An Orphanage in Cape Town

Sammanfattning: To collect data for this report a field study was performed at an orphanage in Cape Town, South Africa. I carried out volunteer work for eight weeks to find out more about the children’s situations. I wanted to find out what it was like to work at an orphanage for children in need and what the employees were doing to help. The children’s ages ranged from five to eighteen years old and they all lived together, although boys and girls slept in different rooms. Before I went to South Africa, I thought that an orphanage was a place for children without parents, who had been abandoned when they where infants. Some of the children at the orphanage come from situations like this, but many of them have family who they need help and protection from. Their own parents cannot take care of them because of different social problems such as sexual abuse, drug abuse or poverty. During the field study qualitative research was performed, where the people that I worked with and the children in the orphanage were participating. Observation was also included in my field work. The result of the field study was very interesting. The most important findings from my results were that all of the people I spoke to said that they would like to see some changes at the orphanage. They came up with plenty of different ideas to make the environment better. I interviewed five employees at the orphanage and all of them said that they would like to extend the amount of employees, have better communication among themselves, therapy sessions - and more weekend activities for the children. During this period of the field study I interviewed a lot of children of different ages, but out of the interviews six where used in this report.