It’s a typical Tuesday afternoon, and Maggy Fungula’s 9-year-old daughter, Simba, leaving school, gets into the front seat, backpack in her lap, and begins munching on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
The pair start rolling away down the sidewalk, Fungula at the driver’s seat of their ride-on kid’s car: A hot-pink, battery-powered convertible sports car. She got it as a gift for her daughter a couple of years ago, but Simba doesn’t like to drive, so now it’s Fungula’s primary mode of transportation.
“When I get in that little mood, I paint it,” she says cheerily. The car has recently been black, blue, and purple, and the colors complement the rainbow of plastic gummy bears dangling from a gold chain around her neck.
Fungula drives everywhere: To and from her daughter’s school, around the piers, up and down Mission Street, bumping music from a speaker.
“I don’t like walking,” Fungula says on another day we meet on the Golden Gate Greenway, as a car drives slowly past in the opposite lane. The smiling driver asks Fungula if she ran out of gas.
On her perch one foot off the ground, Fungula avoids stepping in feces on the sidewalk and drives at her own pace. “I’m in my little world,” she says.
She tries to keep her daughter in that world too, at times uneasy about raising her in the Tenderloin.
Fungula, who was born in Congo and raised in Oakland, has been on her own since she was 17. She struggled with homelessness and health issues, and tries to shield her daughter from what she can, though it isn’t always easy.
She’s seen a daytime shooting in her neighborhood; just a few days ago, she had to administer naloxone to a person she found overdosing on the street. Her daughter was there to watch her check the man’s pulse.
“She don’t know, she’s just a kid,” says Fungula, who knows the Tenderloin well enough to carry naloxone. “She think everything is a game.”
Fungula laughs, then suddenly turns somber. She encourages Simba to do well in school, and “stay away from negativity. It’s a lot of negativity out here, a lot.”
The pair are close, and Fungula plans to keep it that way. She lost her other eight children to the system while she was living on the streets and between friends’ homes, and struggling to care for them. She remembers getting kicked out of shelters early in the morning, and getting shuffled out of Muni.
“If you’re homeless and you’re Black, they take your kids from you,” Fungula said, adding that she also was suffering from mental health issues at the time. “It was horrible.”
When her daughter Simba was born nine years ago, Fungula was having seizures, and the newborn was taken away, too.
Luckily, she said, she got a placement at Ashbury House, a social rehabilitation treatment program for mothers with mental health needs. After a year, she got her daughter back full-time, and moved into a low-income housing building in the Tenderloin.
The two care for each other: Just last weekend, Simba noticed her mother go quiet in the bathroom, realized she was having a seizure, and called paramedics for help.
“I love my baby. I’d give my baby the world,” Fungula says. These days, she has two more babies to care for: Puppies Max and Pencil. This afternoon, Max is peeking out of a kangaroo pouch on the front of Fungula’s jacket.
When Max starts squealing, Fungula squawks back at him, then acquiesces and begins feeding him another peanut butter and jelly sandwich that she pulls from her bag.
“You sound like a monkey!” she tells the puppy sternly, bouncing him in her lap.
Though she and her car get plenty of attention on the streets, with people greeting her or stopping her for photos, Fungula says she feels safest at home with her daughter: Simba playing Roblox, Fungula watching “COPS.”
“I just pray to God,” Fungula says. “I stay to myself, take her to school, go home, and that’s it. I don’t bother nobody.”
Geesus Krist, 9 kids?