very few people that surfed in the UK.
Nobody knew who these people were.
There was a little oasis.
You know, it is incredible that Kelly comes from Florida.
I mean, given how many good waves there are around the world
and how many surfers come from some of the best places
in the world for surfing.
Yeah, and he's amazing with his longevity.
It still absolutely blows me away
how he's able to stay at the top for so many years.
Yeah, Kelly's a good supporter of our work
and I find him inspiring.
I'm exactly six months older than him.
So, you know, when you see him still competing
at the level he's competing, it is just incredible.
He's a very focused guy, obviously very competitive,
but absolutely incredible and yeah, inspiring.
Brilliant.
Now you mentioned about going to America.
So what took you to America and then what,
as an English spoil, made you first go,
I'm gonna try surfing?
Well, it was funny actually.
I had a friend who was from the States
who came over and did a year in the school I was at
and we just became best buddies.
And I went to visit him and saved up money
and got a bit of help from my folks.
And when I was there, he was from nowhere near the beach,
by the way, but we actually went on a vacation
from where he was to the beach
and that's where I started surfing.
Beautiful.
So then once you got back and you were in Surrey,
did you just surf in Britain or did you start to then
yearn to be in Australia or America
and start traveling there to surf as well?
I didn't have access to surfing globally at that stage
because I was still young.
And I surfed, I was like this little grommet
that used to literally try and black rides
to the beach every weekend.
So I mean, by the time I was about 15,
it got to the stage where my parents were okay with me
leaving straight off to school on a Friday
and then being dropped back on a Monday morning.
So I'd stay at the beach on weekends and come back.
So man, I was hustling to get waves.
All right, well then from another perspective then,
what about career wise when you were at school,
what did you dream of being when you left school?
Well, one thing's for sure,
I had absolutely no idea that I would be doing anything
similar to the work that I'm doing now.
And I don't know, I was one of those kids
that didn't really know what they wanted to do.
I was always very obsessed by the things that I got into.
So when I was into skateboarding, I was so into it.
When I was into surfing, I was so into it.
But I didn't really have, in those days,
there wasn't fantastic, or at least where I was,
wasn't fantastic career advice.
So I was kind of cruising.
I didn't do particularly well at school, funnily enough.
I didn't get into university after school.
In fact, I went back and did university later,
actually in the US.
But yeah, so I kind of cruised through school.
And one of my reports was actually read out at my wedding.
And it said, if Tom had as much enthusiasm
for his schoolwork as he does for riding up walls
on his skateboard, he may have made a good student.
You gotta love the positivity
in some of the British schools.
I was, one of the most memorable things
I ever was told by a teacher was,
you'll never amount to shit, which was really inspiring.
Thank you, Mr. Blaisdard, I appreciate it.
All right, so then, obviously we're gonna talk
about the incredible work that you're doing in Africa.
So alongside all of that,
you said your dad was into social issues.
Were you raised in that kind of compassion, kindness,
kind of arena in the family home?
Yeah, absolutely, so names like Nelson Mandela, for example,
were names that we grew up hearing about.
And my father had had some involvement
in the anti-apartheid movement and had been to South Africa
and had friends in South Africa,
had done stuff with Desmond Tutu, for example.
So I was quite familiar.
And in fact, the first time I ever went to South Africa
when I was 18 was with my father
on an anti-apartheid, it was a fact-finding trip.
So it was quite an interesting way
to see the country for the first time.
Brilliant, well, I wanna talk about that,
because I think you and I were very lucky
growing up in England.
The kids TV, I think is phenomenal.
I don't know if you have any comparison
with the US or Africa, but the Blue Peter,
John Craven's News Round, all these shows
that educated us about the world.
And there was always fundraisers.
I think we got a decent kind of story told
about some of the issues in South Africa specifically.
But for people listening,
can you kind of just paint us a picture of apartheid,
how it started and obviously ultimately how it ended?
Yeah, I mean, the apartheid system came into play in 1948.
And basically it built on history of colonialism,
which was a racist oppression essentially,
but for the resources of the land.
And that was very formalized in 1948
under a system called apartheid,
which actually means separate development.
Of course, it wasn't separate and equal development.
It was a very slanted development
where the white minority basically took the profits
of the country and the black majority
was subservient to the whites.
And so this system, unbelievably only fell in 1994
when South Africa had its first free and fair elections.
Okay, and then, so I know that there is Dutch influence
in the history and there's obviously British influence.
Which nation or nations were behind putting that in
in the first place?
Well, yeah, the colonial history in South Africa is British
and also a fusion of Dutch, French and German,
which is called Afrikaans.
And so, way back as I think it was 1652,
Jan van Riebeck came to Cape Town.
So I mean, there's hundreds of years
of colonialism in South Africa.
But yeah, I mean, those nations were the ones
that were in particularly in South Africa.
And of course it's different if you look at Mozambique
or which was Portuguese or Namibia, which was German
and so on and so forth.
All right, so then again, just to further paint the picture,
you have this segregation,
and I think we see that in many places.
I live in a country where there was segregation
with the Native Americans when our forefathers
first came here.
What were some of the negative things
that started to manifest with that regime put in place?
Well, yeah, I mean, as I said, it was very slanted
towards the white minority,
basically getting the profits from the country.
And so in order to ensure that the black majority
basically worked for this, it became very oppressive.
I mean, it was not only unfair,
but became oppressive and violent.
And as the struggle against apartheid
developed, the regime got tougher and tougher,
and there were some extremely violent years.
The regime was brutal, actually,
to black people in South Africa.
So it's a very painful history of oppression,
of racial oppression in South Africa.
Yeah, and ironically, I'll tell you a funny story.
I went as an early teen, and I've always been tiny.
And so I was probably 13, looked more like 11, I'm sure.
And I tried to get into Robocop, and I couldn't get in.
They were like, are you joking?
So the other one, the other screen was showing a movie
called Cry Freedom.
And for everyone listening, if you wanna get,
at least I hope this is right in your opinion as well,
a great view of that kind of feel of what life is like.
And then obviously at the end, when the credits roll,
the victims of that kind of regime,
then I think Cry Freedom, the Steve Biko story
is absolutely amazing.
Absolutely, a fantastic film.
And actually, Steve Biko is one of the most
inspirational figures in South Africa.
He was murdered in 1977.
But he was one of the, he laid the foundation
for changing, his philosophy was essentially
called black consciousness.
And the idea was that people, the black community
had basically internalized their inferiority
in sort of second class state.
And he said, well, you know, how can we lead a revolution
in this country to right this wrong if black people
are even believing that they're second class citizens?
So he was very important for the country,
and funnily enough, his wife, Nsiki Biko,
actually kind of took me into her wing in South Africa,
and his older brother, Kaya, gave me a bit
of a political education.
I was very fortunate when I was in my early 20s.
Beautiful, well, speaking of that, it's a good transition.
So the apartheid kind of movement
is what first took you to South Africa.
So tell me about how that ended,
how that ended up becoming into, you know,
realizing there were issues that needed to be solved
in some of the work that you started doing.
Yeah, when I came into South Africa,
I was just shocked at the apartheid,
because it was very evident,
and it was kind of a painful trip in many ways.
You know, it was so different from where I'd grown up.
And you kind of can't help in that situation,
but want to do something to support it.
And I actually wanted to stay on and just volunteer.
And I didn't have any, you know,
grand ideas about something major that I could do,
because, you know, I was 18 years old,
and didn't really have a whole lot to offer,
but I just wanted to be a bit of a, you know,
to plug away and volunteer and help if I could.
So I actually came back briefly to the UK,
did a couple of jobs to raise a bit of money,
and then went back out to actually try and find a way
that I could get involved and volunteer.
I connected with Nelson Mandela's African National Congress.
And around about the same time,
I went up into Mozambique during the Civil War
to spend some time there,
looking at the socio-political situation.
I was actually shocked to meet street children
for the first time.
And that was quite an interesting moment in my life,
because to be honest, I didn't even know street kids existed.
And I was so utterly shocked
that it kind of changed the course of my life.
So when you say street kids,
obviously we've all got our version of homelessness
in each of these different countries.
What are the conditions and the numbers
that you were seeing over there?
Well, it was during the Civil War in Mozambique,
and, you know, kids were flocking from all over the country
to escape the violence.
And so there were hundreds of kids just lining the streets
in just the small area that I was.
And I couldn't believe it.
I mean, there's literally kids living on the streets.
So we're not talking about kids
that hang around on street corners and go home in the night,
literally sleeping, if they're lucky,
with a blanket on the pavement.
And I couldn't believe it.
It was actually shocking to see this.
Yeah, and then, so that's an interesting kind of thing
I saw as apartheid ended,
is, you know, when you just shut down a regime
of whatever, you know, description,
there's also that knock on effect then.
So when apartheid ended,
you know, one would hope that everything was good again,
and, you know, everything was distributed fairly,
and the people that were already there
weren't, you know, victimized as well.
What were some of the things that you saw
once that happened, once apartheid actually ended?
Well, it was an interesting time,
because what I loved was the excitement
and the joy and the enthusiasm of the people.
I mean, being free, I mean, I was a peace monitor
at the first free and fair elections in South Africa.
And it is one of the best days of my life just to see that
and just to feel that excitement and joy.
So absolutely incredible to witness.
But, you know, what you've also got to look at
is the fact that it was an uphill job.
I mean, you'd have, you had a system
that was designed to benefit the minority.
So take, for example, the social welfare side of things.
I mean, this was a system designed
for a small amount of people
that suddenly bust at the seams.
So getting freedom was one thing,
you know, transitioning the country
into being able to be the best for all its citizens,
whole other story.
Right, because I got a family that actually fled.
They were whites, Africans,
and they were, you know, one of the farmers.
I know there was violence towards the farmers.
And again, when you look at both sides,
if that farmland originally belonged
to another group of people, you know,
it's a lose-lose no matter which way you look at it.
So I could see there was that rough transition.
So let's kind of get back to when you were out
in Mozambique now.
So you're seeing this homelessness,
especially amongst children.
When did you suddenly, or not suddenly,
when did you decide, okay, I want to change something
and start coming up with ideas on how to make a difference?
Well, when I went back from Mozambique into South Africa,
I was talking with the political activists
and those who were involved in the transition
of South Africa from apartheid to the new South Africa.
And I'd come back with this, you know,
this kind of worry about street children.
So I'd seen them in Mozambique,
and now I started noticing them all over South Africa.
So I kind of said to some of these folks, you know,
what's happening with the street children?
And obviously they're dealing with the transition
of the entire country.
So they were like, what?
Yeah, I don't know.
The whole country's changing, you know.
So it wasn't that people didn't care.
I mean, they did, but it was like, there's massive change.
And I'm talking about this tiny little one,
wasn't that tiny, but this group of kids.
So I said to some of these political folks,
I said, well, you know, maybe this is something
I could just chip away at and try and help out
with the street kids issue.
And they were like, okay, whatever, you know.
So I sort of started looking for places
where there were street kids.
And I befriended a group of kids on the streets
in a place, funny enough, called East London in South Africa.
And I couldn't believe it.
I mean, the lives that they were living were so rough.
It was so dangerous, and the violence was incredible.
And I got to know this group of kids very, very well.
And it was a real rollercoaster,
because some really tragic things happened to those kids.
And after sort of six months of befriending this group,
I started looking for programs
that were helping street kids.
They couldn't find much.
And then someone said to me,
oh, there's a program in one of the townships.
So one of the areas where the black community was living.
So in South Africa, you'd have a town
which meant basically a white community.
And then behind it, sort of across the tracks,
would be what would be called the township,
which was the black community
that was essentially serving the white community.
That was how the apartheid towns were structured.
And so someone said, well, in the township,
there's a street kids project.
And so totally naively,
because it was quite a violent environment at the time,
I walked on foot into this township.
Looking for the street kids project.
On the way, I could see a few people thought,
oh my gosh, this guy's nuts, what's he doing?
And a couple of people actually came and walked with me.
They said, hey, what are you doing?
And I said, looking for this place.
They said, oh, we'll walk with you.
I realized they were doing that to keep me safe.
And I actually found this little street kid project there
that was about to close down.
And that was the beginning of working with street kids
for me.
Beautiful.
So it was already a project that they was trying to grow.
They just didn't have the support to get it off the ground.
Yeah.
I mean, they barely had any staff.
I mean, it really was two tin shacks with about 30 kids.
Yeah, that's interesting because I've noticed
so many of the successful programs are grassroots
in the countries that need the help.
And it seems like some of the charity work that we do
and we throw money at are people from here
that go over there and do jobs that the people
from that country are perfectly capable of doing
rather than taking people from over here to lead projects
and empower the people of those areas
to do those things themselves.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think sometimes you tend to notice things.
I mean, there's probably loads of things in the UK
that would be very valid social issues to get involved in,
but you don't tend to notice them in your home area.
And when you go somewhere else
and you see things with fresh eyes,
I think sometimes that just gives you an acute awareness.
Doesn't necessarily give you the understanding
to be involved, but it does, you know,
signals, it makes you want to be involved.
Whereas I think sometimes at home,
you're kind of just so used to it.
Oh yeah, that's just the way it is, you know.
Yeah, yeah.
All right, well then before we actually go onto the project
and how you started to help,
I would love to hear about the addiction first,
the glue specifically, I know there's an epidemic there.
Absolutely, yes.
The drug of choice, I mean, and I say choice
because this is literally all that they can afford is glue.
And so the kids as young as five or six
will come to the streets to,
for an array of different push factor reasons.
And when they're in the streets, you know,
life's really, really tough and it's dangerous, it's violent.
And sometimes to survive, they have to engage in,
you know, sexual activity.
And to be honest, the life's so awful
that they end up just blasting themselves with glue
and because that's basically the cheapest thing
they can find.
Yeah, and it's something that people would look down on,
like, you know, glue sniffers, as we called them back
when we were little.
But then you look at alcohol,
you know, these socially acceptable drugs
that grownups use in developed countries,
and it's absolutely no different.
And it really just implies that there's that trauma,
that darkness in their mind that they're trying to suppress,
that can be suppressed or dealt with with negative things.
Or as we're gonna talk about in a minute,
you can replace it
with some incredibly positive things instead.
Well, that's it.
I mean, you know, your starting point for these kids
is that life's tough, life's really, really awful.
It's traumatic.
So, you know, it's not just traumatic being in the streets.
So something that's happened to them before
to push them into the streets is traumatic.
And so every day they're in the streets,
these layers of trauma are just building up.
And so what they'll do is they literally just use the drug
to just take this pain away.
And what we've tried to do,
what we've recognized is that, you know,
sometimes you have to find a way of breaking through this.
Because in a sense, I mean, if you look at it,
why would you not do that?
And, you know, if life was so painful and so awful,
why would you not, you know,
last yourself away in a sense?
But we found that the surfing particularly,
and I know we're gonna come onto this,
is in a strange way, almost like a healthy drug
to replace the negative drug.
It sounds funny to say,
but it really seems to work like that.
But essentially what it does,
it opens the door for the real work,
which is looking at this trauma.
Absolutely.
I had a gentleman on Ishmael Bay.
I don't know if you're familiar with him.
He wrote a book, I think it was The Long Way Gone.
And he was a boy soldier in Sierra Leone.
His parents were murdered.
He was forced into that.
He was also forced into drugs.
And you'd think that was it.
That person is done.
Well, he was ultimately rescued by a Red Cross worker
and is now working for the UN as an advocate
to get other boy soldiers or child soldiers, you know,
released from whatever tribal, you know, war is going on.
So it's amazing when these mentors come in,
you can take such broken children and actually save them.
Yeah, that's an incredible story.
I'll definitely try and find out more about him.
Yeah, I'll send you his information.
Okay, so there you are.
You're at this township hut.
So I'd love to hear the next year or two after that,
how that grew.
Yeah, well, you know, when I got to this kind of
street kids project, in a sense,
there was a woman there called Auntie Maggie.
She was a black woman from the township
who was basically couldn't read or write,
just had so much love for these kids.
And there were all these kids that had lost parents
and had been found literally on the rubbish dump
or on the streets.
I mean, it was right next to a huge rubbish dump refuse site
where kids adults were living in the rubbish.
I mean, it was extraordinary.
And she was just the most amazing person.
I actually couldn't believe that with next no resources,
she was there, she was giving these kids love, attention,
you know, in abject poverty.
So, you know, when you meet someone like that,
and you see the struggle and you realize that, wow,
even though I actually don't have much to offer,
being an 18 year old with no skills at that time,
I might be able to, you know, ask around
and even get a bit of money towards helping them
for the needs they have.
I realized actually I could make a difference here.
So, you know, under, you know, partnering with Auntie Maggie
and really sort of being led by her,
I got involved with working with these kids.
And, and funny enough, they had such a huge impact on me.
I'm still in contact with a lot of them today.
I mean, they're in their 20s and 30s now,
but they were the most incredible group of kids.
And yeah, I was with them for about six or seven years
in the early 90s.
All right, now was that originally
the Durban Street team?
No, that was actually before that.
Oh, okay.
The Durban Street team was 1998.
This was in 1992 through to about 97.
Okay, so what was that program?
How did you start helping the kids
with that program specifically?
My father was running a charity actually in the UK
that supported projects in different parts of the world.
Not this project, that station.
I called him and I said, hey, look, you know,
this is a really serious situation here.
And, you know, could you pitch it to the board
to potentially get involved?
It's not that they had huge amounts of funds,
but just could we use the UK organization as a way,
as a platform to try and raise some funds for this project?
Cause they're gonna close down if not,
and then you've got 30 kids on the streets.
And so we got a little support mechanism
from the UK towards this program.
And you couldn't really get funds in South Africa
at the time because there was so much need.
Remember the timing of this is two years before the 1994,
which was the end of apartheid and the new South Africa.
So, you know, every aspect of South Africa
needed finance, needed help.
So for something like this,
it was actually a little easier to look outside
of the country for financial support.
And also to gather a team of local South Africans
who could actually assist Auntie Maggie as well
and help her run the program.
Right, so this was at this point providing housing
and education?
Yeah, I mean, it was basically a,
I mean, you could call it an orphanage if you want,
but it was, yeah, it was a living center.
But again, you know, it literally was two big shacks.
And over time, over about six or seven years,
we built this program to be an incredible
children's village actually.
And Auntie Maggie is still alive.
And I go to visit her once a year,
because she's in a different part of South Africa.
And I go and spend time with her every July
on the way to a big surfing contest
I go to down in Jefferies Bay.
And she's still incredible.
She's getting old now,
but the lives that she has, you know,
that she's changed, you know,
she's the most incredible person.
She sounds like it.
She really does.
Now, in those six years,
what were some of the things that you observed
began healing some of these little boys and girls
that came into the orphanage?
I mean, in those days,
there was no social welfare system for these kids.
So there weren't social workers
that could deal with these kids.
The only social workers at the time came from,
for the white community.
And, you know, although there's some very nice social workers,
then they just didn't have any knowledge of what life
was like for black people in South Africa at the time.
So it was a really difficult time
to get children professional help.
And so what we tried to do in that sort of chaos and anarchy,
we tried to put into place a program
where the kids would get love and care and attention,
counseling, and kids would come in
from seriously abusive situations,
both physically and sexually.
And the place was really a place of healing for them.
But we were basically just trying to pull something together
without any infrastructural support,
which was really tricky.
Yeah, and I'm sure I've seen this, you know,
in many, many of the people I've had on
that have experienced trauma in a host of avenues.
And it seems like that tribal element,
that sense of being part of something,
and I'm sure it was the same,
of being part of the orphanage for the kids,
is so healing, and then the ability to then assist,
help, give back, is another huge healing element of that.
Absolutely, they were a big family.
And funny enough, I've got one of the kids from the program
who's in his 30s now, is one of my child and youth care workers,
in fact, our head lifeguard,
that surfers, not street children, as well.
Fantastic.
All right, well, then you mentioned about the street team.
So how did you transition from working with the orphanage
to the Durban Street team?
Yeah, the area of East London is quite a small,
it's a small town in South Africa.
And we'd actually done quite well in the mid-90s
of reducing the number of kids on the streets there.
And there was organizations that were up and running.
So I wanted to, I'd heard that Durban
was one of the worst affected areas
in terms of numbers of kids on the streets.
And the reason for that was because the climate
was so much better than everywhere else in the country.
So kids would come from Johannesburg and Cape Town
and the Eastern Cape, and they'd come up to Durban.
And Durban, you really can, I mean, take away the dangers,
but you really could live on the streets, it's warm,
you know, all year round.
And so there was just so many kids on the streets in Durban
that I really felt that that's where I should be working,
because that's the heart of the problem in South Africa.
Right.
Children, yeah.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.
I saw on one of the videos that you guys did on YouTube
that the number they had on that was about 6,000 kids
on the streets in Durban alone.
Yeah, that's a very old statistic.
So that's going back almost 20 years.
And actually, it's not entirely accurate.
It was, that was using a very, very broad description
of street children, but nonetheless,
there were hundreds and hundreds of kids on the streets,
which is a large number.
You know, it was alarming in those days.
And originally it was political violence
that was leading kids to the streets.
You know, obviously the backdrop of poverty,
one thing you have to remember is that most poor children
live at home, you know, it takes a lot for someone
to actually go to the streets.
It takes something to have happened, a push factor,
and you know, kids end up in the streets
because of that.
So at the time it was political violence.
And then of course, you think about the era
that we're talking about here, the next wave of kids
that came onto the streets was related
to the HIV AIDS crisis.
No, I didn't even think about that.
That hit sort of in the 90s, sort of kind of the beginning
of the new South Africa really.
And you know, for 15 years or so, that was the,
I mean, we were working in the epicenter of HIV AIDS.
So, you know, people were dying, kids were being left
hopeless and ended up on the streets.
And, you know, it was a horrific time actually.
You know, it was before, you know, in those days,
you didn't know much about HIV.
Today, of course, you can keep people alive generally.
But in those days not.
So there was a whole wave of kids coming to the streets.
Who were AIDS orphans and many contracting AIDS
in the streets because of the abusive lifestyle.
So in the late 90s and early 2000s,
we lost a lot of kids to HIV related diseases.
Right now, I remember hearing something,
and then please forgive me if I misquote in this person,
but whoever was the philosophy that AIDS could be cured
by certain unprotected sex.
Was that something that was actually a thing in South Africa
when you were observing this crisis?
But there was an underlying sort of belief
in probably a very, very slim sector of society.
But there was at one stage a belief
that you could cure HIV related illnesses with that.
That was not the main,
most people in South Africa didn't believe that.
But there were obviously a few horrific cases of rape.
And that stemmed from that.
Yeah.
So you have obviously this horrendous homelessness
from poverty, from the AIDS crisis.
How did that then factor into the creation
of the Durban Street Team?
Well, when I moved up to Durban,
I got together with local street children activists up there
and we set up something called the Durban Street Team.
And the idea was that we set up an outreach team
that would literally, we had one vehicle, about six of us,
that would literally drive around the streets all day,
identifying kids on the streets,
building a relationship of trust with them
and looking at what their needs were
and seeing if we could engage and get involved.
We had a little bit of budget.
We were an organization then.
And so we didn't have any facility,
but it was on the street help.
And we got to know, literally all of the kids
on the streets in Durban.
And it was about bringing healthcare to them.
It was about bringing counseling,
access to services and ultimately looking for ways
out of the streets for them.
Brilliant.
Now, I know that you mentioned in one of the videos as well
about the introduction of sports
as one of the healing mechanisms.
So I know surfing was one of them
we're talking about in a minute,
but overall sports, what did you start seeing
when these kids were brought
into some sort of social sporting setting?
Well, sports has always been a fantastic way
to engage with the kids.
Cause I always say to people,
you imagine walking around the streets
in the outreach team and saying to the kids,
hey, how are you doing?
Would you like some counseling?
The kids look at you like you're mad.
But if you, sports is not only engaging
is not only therapeutic in itself and good fun
and engaging, it opens the door to more professional work.
And so before we were doing surfing with the kids,
we had soccer programs.
We also use art and drama and non-sports
but other engaging programs.
But yeah, we found that with the soccer program,
we actually had a world cup for street children
that we hosted in 2010 just before the FIFA world cup,
which was really fun in Durban.
But yeah, the sports have always been an important part
of the work that we do.
Brilliant, did the English team make it to the finals
and then blow it in penalties?
So there was a moment in one of the films
that really struck me and we're gonna talk about surfing.
I keep saying that, but I can't remember
if it was Nintendo or not.
And I wanna talk about him in a moment as well.
But one of the boys came off the beach,
he'd just been surfing.
And then the narration was basically saying,
now they had that fulfillment.
They'd surf, they were mentally tired,
they were physically tired.
That was then the perfect time to then start a conversation
that ultimately is counseling.
And I thought that was a great way of looking at it
because you're right.
You go up to most firefighters, police officers,
members of the military and just be like,
hey, you wanna talk?
Yeah, leave me alone, weirdo.
But if you get that trust, that buy-in,
and I think that exercise is such a great way
of breaking down some of those walls.
What a beautiful place to start counseling
with a bunch of people who've just exerted themselves
and are now sitting on the beach,
listening to the waves roll as they start the conversation.
Absolutely, and our social working,
we always say that some of the best social working
we've ever done is literally with our social workers
sitting on the beach with kids in their wetsuits
who have just had a few rides and they've come in,
they're pausing for a second.
And that's connection time.
It's incredible.
And the world, the kids are absolutely loving at that moment.
So the guard is down and it just opens the door.
Yeah, I absolutely love that.
All right, so then from the street team,
how was Surfers Not Street Children born?
Well, the street team lasted for quite some time.
I mean, we slowly developed it into a home for street children
and it became quite a major project.
And at the time, about 30 staff,
and there were a lot of kids on the streets
and there was really big issues that kids were facing.
Like there was police roundups,
where they would round up the kids
and literally drive them out of the city and dump them,
because they didn't want kids on the streets
when there were international conferences in the area.
And so we were campaigning against this
and trying to change the way that society perceived
and treated street children.
But over time, we realized that actually,
the surfing was really becoming a central part
of the work that we do.
And the kids really just wanted to surf.
They were so into it.
So in about 2012, we divided the organization into two.
And Surfers Not Street Children was one part of it,
focusing on the fusion of surfing with mentorship and care.
And that really sort of developed
to be the main aspect of the work.
And it was incredible because people would say,
well, you know, how come,
why are you getting these kids surfing?
Isn't that just like, you know,
imposing what you like on the kids?
The irony was that was the opposite,
was the kids that were desperate to surf.
We offered them every possibility we could think of.
They wanted to surf and they had chosen to surf.
They thought that surfing was cool.
And obviously it wasn't sort of normal for them
in terms of the fact that they hadn't had access to surfing.
Because think back to apartheid South Africa,
the beaches were segregated.
So black people weren't allowed on the beaches
that white people were.
So you couldn't surf.
A family couldn't have grown up surfing in South Africa
because it was literally illegal to be on those beaches.
So the kids on the streets, you know,
found the sort of adrenaline side of surfing.
They just loved it.
They just wanted to surf.
They thought it was cool.
They wanted to work on their surfing.
It was great for us because we realized
that the more they got into, you know,
they got stoked about surfing,
the less they wanted to engage in behaviors
that were really hard for us to break through,
like drug taking.
So it was incredible to see how the therapeutic side
of surfing and the allure of surfing
and what we call stoke as surfers
was actually the greatest tool that we had.
Yeah, and you know, that makes perfect sense
about the beaches.
Because one of my close friends was a lifeguard,
I believe it was in the Jefferies Bay area
somewhere around there.
And, you know, he was always making rescues
because, you know, a lot of the black South Africans
would get in trouble.
But then historically when you look,
they weren't allowed anywhere near the water for so long,
then that is probably the underlying cause
of why that issue was happening.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, it just literally didn't have access, you know.
And also, you know, the South African coastline,
I mean, this is why it's so good for surfing.
It's really rough.
It's really dangerous.
And if you can't swim.
So the black community in South Africa
had grown up with very wise teachings within the culture
as to why you don't go in the water.
Because the rip currents are so incredibly strong.
But of course, if you have access to the knowledge
of understanding the ocean,
then those things can be overcome.
And that's what we've seen, you know,
since the dawn of the new South Africa,
there's a lot of black people in South Africa
who absolutely love the ocean
and for whom the ocean has become part
of their everyday life.
Amazing.
Now, two things kind of struck me when we were talking.
One of the questions that I'll ask you at the end is,
you know, what do you do to decompress?
And so many people say, I go into nature.
And actually the ocean is one of my favorite places
to go as well.
But then the, so you've got that element already in there.
The other thing is, once you've paid for a board,
that's it, they're good to go.
If we do jujitsu or, you know, polo or, you know,
all these other sports, there's a cost
and you also kind of need another person.
It's hard to do jujitsu on your own.
But with the board and nature, I mean,
that is so freeing to that child.
Because once they have that one piece of equipment,
they can, as long as the board doesn't break,
they can literally surf the rest of their life.
Absolutely.
I mean, and then part of the program that we run is,
you know, the kids can come to the program
literally as they are.
We'll provide wetsuits, boards,
we've got lifeguards and the coaches
and obviously we'll come to that.
But yeah, if you can give the kids access,
I mean, they're gonna get as stoked as any other kid.
Yeah. All right.
Well then I think a great person to kind of tell the story
of what, you know, the impact that you guys are having
is Nintendo and Musibi.
So I'd love to hear about,
firstly, I think it's very powerful,
how he ended up homeless
and then his journey through your program.
Nintendo is an incredible guy.
He now works in a surf shop
and he's also a sponsored free member.
So he's an incredibly good surfer, very, very high level.
And he's basically sponsored to basically sort of produce
edits and photos and things like that.
So he's really doing great,
but his life was really difficult.
And if you go back to when he was about nine years old,
he lost his parents to HIV related disease
and he ended up on the streets
and he would bounce between street families
and, you know, he'd be one day living with one family,
the next with another.
And I met him back in the days of Durban Street Team
and we actually had a live in shelter by then.
And it took quite a while.
He was so street wise that it took a while for him to see
that it would be better to come into the program
because obviously when kids are, you know, on the streets,
you know, and when drugs are involved,
when they're sniffing glue,
and it's sometimes quite hard to take them away from that,
you know, and say, hey, you know, it'll be better here.
And bear in mind that they've had a lot of bad experiences
with adults as well.
So for a couple of years,
he was kind of one foot in the program, one foot out.
And one day he got, he was so high on glue
that he got hit by a car and he got hit so hard,
but unbelievably he wasn't very injured.
He could have been killed.
I mean, it was just crazy.
And after that, he started coming into the program
a bit more.
And when we started surfing, he really got into it.
And from a very early, from very early in that program,
we could see that he had absolute natural talent.
And the more he got into surfing,
the more he realized that if you want to become a good surfer,
you couldn't be sniffing glue
because it just doesn't do anything
to enhance your surfing effect.
It just makes you less capable.
So he wanted to be a great surfer
and started getting into the surf scene,
started being recognized for being a good surfer.
And one of the things that the program's been really
successful over at Nintendo was very much part
of the first wave of this was that it changed the identity
of the kids.
So the kids as street kids were told by people's actions
and words that you are the rubbish of society.
You're the architects of your own misery.
You are there because that's your destiny.
In a sense, that was when people,
every time someone stepped over them,
or spattered them, or swore at them,
or sexually abused them,
kind of the general message that was being given
is that you are lesser people.
But when they started surfing
and became a group of surfers,
suddenly they realized that they felt this new sensation,
which was dignity.
People looked up to them.
People were impressed by them.
Because there weren't any really many black surfers
in those days.
So the African community would literally see these kids
about to jump off the pier and they'd come running over.
They were like, couldn't believe that black people
were doing this.
And they were seen as like, they almost like gladiators,
riding these waves in the community.
This was so new for the community.
And it really changed the identity that these kids had.
And I really got it on one day,
this is actually how we got our name,
when we'd just been given a wetsuit donation
by a wetsuit company.
And it was like 35 degrees.
So like, I don't know what that is in Fahrenheit, hot,
really hot, Durban day.
And, you know, humid, super humid, like Florida humid.
And the surfers cooking,
and I had my board shorts on and my board,
and I was like, hey, let's go.
We're going surfing.
And you know, the kids all came down,
and they were all wearing their wetsuits.
And I was like, whoa, guys, you're crazy.
It's like, you know, 35 degrees centigrade.
And they're like saying, I said,
why are you wearing your wetsuits?
And they said, no, we love our wetsuits.
Yeah, but why aren't you overheating?
And I think, ah, but there's a time, you know,
when we wear these wetsuits,
we're surfers, not street children.
And it was like, ah, man, it's about identity.
They see themselves as sort of full,
they're re-envisioned as full human beings in a sense.
And such a small thing in my mind
had given them such an identity change.
Amazing.
Now we talk about, you know, trauma a lot,
and, you know, PTSD and those things,
but the important thing to focus on is obviously
the growth once you get through that trauma.
Did you witness, obviously, you know, the healing,
but did you witness them becoming more resilient,
stronger young men when they came out the other end?
Sorry, after they'd been in the program, yeah?
Yeah, yeah, when they'd been through this process,
obviously, initially, they were still very,
very broken mentally.
When that healing was kind of done
and they were deep, deep in the program now,
did you notice a resilience mentally as well?
Absolutely.
Look, we're under no illusions that the healing processes
are ongoing throughout many of the kids' lives.
That's the reality.
If you miss out on some of the key parts of childhood,
the foundational development,
the reality is that that has consequences.
If you go through extremely traumatic sexual
or physical abuse as a child,
there are long-term consequences.
But yes, as they went through the program,
as they got counseling, as they got,
as they became happy, and as they had a sense of family
and community within the group of surfers
and the staff in the program, they certainly,
I mean, people have often looked at these kids and said,
wow, they've been through so much,
and yet they're so happy, they're so stoked,
always got a smile on their face.
The reality is they do still carry the pain.
And many of them, obviously, we've been doing this
for a long time and we've seen kids go through
right into their 20s and 30s.
And many of them do carry on seeing people.
We're trying to, the message we have with the kids
is not that, you know, come surfing
and everything will be all right,
but the journey of healing is okay.
It'll be ongoing, perhaps, but it's great
and worth being on.
But surfing in and of itself
is actually extremely therapeutic.
Being out in nature, there's something about surfing
that just is so good for the soul.
And it's been, surfing isn't the model, it is,
but surfing fits the model extremely well.
And some of the graduates that come through,
do they end up becoming mentors in the program?
Absolutely, we've got many of the kids
who've been through the program who've stayed involved.
Someone like Nintendo, you know, going back to his story,
he came through the program
and became this incredible surfer who went on
and surfed for South Africa twice in a row.
He went to the world championships once in Ecuador
and once in California.
This ex street kid who'd been a glue-sniffing street kid
at nine years old was now representing the country,
which was absolutely incredible
and changing people's perceptions.
I mean, people often looked at the kids on the streets
as if they were, you know, the no-hopers
and the naughty kids that didn't want discipline.
And suddenly, one of these kids that had been a write-off
was now representing the actual country.
It was absolutely incredible.
So, you know, Nintendo's become a role model to other kids.
Kids look up to him and they think,
wow, he was able to do it, so perhaps I can.
And he gives back as well.
He comes in, he spends time with the kids,
you know, he gets involved.
He works in this surf shop called the Surf HQ in Durban.
It's one of the main surf shops, really cool people.
And, you know, they have a donation area
where people can bring old boards and wetsuits in,
and then Tando then brings them down
to the kids in our program.
So, you know, he plays his part as well.
He's been really inspirational.
And many other of the kids, both girls and boys,
who've been through the program,
have, are really sowing into the lives of the kids
that are present-day, you know, beneficiaries of the program.
Yeah, and that's a really important point.
And it's something that I've talked about many times
on this podcast too, is I always use the same analogy.
So people have listened to this podcast a lot, I apologize,
but take a kindergarten, you know,
take a bunch of kids that are two or three years old,
from wherever they are, let's say two years old,
and they're running around laughing with each other.
Let's say there's a bull thrown in,
they're all chasing the bull and throwing it.
That's who human beings are.
And then what happens to us those formative years,
then sets us on a path, you know,
so the kids are living on the street.
From some people, there's that eye rolling,
they did it to themselves, it's their own fault mentality,
instead of what happened to that person to get them there.
And what happened, you know, with Nintendo,
is you took that same toddler,
you took them out of that horrible journey they were on,
you put them back on a good path, and look what happens.
He became a great young man.
And even we see this with older people on the streets here.
You know, was that a veteran that came back and fell apart?
Was it someone who was abused as a child
and just couldn't cope with adult life, you know?
And I think that for those of us that are blessed,
and I consider myself one of these,
it really didn't have much trauma in my life.
It's up to us to look around
and reach out to the people that are hurting,
instead of stepping over them,
and it's metaphorically and physically
what happens all over the world,
to reach our hand out and say, you know,
how can we get you out of this dark place
and onto the tracks?
Absolutely, yeah.
It's an incredible responsibility.
And one of the interesting things that I found
with working with the kids on the streets,
you'd think that the streets being sort of such a,
a horrible place in a sense,
because there's nothing nice about living on the streets.
But one of the things that I've been amazed at
is finding that the kids on the streets
often have a deep compassion for each other.
They look after each other.
So with everyone still going through all the trauma
that they are and the abuse on the streets,
they're still, the kids are still looking out for each other.
And I've seen incredible acts of kindness
from one street child to another,
which I've walked away just thinking,
wow, I just don't know why, but I just did not expect that.
Yeah, and there's a horseman.
I'm in the process of interviewing.
We've done part of the interview
and we've got to finish it off.
His name's Buck Braneman,
and he's basically the horse whisperer movie.
It was about him pretty much.
Oh, yeah.
And he, in what we've done so far,
he had a very, very abusive childhood physically.
His father was a drunk and would beat him.
But when, to the point where we got in our conversation,
he's like, I never allowed the kindness that was in me
to be compromised despite the cruelty that was around me.
And that's an interesting thing
because some people obviously do get turned
and find themselves becoming abusers themselves,
but there's so much kindness within most of these people.
If you show kindness to them,
you can pull it back out again.
Absolutely, absolutely.
We've seen that with the kids on the street.
And I see that on a daily basis
with some of the kids who've come through the program
who work for the organization now.
For example, our water safety team,
which is three qualified lifeguards,
all three of them are former street children.
And they do their job really well,
but they make sure there's safety first.
But they also have a huge compassion,
and the kids look up to them
because they've been in the position
that many of the kids we're working with are now.
Fantastic.
All right, well then,
this is a great segue to Girls Surf 2.
So how did that become another initiative in itself?
We've always worked with girls,
but a while back we realized that there was a portion,
there was a group of girls
that we really weren't getting access to
and not able to help.
So we're working with girls on the street,
but there's also girls that are living in these hostels,
these so-called shelters that are gang-run.
They're in a sort of block of flats,
the whole thing is sort of just a big hostel,
and it's terrible, terrible places,
everything you can imagine going on in these areas.
And we just couldn't get into these places,
and so we couldn't work with the girls in there and the kids.
We had to go in on one occasion,
myself and a female social worker,
we actually went in with bodyguards,
so ex-street kids that come through our program
accompanied us, because this is so dangerous.
But something very interesting happened
when we were inside the one hostel,
the gang, which is a prison gang called the 26s,
controlled this hostel.
And when we went in there,
the gang leaders came out to see what we were doing,
and they came up to me, and the minute I saw them,
I recognized every single one of them,
they were kids that we'd worked with on the streets.
So sadly, they were the kids that we hadn't been able
to get off the streets.
But amazingly, they remembered all the stuff
we'd done to try and help them out.
And they came over and just threw their arms around us,
and it was actually quite a beautiful reunion.
And they said, what are you doing here?
And they said, well, here's the issue.
We're worried about the girls inside here,
and we wanna try and provide some support,
get them out of here.
And they were saying, yeah, fantastic.
We don't want them to go through what we went through.
And so, amazingly, these gang leaders
showed just incredible compassion.
They said, yeah, man, these girls are struggling in here.
If you can help them, please do.
And so they gave us access, and they said, oh, by the way,
we control all of the shelters around here,
so you can go into whichever ones you want.
So we decided to set up this program
specifically catering to the need of the girl child.
So it's for girls living on the streets
and for girls living in these awful hostels
where we're basically empowering them
to transform their lives, to get out of the hostels.
So using the model of surfing, fused with mentorship
and psychosocial care to transform the lives
of these girls, some as young as six, seven years old.
That is amazing, because anyone else who walked up,
it would have probably ended in a threat or even violence.
But the fact that you've shown kindness, compassion,
still sat with them, even though they were a prison gang,
to the point where now you were able to access
all these young women that would have been completely
shut off to you before.
It really was one of the more extraordinary moments
that I can remember in this world.
Amazing.
All right, well then, while we're on the subject of all this,
so I'd love to talk about how people listening
can help in some way.
Yeah, we've got a campaign at the moment actually.
It's just about to go, it's live,
it's just about to go public.
It's called Girl Surf 2 Campaign.
And basically we started Girl Surf 2
at the beginning of this year.
And it's been absolutely incredible.
We've got 45 girls at the moment who are in the program.
We've got a, we run from our drop-in center on the beach,
and we've also got a girls rescue center.
And it cost us about $30,000 a year to run this program.
And what we're trying to do with the Girl Surf 2 Campaign,
which is to go fund the campaign,
is that we want to guarantee this program
for the next two years.
It's very difficult to try and get the funding
for a program you haven't started.
So we knew that we had to take a step of faith
and actually start the program and then show people,
hey, this is what we're doing.
Who wants to buy in?
And so we've just got to that stage now
where we've run this thing for nine months.
We've learned about it.
We know we can do it.
We know it's changing the girls lives.
It's been an amazing learning curve for us as well,
but we know we can deliver on this.
So what we want to do now is with this GoFundMe campaign
is to raise the money for this program
so that we can guarantee this for the next two years.
Brilliant.
Well, I will put the links to that
on the show notes for this episode.
So jamesgearing.com and then Tom Hewitt episode.
You can click on that
and then you'll be able to get right to the links to help.
And then I'll also, of course,
share the links on social media as well.
That was wonderful.
Thanks ever so much.
Brilliant.
All right, well, I want to transition
to some closing questions.
The first one that I love to ask,
is there a book that you love to recommend?
It can be about what we've discussed or someone complete,
excuse me, some subject completely different.
Yeah, I think if going back
to when I started the organization,
and by the way, let me just say that
this isn't by no means a one person organization.
I have an incredible team of colleagues that I work with,
all local South Africans.
They're absolutely fantastic crew.
But when I started the organization,
there was a book by a Brazilian educationalist
called Paulo Freire, called Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
And that was a really seminal book for us
because it really helped me understand the idea of,
often oppressed people,
if you're told every single day of your life
that you're not as good as the next person,
you tend to internalize this.
It's just human nature.
You do, you somehow realize,
you somehow feel that maybe this is your lot in life.
This is who you're supposed to be,
even to the extent of maybe it's your own fault.
And Paulo Freire was saying,
he was talking about a process of conscientization
whereby are given the tools with which to see themselves,
to revision themselves as full human beings.
So to overcome this,
what's being placed upon them as being inferior
and second class and seeing themselves
in there as a full human.
And so Pedagogy of the Oppressed,
it's a translated book from,
I'm gonna say Portuguese,
cause I think he's Brazilian,
was really amazing.
And then Steve Biko, also influenced by Paulo Freire,
his book, I Write What I Like, was very interesting
because it was a similar thing
in the context of apartheid South Africa.
Brilliant.
I haven't heard of either of those two,
so I'm gonna add those to the list.
Thank you so much.
Next question, is there a movie
that you love or film as we say in England?
Funny enough,
The Cry Freedom was one of my favorite films,
the one that you mentioned.
I mean, man, I watched that so many times.
And right at the time when I went out to South Africa,
that was a really important movie in my life.
It inspired me.
And actually, the family of Donald Woods,
who was the journalist,
she came around to visit that project
that I spoke about earlier,
my first project in the Eastern Cape
and East London in South Africa.
What was powerful to me is,
I was like I said, 13 when I watched Cry Freedom.
And then before that,
I remember as a young, young boy being fascinated
with the Stanley and Livingston story
and how that was ultimately the beginning
of abolition of slavery by the British.
And now, as a 45 year old man,
I look back at when I was little
and racism just made no sense whatsoever.
Slavery certainly made no sense to me.
And it just, it blows me away that whether it's slavery,
whether it's genocide,
how some people can be conditioned to think that's right
when I believe in our depths of our soul,
that we know that all these negative practices
are completely, inherently wrong.
It was very interesting because we,
historically obviously there haven't been many black surfers.
Now with surfers on street children,
there really are, it's open.
And there are a lot of black surfers.
But if you look at the youngsters in our program,
the young black kids,
and you look at the young white surfers in the area,
they all get on well.
I mean, they all, they don't really notice color.
They hang out, they're just kids together.
And it's so interesting in the new South Africa,
just looking at the way the kids hang out together at school,
it's so different to how it was under apartheid
with their parents or the parents or grandparents.
That is fantastic.
I mean, we talk about this in the fire service.
There's certain individuals that are sexist,
that are racist, that are homophobic, whatever it is.
And when you put a firefighter next to another one,
when they're wearing their gear, you can't tell.
It's irrelevant.
You put a surfer in a wet suit
and put them out on a wave.
You can't tell the black one from the white one
when they're wet and they're on the board.
And it is, it's crazy the way we start to pigeonhole people
to really divide them instead of seeing the commonalities
that we all have.
Absolutely.
Right, well, you mentioned Cry Freedom.
What about documentaries?
Are there any of those that you've seen that you love?
I can't think of one.
Yes, I'm sure many, many, many.
I particularly, remember earlier I spoke about the project
that was right next to a rubbish dump.
I do take quite an interest in,
often I see documentaries about communities
living on rubbish dumps and that really resonates to me
because that was a really important moment,
witnessing people living in such depths of poverty.
It was so tragic that that stayed with me
and I do take an interest in documentaries,
documenting communities where they are having to etch out
an existence from refuse.
Yeah, and that shouldn't be a thing on planet Earth period
as affluent as most of us are.
Absolutely, yeah.
All right, well then the next question I always like to ask,
is there a person that you'd recommend to come
on this podcast as a guest to speak to the first responders
in Military of the World and everyone else that listens?
Good question.
I'll have to give it some thought because again,
just off the top of my head, that's quite a hard one
to come up with but I've had interactions
with some incredible people over the years
so I could probably think of more than a few actually, yeah.
Beautiful, all right, yeah, we'll do that after this then.
All right, so then the last question before we just
reiterate where everyone can find you
and where they can donate,
what do you do to decompress if there's anything aside
from surfing?
Yeah, obviously surfing, yeah.
And I also do stand-up paddle boarding.
I find that I compete in stand-up paddle boarding
but surfing the paddle boards.
So I try and sort of keep up with the 20 year olds.
And every now and again, I win a contest
so it kind of keeps me stoked.
But I have three boys and a wife and so family time
is really important to me.
My eldest son is 14, he's really into skateboarding
and trying to connect with him as much as possible.
The 12 year old is a contest surfer
so he's sort of just lives surfing
and I've got a six year old as well.
And family time is golden and I do travel quite a bit
for my work so I really cherish the times that I'm with them.
And my kids have kind of grown up around all the street kids
as well so it'll be really interesting to see
what effect that has on their lives
because they're very compassionate
because they've had some actually quite hard experiences
like kids that they were close to dying on the streets
of drug overdoses or violence.
That's really tough stuff for kids to,
for your own kids to have to go through as well
just as it is for the other kids living on the streets
to have to see those things.
So yeah, definitely family time.
And also I'm a sucker for watching,
binge watching a season of something.
To really sort of zone out, I'll just put a TV show on
and just binge watch.
I don't watch TV other than that,
but a good series, man, I could sit up all night
watching that.
Brilliant, well just what you're saying about the kids,
I think that's very important as well.
They watch us as far as how we eat,
they watch us as far as our exercise habits,
but they also watch us as far as our compassion
and kindness and my little boy, bless him,
he's done charity, workout, fundraisers,
and we just walked the other day
for like a suicide awareness thing.
He knows about this project, he actually did.
He spoke on one of the episodes of my podcast
about his mental health challenges.
And I think it's so important because now that generation
is normal for them to exercise, to eat well,
to be vulnerable, and hopefully we can change the world,
this next generation, it will be the first wave.
Absolutely, yeah.
Brilliant, okay, well I wanna say firstly,
thank you so much, but let's make sure that we reiterate
where everyone can find you guys.
So firstly, Instagram, what's the handle you have there?
Yeah, Instagram is our name.
SurfersNotStreetChildren.
Probably once you get to the surfers and then N,
it probably pops up.
But yeah, that's probably the best place to keep up with us
on a day-to-day basis.
Facebook is also SurfersNotStreetChildren,
and our website is surfnotstreets.org.
Brilliant, and again, I'll put all those on the show notes
on the website.
So, and then as far as the link to donate,
where's the best place to find that?
The link to donate is, I'm going to send that link to you,
and then that will be all over our Instagram and Facebook.
And you can donate on our website,
it's very easy and very safe, but the specific one
for the Girls Surf 2 campaign
will be all over our social media.
And hopefully some of our supporters are going to
sort of pump that out as well, like Kelly Slater,
for example, and a number of others.
So, you know, hopefully in the surfing world,
there'll be a lot of people pushing that as well.
We're excited about that.
Yeah, well, I know there's a lot of firefighters
at Surfers, my old department in California,
kind of a
California, having that three quarters of the department surf.
So,
Oh, that's awesome.
Yeah, so hopefully we can get the first responders
of the world to make this happen just on their own.
So, okay, well, beautiful.
Fantastic, well, thank you.
Well, I just want to say thank you so much.
You know, I love what you're doing.
I love connecting with people like you that have taken up,
you know, just picked up one area that needs to be helped,
especially to do it in a completely different country.
And, you know, I just appreciate you taking the time
to talk to us.
Well, thank you very much for the opportunity.
And I really do appreciate your encouragement as well.
Thanks for that.
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