The effects of a merciful heart

Abstract

In this article, I examine the relationship of charitable help that, through the persons and the work of caregivers, connects some donors to the young persons who grow up in home-based childcare institutions in contemporary Malaysia. The prism of my analysis is the small charity functions that take place within the homes that I have studied, which allow donors and receivers to elaborate, perfect and enact moral ideas of themselves and of their place in society. Because they stage the main characters of charity, the functions also give an insight into how, since an early age, children actively explore the dominant and largely ethnicized model of virtue and merit they are summoned to embody, thus making sense of their shared condition of “charity children”. This self-care work, I argue, inspired by Erica Bornstein’s study on Indian charity, is made possible by the “pure gift” core that characterizes donors and caretakers, as it frees the aided children from the necessity to “buy” their care back, which is otherwise requested in traditional child fostering.