The Haven Hotel

They and Them

The Haven Hotel is home to just over one hundred and fifty thousand people. It's a far cry from the five million that used to live in Johannesburg, but it's vastly more than this tiny section of the city was built for. Expanding the hotel is not an option, so most of us simply have to live with the lack of space.

Most of us, except for those in Central. The residents of Haven Central get to retain most of the small luxuries we all lived with more than a decade ago; things like space and hot water on demand. I've seen hundreds of children enter the Haven, some with families and many without and a few who watched their families die. All of those children carry some form of trauma, and they're either shipped to another part of the Haven with their emotional baggage or kept in South and trained to be officers in the same city that destroyed them.

Until today I didn't even know that there was a children's trauma unit, or any form of therapy, in Haven, and it's disappointing to find that there are less than thirty children using the services provided by four psychologists. The four children here right now wear expressions indistinguishable from the distant stares I see on the faces of other kids whom I've guided to the Haven. Doctor Carver explains that two of them were adopted from East Haven, taken from abusive parents, and one's mother was killed by stragglers during the journey here.

"It's so sad that they'll have to grow up in a world like this." She says while we pass those three and head towards Nadia, who's in a separate room on her own. "That's why I'll never have children. They'll either be victims of evil or perpetrators. Sometimes both."

I'm not in the right frame of mind to respond. At least these kids have resources to help them get over their mental damage; there are thousands of other children who have dead and abusive parents who have a choice between suicide and living with the trauma. I'm too preoccupied with about how most of the children I've met will never get this kind of help. I wonder how much scarring Yusuf carries around from his childhood. 

"Hello." Nadia chirps, on the threshold of happiness once again. 

"Hello." I was unaware that the door had opened or that I had walked into the room alone, leaving Doctor Carver outside. I sit down on one of the tiny plastic chairs and face her. 

"How are you?" She asks with a smile.

"I'm fine." The lie comes easily; I've been giving it to everyone since getting back to the Haven. Copley's training has helped take my mind off of the depression, but it's always there under the surface. "How are you?"

"Fine." I can tell she's lying as well. She's simply parroting what I said to her, and it comes as a surprise that such a young child would do something like that. "But I had a bad dream last night."

"What did you dream about?" I'm not sure if I should be asking this; I assume that my reason for being here is to take the girl's mind off her problems, rather than undo whatever therapy she's going through by diving straight into them. Yet the words flow automatically.

"My dad." She says after a pause and just before I'm about to change the subject. I decide to change the subject anyway.

"How are you liking it here? Where, who are you living with?"

"What happened to him?" She ignores my attempt at making this a pleasant conversation and now I'm reminded that little children don't care about awkwardness. 

"What?"

"What happened to my dad?"

"He," I have no idea how much this girl already knows; how much she's been told, but if she's asking me she probably doesn't believe what "they" have been saying. "He passed away."