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Masizame Children's Center

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3 MCC Centers

Masizame Children's Shelter
Plettenberg Bay, South Africa

Summary

The Masizame Children’s Shelter was started with a focus on the street child, but they have expanded their vision to reach the high-risk child through offering preventative and outreach services. They work very closely with all other role players in the children’s lives, insisting that they have a role to play in the planned care of these children. To achieve this they hold regular Role Players Meetings where everyone commits to the part they have to play. For example community organizations such as Youth Future Data have agreed to change their set life skills programs to include these children; for the schools to have more patience with these challenging children and to link up with the staff at Masizame in case of problems and be trained by Masizame in behavior management rather than to allow the children to become early drop-outs.

With this expanded vision, through experience and a close relationship with the schools, the staff at Masizame has found that the street child fails out of the school system in Grades 1, 2, and 3 largely because they never received any type of pre-school education. The social circumstances of their homes are extremely bad. In response to this the Masizame staff have started to offer a free Pre-School Education together with feeding, clothing, medical programs, etc. In conjunction with the Educare Program they also train mothers in managing crisis cases informally to hand it over to professionals. These mothers also received Montessori Training so that they can help with the Educare Program. In life skills camps they assist parents to better understand and cope with their children in their uplifted state after going through Masizame’s programs.

Through various fund-raising (in South Africa) and community presentations the Masizame staff aims to educate the community and raise public awareness about the high risk and street children. In assisting the community and all role players to achieve a better understanding of these special children the staff at Masizame can truly and happily say that there are not any hardened street children in the center of the town of Plettenberg Bay. That is quite a feat.