INSTITUTIONALIZED CHILD CARE IN URBAN SOUTH AFRICA

extremely obvious that these are the most critical needs that a center must focus on, but
these are needs that many of the children have been critically deprived of during the early
years of his or her life. Food and shelter are often the first types of provisions that are
expected from institutionalized child care, and in the case of 5Cees, those needs are given
top priority. Around the perimeter of the center’s campus, its outside walls were adorned
with handprinted quotes such as “there is no sense in promising a better future for a child
if that child is going hungry today.”
Three of the five largest expenses listed on the center’s budget were directly related
to either food or shelter. In addition to the center’s planned budget, a large portion of the
goods that were donated in-kind consisted of either food or clothing. On one occasion,
when the children had been dropped off at school and there was a daytime lull of activity,
Sarah Sunker asked if I would go on an errand with Marc to pick up a donation of food at
a nearby church. The church turned out to be visibly wealthy with a large congregation.
They contributed dozens of bags of maize meal and rice, between 40-50 jars of peanut
butter, a similar amount of bottles of juice mix and cooking oil, along with numerous
stacks of canned food. Marc and I spent close to an hour loading all of the donated goods
on to the pickup truck, leaving its cargo bed nearly full. While the financial documents of
the center reveal that it placed a high priority on food, even more food was acquired
through donations that weren’t represented in those statements.
Education is also a top priority of the center, and although it is higher up on the
Maslow hierarchy, it is widely seen as the pathway through which children can
eventually become able to provide for their own basic needs as adults. If the biggest
expectation that the center instilled among the children was that of adequate food and
141