What I Learned Growing Up in a Halfway House for Youth

I was about seven. My memories are of coming home from a Women’s Refuge camp—basically, my father was an abusive alcoholic so Mum spent a bit of time with the Refuge, and we had gone away on this camp. We got back and there’d been a massive party and there were all these teenagers in our house. My mum walked in, shut down the party, and told all the kids, ‘Look, party’s over, go home.’ The majority of them said, ‘We don’t really have homes to go to.’ So Mum went, ‘OK, you can stay here. There’s just one rule: you either get a job or you go to school.’ That was the beginning.

There were 36 teenagers in a three-bedroom house, sleeping everywhere, including in the bathtub. My brother and me slept in the same bed as my mum. We basically had one room for us three, and the kids were in every other room of the house. My mother moved the fridge into our room so they wouldn’t eat all the food. There was graffiti on every single inch of the wall. A gang emblem was one of the first things I learned to draw because that’s what all the kids were into. There were so many holes in the wall that the only rooms that had walls you couldn’t see through were the bathroom, the toilet, the kitchen and our room. The walls between the other rooms had been knocked through and there was the only the framing left.

As time passed Mum got a lot of support, a lot of community support, the government departments came along and they built her a garage and they helped out with food and other things. And they eventually redid the whole house so it got done up nice, a few more controls were put in place, it became more settled. Eventually we were moved into a five-bedroom place. And then it became a more official social-housing home.

Some upbringings don’t prepare you for the kindness of strangers

I remember that awful first night for a lot of them, when they’d arrive in a police car at all sorts of times of the night, after events had escalated in their homes and they’d been removed, or they had been arrested doing things and the cells weren’t the place for them. And that horrible first moment for them, arriving in this new place, not knowing what to expect, what it’s going to be like, what we’re going to be like.

There was always this really odd thing where they would see us kids—as in Mum’s actual kids—there and we were so used to it, being friendly and welcoming, that it always cut through for a lot of them because we were the same age or younger and they were like, ‘These kids are really nice and really welcoming.’ I think that cut through.

You could physically see the shock in them when they were treated with care and love, when they were pulled back into line not through violence but through care and through words and logic—what’s the point of running away? You’ve got food here, you’ve got love, we won’t let anyone hurt you.

Sharing a home with rough kids sets you up for tragedy

There was this one kid who came through the home who was just so calming. He was around my age so I knew him at high school and stuff and he was amazingly funny—I became an actor but he had so much more talent than I would ever have. He could make people laugh for days on end; he was always the life of the house. He was such a natural comedian. He stole a car when he was 16 or 17 and was running from the cops, crashed the car and died.

But it has its perks

They were a tight-knit group, and they were really tight with us. Local kids were told not to play with me as a kid because I lived in the halfway house. I know my brother leveraged off that a bit—kids were always scared of him. We always felt they had our backs. They were incredibly protective. Like, my father stopped harassing us once the house started because the reality was Mum had a bunch of teenage boys there who’d do anything for her.

Sharing your family enlarges it forever

When our family gets together for Christmas and things, it always feels like there are people missing. We shared our mum with so many people. I think that’s the oddest thing. We’re still a really strong family. We still get on really well, we all love each other, we all appreciate what Mum did for us—she made a special effort. She knew she was giving a lot of time to these other kids, so she made an extra effort to make sure we were happy as well. But we always feel like there are people missing when we have family gatherings.

That our childhoods last our lifetime

I learned compassion, that not everyone comes from the same loving family environment that you do. Some people just don’t have—through no fault of their own—the things that you have, the things you take for granted: food, parents who know how to parent, love. As a kid you realise there are kids out there being treated badly.

I do know not all of them went on to become model citizens, shall we say. I remember once being told in my late teens that if I ended up in prison I’d be fine, because some of the guys ended up in there. The fight is so hard. They are so far behind from the beginning that them going on to have normal lives, to have jobs, to have kids, is a huge success. And heaps of them have done just that.

Jason Te Kare is an Auckland theatre director. His play Cellfish is a dark comedy set in a men's prison, and is based on people he has known over the years. Cellfish is on at Q Theatre in Auckland, June 13-24.