4 December -Siva Aalayam

Drug Awareness Collaboration

Despite heavy competition from the 2010 World Cup Soccer draw celebrations taking place in the city that same day and night, my impression was that the event remained very well-attended and supported by the community. Certainly, everyone who attended got an action-packed, informative experience, and much to think about afterwards.

Opening the proceedings was Royston Bennett; who; between the other speakers; described his own descent into a Tik-fuelled hell, which cost him his career, home, temporarily his sanity and nearly resulted in the death of his own wife and child by his  own hand.

It was almost hard to believe that such an engaging, intelligent and very likeable person like Royston could ever had become the single-minded monster he was so eloquently describing, and he really underscored the fact that no one - adult, teenager or child – could somehow be immune from addiction or able to control the effects of drug use, no matter what moral upbringing they came from, or how smart or funny they might be. There was a collective sigh of relief from the audience, as he later described being snatched from the jaws of certain tragedy through both the love and determination of his wife, Lolita, and his own resolve to recover. It was uplifting to hear how he was able to prevail over this shattering event and ultimately become a powerful force for good in the community through the establishment of treatment programmes for addicts and support for families.

Lolita Bennett was a suprise speaker at the event - she was the most surprised, as she had not been expecting to speak! Lolita movingly spoke from the heart about her fight to get Royston rehabilitated, starting from the time the Cape Argus published a letter from her “Tik has taken away my husband and I want him back” (Cape Argus 10/10/2005).

Lolita strikingly used the analogy of people as mirrors, able to shine/reflect light on one another, and pointed out that even shattered mirrors have this ability. Her strength and courage as a woman, wife and mother, in the face of obvious mortal danger, and her decision to publicly seek help was a lesson in love for us all.

Our principal guest speaker, Ellen Pakkies, was next to take the podium. Ellen was convicted in 2008 for the murder of her twenty-year old son Adam, who was addicted to the drug Tik. Instead of imprisonment, Ellen was given the opportunity to serve her sentence through community work, using her life experiences to help others in similar situations to her own.Pensive, with hands clasped protectively over her midsection, Ellen began to dissect her life in vivid, clinical, brutally honest detail, made even more horrifying by her almost matter-of-fact tone, which only occasionally betrayed a hint of heavily-guarded emotions.

Starting with an account of her sexual abuse beginning at the age of four, moving on to being a virtual sex-slave as an adolescent, to describing being gang-raped multiple times, contracting STDs, and being attacked, traumatised and abused by her husband, as well as by her son Adam; Ellen’s story was deeply shocking to us all. The incredible burden of pain that she had carried for so long could only have been excacerbated during the seven years of torment suffered in dealing with her son’s addiction – the savage abuse, continual theft and violence that she described during this period alone would have broken many people, and driven them to desperate acts.

Ellen’s straight-forward description of murdering her son, the bleakness of her thoughts at the time, and the aftermath, were an uncomfortably cathartic climax to everything we had just heard. We all pray that Ellen will eventually be able to enjoy peace and resolution in her life, and thank her for her courage in speaking out so honestly about these issues.

Next on the podium was Police Inspector Ian Bennett, who is the Media Liason Officer and Social Crime Officer serving the Athlone community. As opposed to talking about the actual drugs used and the drug trade, which might have seemed the obvious route for his talk to take, Inspector Bennett instead spoke about our children, and our interaction with them as parents and adults in the community.

Inspector Bennett (Ian), is an extremely quotable and impassioned, capable speaker - I jotted down a few of the many gems he gave out:

“The biggest policing is parenting.”

“If we are not talking to our kids, who is talking to them?” He then answered this question himself with “The guy with the gold chain and the rings, that’s who.”

“One thing that gangsters get right that we as parents don’t, is that they acknowledge our kids”

“We need to talk to our kids in a positive way right from an early age – if we don’t believe in our kids, who will? The gangsters will, that’s who.”

“The difference between being big (grown up), and being adult, is that adults know that they must protect their kids.”

 Editorial by Alan Vesty