Film 2010: Listen to Bodouwyn and others

What is the biggest challenge for social services in the next 10 years?

“I used to have a drug problem and I had to go through rehab.” Francisco Abaga is frank about his past when  I meet him at the SPOTT centre for drug dependency, where he is based. SPOTT is a day centre for people with a drug and alcohol problem and it is run by the Diputació de Barcelona. On the morning we were there, the majority of people who came to the centre were homeless men between thirty-five and fifty. They come to SPOTT to have a shower, get something to eat and wash their clothes.

“This type of centre has been around for ten years but I didn’t know about it back then, little did I know I was going to be working here one day...” Abaga says referring to the time he needed it most. But in the end, he decided to seek help and got the support he needed to overcome his addiction. Now, he is determined to help others do the same through his work as a ‘mediator’.

 Working with people who have drug problems takes a lot of sensitivity, and even the most dedicated social worker might face a blank look from someone who is  thinking ‘you have no idea what I’m going through’. But Abaga does know: he has been there, he understands exactly how it feels and he knows what it takes to leave it all behind. “He brings knowledge that only mediators can. They’re close to the users in ways in which we professionals aren’t able to be, because we haven’t had that direct experience,” confirms Lola, a social worker at the centre. Lola says: “I was his social worker. Now I have to be clear with him that we are work colleagues.” She is particularly proud of Abaga, who she used to follow when he was a child at children’s home.

Abaga is modest about his contribution to the centre. “My role is pretty straightforward. I’m a mediator. A mediator is not a professional. It’s a person who has reformed themselves.”  But, watching him interact with the young men who come to the centre when we are visiting, it is easy to see the trust he builds and the role model he represents. When they complain, Abaga is neither sweet nor politically correct: he confronts them with the reality of their situation and the way to get out of it.

Abaga is particularly angry about the attitude of some young people: “At a rave or a disco, the party doesn’t start until they take some pills.” Abaga visits high schools where he meets youngsters who think they know it all, and refuse to take messages about the effects of drug-taking seriously. In those cases too, Abaga is brutally honest about the disastrous consequences of drug addiction.

When we see Lola at the end of the day, she is in reflective mood: “In social services, you can contribute by experience, by qualifications, or by who you are. What Abaga brings is who he is.”

Like many Bosnians in the beginning of 1990s, Mirsad Aladin escaped the war and ended up as a refugee in Belgium. It would have been dangerous for him to return home after the Bosnian war ended: he is a Bosnian Muslim while his wife is a Bosnian Serb.

Aladin spent five years living on social benefits while his asylum status was being reviewed. He had no right to work and woke every morning with no purpose or a job to go to: “I got financial support but I felt awful spending the money I didn’t earn myself. I would wake up, stay around the flat or go into town and spend the money I hadn’t earned myself. I felt completely useless.”

Once granted the right to remain in the country, the OCMW, the local social services agency, offered him a place at an employment and training centre supported in Ghent. Eight years later, Aladin is an instructor at the centre helping others who are experiencing hardship in their lives to re-train and get back into employment. “I joined the centre as an apprentice and today I’m one of the staff responsible for training newcomers to acquire carpentry skills,” Aladin says, proud that he could be inspiration to young men who are also given a chance to start over at the centre.

“It is a way to provide opportunities for people who have missed out earlier in their lives and give them opportunity chance to integrate into society,” explains David De Kenkelaere, the centre manager.

“Here at the centre - everything is organised for you. You can work to improve your skills and you are also given the opportunity to take classes and learn the Dutch language,” says Aladin. After working in the centre all day, apprentices have the feeling they have earned the state benefits they receive. Also, coming to work every day and working with people from different backgrounds such as Georgia, Russia, Africa and Asia is part of the integration process itself. According to Aladin, at the end of the day “you feel useful and you feel you have earned the money you are given.”

But where does Aladin see his future? He tells us that Dayton agreement brought an end to the war in Bosnia, but as a result the country is politically decentralized with two governing entities and two parallel ethnically divided communities.

“If I go back today, where should my two daughters go to school, with Bosnian Muslims in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina or with Bosnian Serbs in Republika Srpska?” – says Aladin in despair. He explains that he and his wife have educated their daughters to be proud of their mixed ethnic background and he wouldn’t want his kids to question their identity.

But Aladin remains hopeful. He goes back to Bosnia once a year and has started re-building a house in his local neighbourhood. He is hopeful that things will change for the better in the future: “One day, when my daughters have grown up enough to make their own choices, my wife and I will return and spend our last years in Bosnia, where our lives first met.”

At 32, Stefan Jul Gunnersen is an ambitious young professional working as an editor on the Statistical Yearbook at Statistics Denmark. His ambition and creativity stretch further than his job, currently producing music as a hobby and thinking about a future career in writing. “Feelings are the true source of my creativity and dedication to life. When I feel intense happiness or pain I tend to be far more creative than when I am not,” he says. And Stefan does have a story to tell, a story of pain and happiness too.

Today, his newborn baby Sebastian and his little family bring him great joy. But Stefan’s past is filled with the intense pain that any child would feel over an absent mother. “My mother was never very good at fulfilling the needs I had as a baby and a little child. So I constantly yearned for her attention and love. She always seemed so far away, and matters got worse when she took her own life. I was barely five years old.” This changed the course of Stefan’s life.

Stefan had already gone to live with foster parents when he was 2 years old as a part-time placement to relieve his mother from the burden she could not cope with. “My foster mom worked at a day nursery where she met me, my mom and my absent dad, and she took matters into her own hands. She really wanted to help me and my mom. Not so much my dad,” Stefan explains. After his mother died, he was put into foster care with the same family. Stefan explains that his new family gave him security and discipline, but he still had some behavioural issues, like never wanting to let his foster mother out of his sight and sometimes being a bit hysterical.

“I was very unhappy, and all I really wanted was my mom. Of course, I did not understand much of this at the time, so it was all on a very subconscious level,” Stefan recalls. This struggle followed him into later life, and was manifested in his relationship to women: in his adolescent years, he would idolize all the girls he fell for, turn them into angels, always feeling unworthy of their attention.

As a teenager Stefan reacted to his situation, not in an extrovert way by taking drugs, being violent or committing crimes. Instead, he buried himself in the world of computers. “I loved playing computer games and I was doing a bit programming by the age of ten.” His foster parents, however, being traditional outdoor and outgoing people, did not understand his introvert behaviour and passion for computer games. “I felt that I was a bit amiss as a person when I was in my teens,” Stefan admits.

However, he also had people in his life that inspired him. Firstly it was the youngest of his older step-brothers, who was something of a role-model for the young Stefan. “He was fancied by women, had control of things and money came easily to him. He was extremely cool and he felt proud of me, and that made me feel good.” Secondly, Stefan had a school teacher who was always looking out for him, providing stability. “I knew that what he said was the truth and if he scolded me, then I had done something wrong. And if he praised me, I would feel so proud.” Thirdly, there was his uncle, who was not his real uncle, but shared the same interests as Stefan, and they would play stratego, chess and computer games. “Being with him was a kind of heaven for me, I could let go of my troubles and burdens for a while and just be myself in another reality.”

The gap left by his biological mother could never be filled. “This is something I have to live with, and have come to accept. I found that helping others fills this gap and establishes a purpose with my life.” This is why Stefan got involved with TABUKA – a group of people who have spent their lives in foster care and are working to improve the system. They hold lectures and seminars with foster care families and social workers to raise the issues children face during their transition. One of Stefan’s messages is to bond with the children, get close to them and give them a hug - that is what he missed most.

So what was the role of social services in all this? According to Stefan, back in those days there was not so much control of foster families. Social services were happy that families would take children in at all. His foster family was not inspected for years. “They trusted them, and it was all good in my case. But there were a lot stories in Denmark where foster placements had gone wrong.” Today, things are a bit different: supervision is a serious part of a foster care placement, and social services also try to limit the number of placements and give help to biological families instead, which in some cases could be in the best interests of the child.

Ultimately, the goal is to create that safety net every child needs. “I recently became a father myself and I have given parenthood and my son a lot of thought. I never really felt safe myself. Not with my mother and not in the foster care system. I want to provide a solid base of trust and safety for my son.”

At 42, Daniela is finally content with her life: she lives in supported housing, has a job at a restaurant in Belgrade (Serbia) and is the first woman with disabilities to have reached the top of Mount Elbrus in Russia. But it wasn’t always so.

“I was born without both hands and feet and with a facial deformity. In my early childhood I was moved from one foster family to another,” Daniela says. Her parents abandoned her in the hospital at birth, and she was isolated in different institutions until the age of 3, when she was placed in a private home. Due to prejudices, life was not easy in the private family either, and Daniela was often left to fend for herself. When she was 11, she was placed in a residential institution for children and young people with disabilities where she remained until she was 35. Care for people with disabilities in Serbia has traditionally followed a medically-oriented approach to their disability, with lifelong placements in residential institutions.

“At the beginning, my life was not easy. I came to a new environment where I lived with over 300 other children that also had developmental difficulties. My unusual looks attracted attention,” Daniela explains. In the beginning, other children helped her with daily activities, but in time Daniela became more independent. “I worked at the switchboard and we received a small amount of pocket money. It was never enough to cover my needs, but I did not expect more, as there were 300 of us living there.”

In 2002, Daniela went to the seaside for the first time and learned to swim. She started to attend swimming classes and to train, and soon after joined the Serbian Para Swimming team. Two years later, she came 15th out of over 300 participants in the Argentina Marder Plata competitions for the disabled. She went on to half-marathons, to basketball and table tennis competitions, where she achieved very good results. However, after such an inspirational journey, Daniela had to return to the same institution. “My sports career fulfilled my days, but it did not make me completely happy. I wanted to work, make my own money and have my own home. I believed that if I wanted something badly enough it would come true eventually.”

At the beginning of 2003, the Serbian Association for Promotion of Inclusion (SAPI) supported by the Social Innovation Fund (member of ESN) started a project helping people with intellectual difficulties to live independent lives. “They were looking for volunteers and I applied without hesitation,” Daniela says. This project changed her life. She was helped by SAPI to obtain housing and employment. “Now I live with my friends. At home we do the usual everyday things - cleaning, reading, and watching television. I use public transport, work full time, and at the weekend I do things I like.”

“Since sport helped me to overcome many difficult situations, it remains my biggest love,” Daniela says. Her personal goal was to start mountaineering, and she discussed this with the SAPI team. In 2006, she went to Rajac mountain in Serbia, where she was taught how to climb. “They taught us how to pack, climb, tie knots. I liked it and I wanted to reach a mountain peak,” Daniela says. In 2007, Daniela became the first woman without hands and feet to complete the mental and physical training delivered by the Federation for Sport and Recreation for People with Disabilities of Serbia. She went on to climb mountains in Serbia, Montenegro and Bulgaria. In 2008 she climbed Mount Elbrus, thus becoming the first woman with disabilities to reach the top. “I made it. I like to try new things I haven’t tried before. Now I want to practise skiing, biking, and fencing.”

Recently, Daniela was elected to chair the group for advocacy to help people with disabilities understand their rights. The message to all her friends in institutions is that they need to be persistent and never to give up their dreams, no matter how distant and unrealistic these may seem. “I always tell them that they too have the right to practise sports, work and live independently, as I do, in supported housing.” When faced with prejudice, Daniela advises them to ignore the mocking. “I never paid attention. It takes a strong will to fight for oneself and make it.”

“Whatever state your loved one is in right now, the truth is, there's a limit to what you can do to help,” says Christine, a mother from Brighton in UK, who thought that she could beat her son's heroin addiction with motherly love.

In May 2005, her youngest son tried the ‘cold turkey’ at home, quitting heroin. For days, Christine comforted him through cramps, sweating and throwing up in the kitchen sink. She truly believed that she could beat heroin with mother love and herbal tea.

“We'll keep this in the family, I thought, I can nurse him back to life. I was so obsessed with trying to cure his addiction that everyone else in my life was pushed aside,” Christine says about her ordeal. In a matter of weeks, it had become clear that her homemade rehab wasn't working.

In June 2006, after another year of denial and misery, and lies “I'm not a junkie, I'll get another job, I'll pay you back” Christine decided to seek help from social services. She offered her son a deal that she would only support him if he entered a rehabilitation programme. Christine was offered support from PATCHED CRI, a project run by Brighton and Hove municipality supporting the families of users with drug abuse problems.

“In the first of many counselling sessions, I started to understand just how much damage my son's heroin addiction had inflicted on all our family. It was painful for me to acknowledge that I needed as much help as he did,” Christine says.

Although the rehabilitation programme didn’t work (twice) and by December 2006 her boy was begging for money and homeless, Christine didn't give up. Eventually her elder son and husband, stepfather to the boy, joined the efforts and managed to get him off the streets and into rehab. This time, with community support, it did work.

“He's made a good recovery supported by the community that welcomed him, but we all know that staying off heroin is a full time job. It involves changing every aspect of your life,” a more experienced Christine says. By September 2008, her son enrolled in the university and wrote to her: ‘I have no illusions about the difficult challenges I face. But I’m ready to meet them’.

PATCHED, Christine says, couldn't have saved her son any more than she could, but it gave her the strength to face up to the harsh reality of heroin addiction and the sheer difficulty of getting off the drugs. Social services played an important role to help Christine - so she can help her son.

The pleasure of seeing him find his own way was more than we, she and her family could ever have hoped for.

“My problem really was that I had been terribly poor when I was a child. My mother was a fantastic woman, very witty, very intelligent, and very artistic, but she had social anxiety and was afraid to be part of the society,” Lise Jul Pedersen starts the story of her life. Lise and her two siblings lived in their little excluded paradise - with no money at all. In the 1970s and 80s they only lived on 2000 euros a year. “We never went on holiday, hardly ever got haircuts or got washed; we had no new clothes or friends for that matter,” Lise recalls. “This was not such a problem in our early childhood, but it became problematic when we started school and had to relate to other people.”

If you ask her to summarize her issues in the past, Lise is upfront and braver than many: “The problem was that I had been excluded most of my childhood by being poor, so when I grew up I found it hard to connect to people. I had lived a very isolated life.” Her way of compensating for this was to develop her intellect and be smart and active instead.

When she had a 'break down' at the age of 25, her ambition had driven her to become a workaholic and, on top of that, she had fallen in love with her boss. “Then I went totally mad” says Lise with a smile and a hint of sarcasm and “they called an ambulance and put me into hospital. I did not choose that!” Between the ages of 25 and 28 she was put into hospital 7 times with 7 different diagnoses, which, as Lise says “were all true at the time”. Every time she was 'stabilised' with medicine but never received any help for dealing with the problems that caused her illness in the first place.

In retrospect, Lise takes the role of a journalist - her current job and the one she does best - and explains the situation with utmost precision: “Sometimes it takes a long time to arrive at a breakdown, but to be honest my life wasn't great before then anyway. There is no doubt that my illness was related to the fact that I had a very poor background. I always had this feeling that I did not fit in, in this world. But I compensated by being smart and active instead.”

Education was extremely important to her. It was the main factor in her recovery later on. “The hospital didn't help me at all, they only helped me not to be psychotic in the short term but not to deal with the problems I had,” Lise explains. At 28 she decided that she would not to be admitted to hospital again. She didn't feel she got much help from social services either. Instead, university was her rescue.

“It was only through university that I was allowed to belong. I was allowed to attend classes even though I was heavily drugged at the time. University helped me maintain my network. I was desperately clinging on to my friends and network at the university.” Despite the doctors' advice to have a break from university for a year, because, she was told she was terribly ill and psychotic, Lise continued her studies. “I knew if I stopped, all my friends would have moved on in a different direction and I would have been lost.”

Lise got a postgraduate degree in Art, History and Information Science at Aarhus University. For many years she has been a programme manager at the "idiot box", a local TV programme, made by and for mental health users. Today, she has her own TV blog that discusses social issues and concerns. She is also active at the European level in promoting a better understanding of mental health and wellbeing.

“There is a belief that mental illness does not affect the highly-skilled, or that you cannot recover after a serious mental illness. Maybe I will never fully recover but I have to live with it. And to fight discrimination in society you have to develop a sense of responsibility and competence so that you can resume and regain your position in society.”

You can watch this interview with Lise, and find about her other work HERE.

32 year old Maria Lipitor has finally made a home for herself and her 10 year old daughter Neda. “I have many dreams for the future, but maybe they are not feasible. What I want most is to continue to be with my daughter and to be able to provide for her,” Maria says.

When Maria was her daughter’s age, she had to leave her home and live on the streets. “My dad passed away when I was little and my mother found someone else. They both drank alcohol and were abusive to me and my siblings. My mother was not taking good care of us and was hurting us often,” Maria says.

These circumstances forced her to escape and live on the streets. “I was constantly afraid of the tramps that were living in the same conditions as me. Life on the streets is really tough. I always had to keep my eyes open to avoid dangerous situations,” Maria says. She used to sell cigarettes in the market and sometimes even begged for money to be able to buy food and cigarettes. “When I was a child, I did not turn to social services, I didn’t know. But a local organization took me from the streets and God was with me, no one else. My mother didn’t want to know anything about me,” she recalls.

As an adult, she tried to make the home she never had. “I met a boy and I trusted him. I thought that we could build a family together.” At first, they got along very well and they lived together in a house belonging to one of his brothers. But after her daughter was born, the father started sending them to beg for money. “I spent most of my time on the streets with my little girl, until a police patrol took us in and alerted the city’s General Directorate for Social Assistance and Child Protection. As I couldn’t offer my daughter either a home or a decent life, and her father didn’t care, my child was placed in foster care for almost 3 years.”

But Maria didn’t give up. She kept in touch with the foster family. In the meantime, she separated from the father and turned to the services of the Night Asylum, part of the Caritas Federation of the Diocese of Timisoara, who offered her shelter, food and decent living conditions. “I learned about these social services from other people like me living on the streets.” With the support from the EU’s PHARE programme, in 2007 Caritas started a project for Social and Professional Integration of Homeless Adults at Pater Paulus Farm, located in Bacova (a village in Timis County). Maria signed up for this programme and managed to get a roof over her head, a job by helping in the farm and most importantly she was helped to get her daughter back.

“I have a room just for myself and my daughter. We have a bathroom, a kitchen and all the necessary conditions for a decent living. I also got a job, and we get help and support from the Centre every time we need it. We also have access to medical care. Once a day we receive a warm meal and we don’t pay for any of it. On the contrary, I receive a monthly wage. I can work here and also keep my daughter close to me. She is going to school now. I want her to learn and progress. I didn’t have this opportunity...” Maria says.

She doesn’t have an advice for social services, as she is very happy with what they have offered her. She knows it would have been better if she had had better opportunities in the past, to go to school and not to have to leave her daughter with other people. “But now that I managed to get Neda back, I want to offer her a different life - a better one,” Maria says.

Danny Mitchell, 29, is not afraid to say it: being in the care system since the age of 9, he has had a rough ride. He was moved from foster family to care home to boarding school and then back to foster care with a different family. As a teenager, he ran away and was left to fend for himself, without a supporting network of family and friends to turn to. Questions that gave him anxiety then still bother him today, albeit subconsciously: “Why did my mother leave me in care? Why she never kept in touch?” As a child, Danny hated social services, not only for moving him around, but also for leaving so many unanswered questions key to his life.

Coming from Cornwall in the south-west of England, he decided to move to the big cities of the south-east, hoping that he might get more help there. Instead, he slipped into a life of homelessness, drugs and small-time crimes to fund his drug addiction. This path took him to prison, and for the next decade he was trapped in a vicious circle of coming in and out of prison, through the system’s proverbial revolving doors. “As soon as I came out, I would go back to doing exactly what I did before, which brought me back into prison. I knew no different way of taking care of myself, so that’s how I did it.” After a while, Danny was getting himself arrested on purpose, so he could go back to prison. “People talk about social services helping them. I used the police and prison service to help me. I was homeless. Prison was the easiest accessible service to food and shelter, that’s how messed-up things were back then,” Danny explains.

Since 2006, however, he has chosen a different path. “I came to realise that this whole life had affected my mental health,” Danny says explaining that he needed more than just a roof on his head to sort out his life. Being released from Woodhill prison in Milton Keynes in 2006, he approached services for the homeless, explaining his needs and issues. He was lucky enough to be referred to the joint scheme of the Milton Keynes Community Safety Partnership, P3 and Revolving Doors. The scheme helps people in the city who are in crisis because of a combination of mental health issues, homelessness, substance misuse, or due to offending. This scheme was to change Danny’s life.

“They didn’t just give me a house to live in. There was a structured amount of support in other areas. That really worked for me,” Danny explains. It has been four years that he has been off the streets and committed to help improve services through his involvement with the National Service User Forum run by Revolving Doors, a charity specialising in helping ex-prisoners. He has gained new skills and confidence to help the system that helped him. The P3 scheme is now in danger of closing down due to various factors, not least the cuts. “This type of supports needs to be there, so that other people as well can benefit from it. They need to access it from the street level, that’s how it helped me,” Danny says.

He is now working on making a case for the scheme to continue, through a campaign of interviews and a photo film with users like himself who have come through some tough times and out the other side. Danny is mostly worried about users who have just joined the scheme, as they need this support to make it through. “It looks like the carpet is going to be pulled out from under their feet, and they will be left high and dry,” Danny expresses his concern. “I know exactly how it is to be homeless, spending a Christmas day shivering in the cold, with no one in the world around you, and I want to do my part to protect this scheme that has helped me so much.” Danny says.

Watch Danny’s video account of his story HERE.

When Peter fell into a coma after a heavy blow to the head, he ended up in a surgery in his home city of Dortmund in North-Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. After that, though only 60, he moved into a care home for older people in Zeppelin street in the city and slowly recovered over a period of three years. Although his health had stabilised enough, he was left partly paralysed on his left side as a result of his injury. 

Following a needs assessment under the German national care insurance, he was eligible for financial support to help him cope. Municipal social services have set up a number of advice centres for senior citizens (Seniorbüros) in the city in partnership with local charities. Though not directly responsible for the care insurance assessment, his local Seniorenbüro helped him get the financial support to which he was entitled. “He is not able to use his left hand, but he can walk with an aid,” says one of his carers. Peter is also lucky to have a niece, who looks after him from time to time. But Peter, just as majority of older people, wanted to live independently in the community.

To help him with this, social services talked to his doctor about whether he would be able to live on his own. After assessing his level of needs, social services also proposed that he move into sheltered accommodation in Hangeney street, where he now lives with a mixture of people young and old. But the move from the care home to his new home involved procedures for giving due notice to the care home, establishing a contact and contract with the landlord of the sheltered accommodation – the staff from his local Seniorbüros helped him every step of the way.

Peter is enthusiastic about the help he got from the Seniorenbüro and keen that others continue to benefit in future. “Without this money, I would still be in the old people’s home. I had no money left at all and nothing left from my old household goods. I got a €900 moving grant, which meant I could buy furniture and other things for my new flat from a house clearance auction,” Peter says. Social services were there for Peter to help him buy all the necessities and furniture for his new home and paid for his new flat to be repainted.

Despite the good start, in the summer of 2009, Peter broke the leg on his right side after a fall, which further limited his movements. “My neighbours called a doctor after my fall. I had to have an operation in hospital and they organized physiotherapy there too. They asked me how I could look after myself at home as they had concerns about whether or not I could manage alone,” Peter explains.

But following rehabilitation, he got better again and yet again was able to go on living independently in the sheltered accommodation. The community around him is really important to his recovery and independent living. “I often go to breakfast groups, birthday parties or coffee-mornings with my neighbours. Residents’ relatives come and visit and they’re very friendly too – they often bring fruit and other food from the market because I can’t really carry it myself”.

Life, just like Peter’s story, has its ups and downs. His story represents many other stories around Europe, where older people are supported to live independently. But to succeed, they need some help along the way from social services and from people around them to take their hand from time to time and help them overcome obstacles. Trust, Peter says, was the key factor in his communication with social services: “It’s really important. If I didn’t trust them, I could not speak with them about my personal problems. But I go to talk to them and I feel understood.”

Now aged 19, Pascal Epinette’s early life was marked by a number of defining moments. When he was just 9 months old he was abandoned by his mother and placed with a foster family, following the intervention of the county social services department. His earliest memories are not of his alcoholic and illiterate mother, nor of the father he didn’t know, but of Mr and Mrs Clément - “who became my parents,” he says.

Unfortunately, what he himself calls a ‘bad decision’ by the family court upset the equilibrium provided by his new home. At the age of 6, Pascal was returned to his mother, resulting in him being subjected to a year of physical and mental abuse by her. Prior to this, he used to spend every other weekend with his mother, sometimes coming back covered in bruises. This decision by the judge was taken against the wishes of those closest to him, particularly his social worker, his psychiatrist and Mr and Mrs Clément who, he remembers, were “not particularly keen on the idea.”

The decision was overturned within a year and his childhood continued with the Clément family, surrounded by his four brothers and sisters. His birth-mother gave up any rights to him when he was 9. Pascal admits to having done ‘quite a few stupid things’ during this time, particularly at school. He was ‘very rebellious’ to the point of getting expelled from school and having to spend 3-4 months in a secure children’s home at the age of 11. Now a 19-year old young adult with the benefit of hindsight, he stresses the importance of “listening to grownups” during his childhood.

Another defining moment in his life was when he discovered, at the age of just 13, a passion for what has become his job today. To begin with, he went to a rural college, which is a private school combining schoolwork with vocational training. It was there that he met Mr Tessé, a training supervisor in park and garden maintenance. “He gave me new focus and taught me how to work - from day one, “Pascal explains.

So what does he like so much about this job? “Mostly, it’s about being outdoors in green spaces. I don’t like being confined so I took to it straight away, and also working with wood – it’s all connected”. This passion for green spaces goes hand in hand with his favourite hobby: quad-biking out in the countryside, on the outskirts of his home town.

What about the best and worst times of this childhood which, in his words, “was not always easy”? “The worst times of my life were when I was aged 6 or 7 and I was given back to my mother, and the days spent during my childhood at Mr and Mrs Clément’s home are my best times.”

Now running his own small business and qualified in maintenance and design of natural and rural spaces (Vocational Training Certificate – BEP), he is still working part-time for Mr. Tessé, his old training supervisor, until his company grows to the point where he is able to devote himself to it full-time. “These days, I’m trying not to make the same mistakes as before. My goal is to move forward, learn about life and make the most of it, and to be able to spend my time on my business, because my work is my passion.”

Despite a ‘poor decision’ which, fortunately, was overturned, Pascal Epinette is fairly happy about the role social services played in his life. “They enabled me to move forward and overcome the difficult obstacles in my life.” Being placed with a foster family gave him the security of parents “who have always been there for me”.

La jeune vie de Pascal Epinette, 19 ans, a été marquée par nombre de moments clés. A l’âge de 9 mois, il est abandonné par sa mère et placé en famille d’accueil suite à une intervention des services sociaux du département de l’Orne. Son premier souvenir ne sera pas celui de sa mère, alcoolique et illettrée, ni de son père inconnu, mais de M. et Mme. Clément « qui sont devenus mes parents ».

Malheureusement, « un mauvais jugement » du tribunal des affaires familiales déstabilisera ce nouvel équilibre apporté par son nouveau foyer ; en effet, ce jugement le voit retourner chez sa mère à l’âge de 6 ans où il sera sujet à un an de maltraitances physiques et morales de sa mère. Avant cela, Pascal passait un week-end sur deux chez sa mère et en revenait parfois muni de bleus et d’hématomes. Cette décision du juge fut donc prise contre le gré de son entourage immédiat, notamment son assistante sociale, son psychiatre et M. et Mme. Clément : « ils n’étaient pas trop chaud » se souvient-il.

Replacé par après en famille d’accueil, son enfance se poursuivra chez les Clément, entouré par ses quatre frères et sœurs, sa mère ayant renoncé tout droit sur lui à l’âge de 9 ans. Pascal admet avoir fait « pas mal de conneries » surtout à l’école durant ces années-là : « j’étais très rebelle »… au point de se faire expulser de son école et devoir passer 3-4 mois dans un foyer fermé à l’âge de 11 ans. Maintenant jeune adulte de 19 ans, du recul lui permet de souligner l’importance d’ « écouter les adultes » au cours de sa jeunesse.

Ce ne sera qu’à l’âge de 13 ans, encore un moment clé, qu’il découvrira sa passion devenu aujourd’hui son métier. Il se rendra dans un premier temps à une maison familiale et rurale, une école privée qui combine enseignement scolaire avec formation professionnelle. C’est là qu’il rencontre Monsieur Tessé, un maître de stage en entretien parcs et jardins, « qui a su me recadrer, m’apprendre à travailler, » dit-il, et cela dès le premier jour. Qu’est-ce qui lui plaît tant dans ce métier ? « Etre dehors tout d’abord, dans des espaces verts, je n’aime pas à être enfermé, donc j’ai tout de suite accroché…et puis travailler avec le bois – tout se réunit ». Ce goût des espaces verts va main dans la main avec son passe-temps préféré : celui de faire « des randonnées en quad » dans la campagne, aux alentours de sa ville.

Et les bons et les mauvais moments de cette enfance « pas toujours facile » selon Pascal ? « Les mauvais moments de ma vie ont eu lieu à l’âge de 6 à 7 ans quand je suis retourné chez ma mère et les jours passés pendant mon enfance chez M. et Mme. Clément constituent mes bons moments. »

Maintenant jeune chef d’entreprise et diplômé en «entretien et aménagement des espaces naturels et ruraux » (Brévet d’études professionnelles – BEP), il travaille toujours à mi-temps chez M. Tessé son ancien maitre de stage, le temps que son entreprise prenne assez d’ampleur pour qu’il puisse s’y consacrer à plein temps. « Aujourd’hui, j’essaie de ne pas refaire les mêmes erreurs qu’auparavant : mon objectif est d’avancer, de découvrir la vie et en profiter, et de pouvoir consacrer mon temps à mon entreprise car mon travail est ma passion. »

Malgré « un mauvais jugement » qui, heureusement, fut renversé, Pascal Epinette est plutôt content des interventions des services sociaux dans sa vie: « Celles-ci m’ont permis de bien avancer et de surmonter les obstacles difficiles de ma vie. » Son placement en famille d’accueil, surtout, lui donnera la sécurité de parents « qui ont toujours été là pour moi ».