Act Like a Man
Men are supposed to be…
Men are supposed to do…
Men are supposed to have…

MIKE FALLAHAY, a Peace Corps volunteer who is a 20-year veteran marriage and family therapist, writes the last line on the chalkboard: Men are not supposed to... 

His audience is restless, partly due to raging hormones. 

Today, Tuesday, March 17, there are no estranged or straying spouses for Fallahay to counsel. 

Instead, his audience consists of boys between ages 12 and 17 who attend the Basseterre High School.  They meet in the guidance counsellor’s office on Tuesdays between 3:45 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. for an after-school programme called Male Enlightenment. 

Ron Collins, a guidance counsellor for the Basseterre High School, designed the Male Enlightenment Programme and introduced it in October 2007.  Fallahay, who helps lead the boys in group discussion, came on board in October 2008.   

A few of the boys in the room are here because their parents came to the school to request that they be signed up in this after-school programme. 

However, most of the boys are here because school officials identified them as students at risk of delinquency.  These boys have a history of violence.  They would threaten the learning environment by disrupting classes on a regular basis.  They, too, would skip classes or simply not show up for school.  Simply put, these boys have academic and behavioural problems.
According to Collins, the administration has placed “20-something” out of the more than 800 students at the Basseterre High School on an at-risk list. The intention is for the guidance counsellors to offer these at-risk children immediate, specialised attention and their parents disciplinary reinforcement, which hopefully would reform their behaviour and thus improve their life chances.

Today, Tuesday, March 17, only nine boys are present for the Male Enlightenment Programme.

“Once they’re in school, they come to the programme,” Collins says. 

The Male Enlightenment Programme is about to start.  Fallahay has finished writing on the board.  He puts the chalk down and turns around to face Collins and the boys.

I give the room a quick glance.  UNICEF posters with large print and frank headlines cover the walls. A headline on one poster reads: Don’t feel pressured into having sex. Another poster headline reads: 10 Facts Adolescents Everywhere Have a Right to Know about HIV and AIDS. 

There are also stern warnings against drugs and violence. One UNICEF poster has the headline: The Self-Destructive Use of Gangs.  Another reads: It Makes Sense to Stop the Violence.

One boy immersed utterly in his Nintendo DS comes face to face with disappointment as Collins confiscates it; Game Over! Another boy, who is adroitly texting, loses his cell phone to Collins.

Collins asks the boys, “How many exams did you do this week?”  Some of the boys respond and Collins, the guidance counsellor, says “OK, I’m going to see at the end of the term, eh!”

He asks one of them, “How about you?”

To another, he asks: “What about you?  You enjoyed the exams?”  The boys address Collins in a relaxed yet respectful manner. They listen to Collins. He keeps them in line.

“Many of you got sent down to the office this week,” announces Collins. He asks individual boys, “You got sent down to the office this week?”  Several of the boys quickly own up to this and offer their reasons. 

“Most of the times you’ve been out of the class playing ball on the field and so on,” says Collins to one of the boys.

After several minutes of Collins’ interaction with the boys, Fallahay opens the discussion. 

Collins says, “Listen to Mike now and pay attention!”

Act like a man!

Fallahay asks: “Has anybody told any of you at any point to act like a man? 

Silence!

Collins: “Anybody ever tell you act like a man?!”

Boys: “Yeah!  Yeah!”

Fallahay: “Why do you think they told you that?”

One boy shouts out, “Because you hungry!”

They laugh and so do I. I stop when I realise that laughter is coming from my throat. This is serious, after all. However, the session becomes pure comic relief from then on as the boys seemingly adopt a pack mentality, chatting giddily and feeding off of each other’s energy.

Fallahay and Collins remain credible throughout the session by not cracking up; Fallahay shows restraint and experience: his cheeks turn pink whenever someone makes a really funny joke, but he neither loses his composure nor his focus.

When the session ended, Fallahay summed up his focus.  “My philosophy of counselling with a group like this is to heavily plant seeds,” he said, adding that “The hope I think is that something will change in the future.”  

So whenever Fallahay meets with the boys, he adroitly steers them to express thoughts about their future and what it means to be a man.

Strict rules of confidentiality apply to these counseling sessions. So, without being specific, I will only say that the boys’ responses concerning what men are supposed to be, do, have, etc. were marked by elements of homophobia, materialism and misogyny. 

Some of their responses were disconcerting from a humanistic point of view. In particular, a couple of the boys shocked me when they described what they would do to a cheating wife.

Others expressed a need to remain single.  “We’re going to be bachelors,” said one boy. “Six of us will have one house, a big mansion,” he said, pointing out his future roommates among the boys.

There is a natural camaraderie among them.  The boys share a lot.  In session, one boy mentions that his brother is in jail. “He robbed a …,” he says, emitting an automatic laugh; a defense mechanism, as if to say I will laugh at this embarrassing, traumatic situation before you laugh at me. 

So instead of laughing at the boy, his “boys” end up laughing with him because he laughed first.   

When the session ended, Fallahay said something interesting.  “Boys are typically taught not to cry, not to show fear, not to show shame. So those are three of the main feelings, if you will, or emotions; the other two being happiness and anger.”

Fallahay continued: “So a lot of anger is covering up for sadness, fear and shame. This is more difficult with boys than with grown men necessarily, but the idea [of the Male Enlightenment Programme] being that, ‘OK, if I can deal with my sadness or my fear then I don’t have to gloss it over with anger.  And so I can choose to handle things differently.’”

But, today, Tuesday, March 17, the gloss of machismo prevailed.

Today, the police had to take one

“Today, the police had to take one [of the boys],” Collins disclosed at the end of the Male Enlightenment session.  “He did something to one of the students here, and the police may have been around and got involved.  Somewhere along the line, he threatened the police and that was out of our hands,” he added. 

On Friday, March 27, SKNVibes spoke again with Collins, who provided an update on the situation with the police. He said the police released the boy into the custody of his parents that same day, March 17.  The next day, the parents met with school officials, who decided to keep the boy in school. He will continue to be supported by a regimen of individual counselling sessions during school hours along with group discussions in the after-school Male Enlightenment Programme.

At the end of the March 17 session, Collins pointed out the proven success of this type of counselling regimen, noting that, “One of the boys got a prize at the last Speech Day for ‘Most Improved.’ He has gone back into the mainstream [forms with extensions between g1 and g4 are considered to be in the mainstream, according to Collins].”

He added that, “It has its successes. During the school day, I will meet with them as their timetable would permit and have individual counselling sessions.”

The guidance counsellor continued, “So by the time they come here [to the after-school programme], we’re already dealing with certain things. There are some things I can’t deal with here, like certain family situations.”

To deal with family situations, Collins conducts announced home visits to assess the domestic situations of not only these at-risk children but the general student population of the Basseterre High School. 

Sometimes parents request the home visit, but at other times the school initiates it. “We request it because of the problems we are having with the child and we need to sit in a different environment to address the problems, especially if the child’s behaviour is related to what is happening in the home,” Collins said. 

Fallahay, whose primary assignment is with the Department of Gender Affairs, accompanies the guidance counsellor on these visits when his schedule permits. Visits usually are carried out in the evening or late at night when parents are available. 

“It allows us to establish a relationship with both child and parents. Once we are on the same page, it’s a lot easier to work with the child after that,” said Collins, adding that “It provides the opportunity for us to realistically address some of those things that otherwise we wouldn’t be able to address, like things that parents are struggling with, that they need information on; they need reinforcement and sometimes they need support.”

Sometimes the home environment is supporting the behaviour

Collins remembers one home that he and Fallahay recently visited.  The visit has stuck with him. “It was obvious that the parents needed empowerment. The child was actually running the home. So then we were able to address the root of the problem,” he said. 

The guidance counsellor, who is a major proponent of the home visit, explained the rationale for it this way: “What we don’t want to be doing is just addressing symptoms.  If the root is at home then we have to go straight to the cause of the sickness.  Sometimes the home environment is supporting the behaviour, or the home environment is the reason for their behaviour.  So we need to be on the same page with the parents,” said Collins.  

Collins and Fallahay have found something to be troubled about; at-risk children are often on the same page with their parents.  For instance, marijuana use on school grounds is a problem that would prompt the counsellors to schedule a home visit. When they get to the home, many times they realise that the parents also smoke, and, what’s more, they do so in their children’s presence. 

“They have the access and then they see the example right there,” Collins said about some at-risk children.   

Yet, Collins says those parents often express shock and amazement when they learn of their children’s marijuana use.  He says they offer the usual: “I don’t understand why he’s smoking. I do not give him drugs. I tired tell him to leave that area and do not do that.” 

Asked if he makes an impression on parents who use marijuana in front of their children, the guidance counselor laughed resignedly.  “Oh, you don’t really get very far,” he said, adding, “I’m being honest!”

“There have been some parents who have expressed regret about their lifestyle, which has resulted in the child’s behaviour and lifestyle,” Collins said.  “But there are some who don’t have a problem with the smoking. They’re not going to change that,” he added.

In the best interest of the child

All in all, the home visit opens the door of communication between parents and the school. This gets parents involved, making the job of the school counselors and administration a lot easier. 

The upshot is that when a child is aware of a supportive, ongoing relationship between the school and home, s/he will feel a lot less empowered to act up, skip classes, and play hooky from school; this results in a more empowered home, school and, most importantly, child.

Collins, the guidance counsellor, attests to this. “There are some parents who say, ‘I don’t have that problem with her or with him at home.’  But, after a while, sometimes they come and say, ‘Honestly, this is the reality,’” he said, adding that, “Some of them are very, very defensive, but once they realise it is in the best interest of the child, you’re not working to get the child thrown out of school, you’ve tried everything to save the child, you’re working towards the empowerment of the child – once they buy into that – then you get their cooperation.”

To empower participants, the Male Enlightenment Programme consists of five core components: Training and Skills Development; Mentoring; Life Skills Training; Recreational and Social Activities, and Spiritual Enrichment.

He is going to be a leader; he is not going to follow anybody

Last term, the boys studied barbering under Dion Browne of Reliable Barber Salon. The National Skills Training Programme purchased cutting machines and other equipment for the course. The boys gave each other haircuts, with Browne there at the school to hold their hands literally. They would start the haircuts, but Browne would finish them.

“I had to get the persons sitting to be comfortable with the persons who were doing it,” said Browne, who said the boys were fearful that another boy would push their “square” back or give them a patch. 

“I told them to just relax because I was going to have their hand,” Browne said, adding that, “I taught them how to hold the machine.  A lot of them had mechanics or techniques that were pretty good. They were flexible.”

Browne explained that he taught them how to cut with their wrist and not their hand. He said some of the boys seemed interested, but there was one in particular who displayed sheer detachment.

“The smallest guy in the bunch, he had a chip on his shoulder, man,” Browne said. He added that, “He would sit there like, ‘I don’t want to be here.’  And I would be like, ‘Just relax!  It’s only an hour.’ He was just there for being sake.”

Browne continued: “Come to find out that he was just following people.” 

The barber remembers this boy not just because “he was the smallest thing,” in his words.  “To be honest with you, his mechanics was one of the flawless ones I had out of all of them,” Browne said about his most uninterested student. 

Talking to Browne, it is obvious that he had formed an attachment to the participants of the Male Enlightenment Programme.  Browne said he spent time teaching them life skills as well as barbering. He also gave them free square cuts at his barber shop.

So I had to ask, “What was it like on the last day of class, saying goodbye to them?”  I joked: “Were they sad that they would not be getting their free haircuts?”

“That was kind of weird,” said Browne.  “I was going up there and everybody was just leaving. So I was like, ‘Why is everybody leaving?’” Browne said he soon found out that the guys were not sticking around because Collins, the guidance counsellor, was not present that day to keep them in check. 

“Only two of them stuck around out of about nine of them,” he said.  “They were a trip!” So they never got to say goodbye. 

The gloss of machismo prevailed.

Browne explained that one of the two boys who remained that last day of class would always encourage the boys to listen to him in class. 

“He is going to be a leader,” Browne said, adding that, “He is not going to follow anybody.”

Perhaps that is what it means to act like a man!