When I was twenty years old, I turned my life around. Instead of making multiple New Year’s resolutions in the beginning of that year, I made one lifetime resolution: to never be flat broke again.

Life in a poor, black family in the South African townships meant that sometimes you wouldn’t even have ten cents to your name. And you can’t even borrow that ten cents from someone else because no one around you has ten cents to spare. It’s not like we were so poor that ten cents was the difference between life and death, no, we had money, but it wasn’t up for grabs.

During school, I was given two rand each day for lunch, and, in the two years after I finished school, my mom would always make sure I had enough money to buy the things I needed. But I’d always exhaust it all right away and then go back to having absolutely no money. I hated that, so I decided to start saving my money in an old Nike shoebox that I hid from my family in my closet. I shared my room with my eighteen-year-old brother, Lars, and my older sister and her seven-year-old daughter, Pumpkin lived down the hall.

I saved a lot of money: I put so much change in that box that I had to take some out and spend it at the end of the year because the weight of it was destroying my box. After three years, I had withdrawn money from the box a couple of times, and I had to replace the old, worn-out box with a new one. It wasn’t much, considering that I was a jobless 23-year-old guy, but in my own right, I was financially stable.

When I was 23 years old, my fifteen-year-old nephew named Gift came to stay with my family. Gift was a dark skinned, short soccer player with a nice fade haircut. His smile was decorated with a silver tooth and his confidence made him seem a lot older than he was. Just one look at him and any smart person would know not to trust him. He was my older brother’s son but he had lived with his mother until she recently died. My older brother, Gift’s father, lived in the suburbs with his other family, but Gift didn’t like visiting them because his stepmother didn’t like him. Despite his name, he didn’t look like a gift anyone would actually want to receive.

My mom, Gift’s grandma, wanted Gift to feel at home so she told Gift he could go eat whatever he wanted in the kitchen. He ate six slices of bread, and then three hours later, when he felt more at home, he returned to the kitchen and ate about ten more slices. Gift had no respect for the rest of us in the house, and it was behaviour like this that made this clear.

Tell us: How do you think Gift will affect this family’s overall dynamic?