Team Beginning

Teach Love and Care Network/Ingwe Care, NPC (TLC) was founded in 2011 by two fulltime volunteers, Lorna Rutter and Marty Wallace, while working in the Bloekombos township in Cape Town, South Africa. They were later joined by Lorna’s husband, the late Reinaldo Rutter, and Steve Zimmerman to make up a board of directors.

It began through a contact with two crèches (ECD Centres), where there was a very apparent need for basic sanitary facilities (one had only pots for the children, the other only a nonworking toilet). As TLC became aware of other needs at these crèches, we talked to friends in the Cape Town community who wanted to help improve the crèches with the toilet facilities and other basic needs, such as painting, fixing leaking roofs, providing sleeping mats/blankets so the children weren’t on cold concrete floors; along with providing some books and teaching resources for the children and basic first aid courses for the staff of the facilities.

As TLC worked with these first two creches, the word spread to other female principals of 18 more crèches serving the Bloekombos area, who were all very encouraged and excited to see that there was hope for improving their own centres. These principals are all women who have been working for years on meagre resources and who do so out of love for the children.

The crèches in Bloekombos serve a crucial role in that they are providing decent jobs for the teachers they employ, as well as helping bring an income to the principals’ families. By assisting the principals in these ECD centres in meeting basic needs, we really can make a difference in the lives of the little ones for whom they care. The ECD centres’ focus on children’s educational, physical, spiritual and emotional development make them vital to the families they serve and to the entire Bloekombos community. Without the crèches, who serve around 1000 children, many parents would not be able to maintain employment to earn a living, thus further trapping their families in hopelessness and other social and economic problems. The crèches’ interventions in Bloekombos are imperative; if they did not exist, the children our future leaders would be severely neglected and pose only greater economic and physical threats to our country in the years to come.

ECD centres are the knitting that keeps our communities together, which is why helping them is the highest-ranking social development cause in the minds of government officials the world over. As Christians it is our duty to be the hands and the feet of Jesus!