There is always a 6 p.m. traffic jam outside Wishing Well Daycare in Hayward. Three parents are there to pick up their kids after a 12-hour day and three more are there to drop them off for a 12-hour night.
Fouziya Bawazir directs the flow as owner of the 24-hour home-based childcare service she operates in her her single-story, three-bedroom home. She rotates 15 kids whose parents are single, with many working in essential services with schedules that are in flux.
“There are kids here all the time,” says Bawazir, an immigrant from Pakistan who arrived in Chicago in 1995, and moved to Hayward four years ago.“Some parents have to work at night and have no place to drop the kids. I cannot say, ‘No,’ so I do it 24 hours.”
Bawazir takes in kids on weekends. She takes in kids on holidays if need be. While not yet 50, she considers herself a grandmother who can always be counted on because she is always home, except for Sundays when she shops for groceries to use during the coming week.
“I know how the parents are struggling,” says Bawazir, who raised two kids as a single mom with a full-time job herself, as an insurance verification agent for a hospital in Chicago. She could have used the type of service she is now providing. “Every day I was running and running and struggling and struggling.”
The sheer relentlessness of operating a 24-hour day care center will be brought to light Friday when “Through the Night,” a feature-length documentary on round-the-clock child care launches at the Roxie Theatre’s virtual cinema. The film, which will reach PBS in the spring, is about Dee’s Tots in New Rochelle, N.Y., and the single working mothers who depend on it. Dee’s is run by Patrick and Deloris Hogan, a married couple who split shifts and take turns sleeping.
“This work is hard,” Deloris testifies in the movie. “I’m so tired that I feel like if I lay down I might not get back up.” But there are two of them at Dee’s and just one of Bawazir at Wishing Well.
Bawazir was sent a link to watch the documentary in advance but has not been able to concentrate for more than a minute before being interrupted. “I have to check up on the kids even when they are sleeping,” she says. But she has seen enough to know that it was made before the onset of COVID-19, which makes the job even tougher than depicted in the film.
“We are working harder than before with disinfecting everything,” she says.
To help enforce the protocols and and run the center, Bawazir has two daytime helpers, but she also needs a uniformed traffic cop to handle the transfer of kids. Parents and kids must stay in the car until summoned in order to keep everybody six feet apart. Once inside, Bawazir allows siblings close contact but keeps everybody else spread out while taking lessons, eating and sleeping. She invented a 20-second song which the kids sing, end-to-end, while washing their hands. Everybody gets a health check upon arrival and any child with a temperature or runny nose gets sent back home, as much as it hurts Bawazir to do so.
“We have to work together to save each other,” she says. “We are like a family.”
Bawazir is not the only home-based childcare provider to offer 24-hour service in Hayward. Her own mother also does it at Day & Night Daycare, and there is Tree House Daycare. But Bawazir may be the only one who does it on her own, overnight.
“It is life consuming,” says Gina Fromer, CEO of the Children’s Council of San Francisco, a referral organization dedicated to supporting the childcare system. “The caregivers tend to give and give and give. They sacrifice their own lives to support those childrens’ needs.”
The City and County of San Francisco has 700 licensed home-based childcare facilities but only 5% offer overnight care, according to statistics provided by the Children’s Council. Kim Kruckel, an attorney with the Child Care Law Center in Berkeley, knows of only a few of homes Bay Area-wide to offer the overnight service.
“It is expensive to provide due to labor costs,” Kruckel says. “Twenty-four hour day care doesn’t pencil out money-wise and that is why there aren’t that many of them.”
Overnight childcare was not in Bawazir’s business plan. When she opened Wishing Well two years ago, she planned to run it on the standard 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. schedule. But Bawazir could not refuse a parent who called pleading for an extension. She’d been on the pleading end herself when her own kids were in daycare in Chicago.
“The kids are asleep and they have to pick them up and put them in the car and take them home,” says Bawazir, who couldn’t bear to see it. So she started allowing kids to stay over and that led to her overnight service. Lights are out at 9:30 p.m. and any child still there from the day service is allowed to stay over.
The operating license does not limit the hours a service can be open, but there is a ratio of providers to children which varies by county. With staff, Bawazir is licensed to have as many as 14 kids at a time, but no more than 8 overnight without adding staff.
“She plays a huge role in allowing me to go to work full time during the day and then go to school in the evenings,” says Aisha Esa, 29 of Oakland, who works at a non-profit while attending nursing school. This requires her to drop off her daughter Lilliana Vallette, 5, at Wishing Well and pick her up at 10:30 p.m. three nights a week and at 5:30 p.m. three nights a week, leaving out only Sundays.
“She is literally my daughter’s second mom,” Esa says.
As such Bawazir throws a birthday party for each of her kids, with a cake from Costco and balloons. She was off on Thanksgiving this year, but she still took in four kids who had nowhere else to go.
“This is something that makes you feel great by just doing the job,” she says.
Sasha Jones, 32, of Hayward has been using Wishing Well since her daughter, Ivy Hubbard, was born four years ago. Jones works full time as a caregiver with a second job that often causes Ivy to be left there 10 hours a day. Sometimes, when it is too late or Jones is too tired, Jones leaves Ivy there overnight in safekeeping. She’s never heard Ivy cry or complain when she drops her off or picks her up.
“I don’t know where I would be without Fouziya because I don’t have family here to fall back on,” she says. “There will be moments when it is just me and Ivy and she will say ‘I love Fouziya and Fouziya loves me,’ I’m like ‘Oh my God.’ ”
Bawazir’s clients range in age from 8 months to 8 years and she’s taken them as young as two months. They are turned out at age 13 but that is not the end of the relationship.
“They promise they will come back to see me when they become doctors and firemen,” she says. “One little guy promises he will come see me when he becomes President of the United States.”
Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: swhiting@sfchronicle.com Twitter:@samwhitingsf
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