Faces of the Abandoned

China's orphanages used to be seen as dumping grounds for unwanted children. No longer. An on-scene report from a volunteer caregiver.

By Noelle Chun | Newsweek Web Exclusive

The first time I met Jun Jun, she was quieter than the other children. The reason? She'd been separated from her foster parents and returned to a children's home to ready herself for permanent adoption. At first, she padded around in her puffy purple dress, eyebrows arched as she cautiously watched other kids play before jumping in. But she soon warmed up. Revving back a few paces, she sprinted into my arms. I tossed her up and down amid happy squeals of "yah yah yah yah!" She played with a boldness that often left her on her head or flat on her face. The caretakers practiced lunging as they reached to catch her.

I met Jun Jun during the two and a half weeks I spent in Beijing and its vicinities volunteering at homes for Chinese orphans. I wasn't sure what to expect before I arrived. With access to the homes typically limited, most foreign perceptions of the country's orphanages are informed by pieces such as "The Dying Rooms," a 1995 British hidden-camera documentary that gave rise to a scathing expose of neglect of Chinese orphans.

It's different now. While the conditions of the hundreds of state-run orphanages in China are still largely unknown, U.S. agencies participating in the China Center of Adoption Affairs's international adoption program say that at least some of China's state-run homes are now equipped with better facilities, such as new cribs, heaters, air conditioners and medical equipment. There are no definitive estimates on the number of orphans in China, though Children's Hope International believes there are around 600,000, with 70,000 of them in state-run programs. "Orphanage care in China is superior to that found in any other country," says Katie Biddle of the Hawaii International Adoption Agency. "They really put money into the kids."

The privately run facilities I worked at certainly bore no resemblance to those dying rooms. Instead, I found simple but clean and conscientiously run facilities, taking close care of more than 100 children.

By the time I left, I saw a new side of China. I had seen the painted faces of Shanghai girls in their shiny heels. I had also seen the bare feet of the countryside. But this was the first time I saw the faces of the abandoned. The classic foreign stereotype is that Chinese orphanages are filled with young girls, pushed out of the family by the dual forces of preference for boys and the nation's one-child policy. But these homes were different. Workers cared for the frailest of children, those suffering from serious birth abnormalities such as heart defects, anal atresia, cerebral palsy, autism, spina bifida, seizure disorders and other cosmetic abnormalities. Here are some of my experiences:

BAN BAN'S BATTLE
In Shanxi province, it was hard tell when the day began and ended. The washing machine labored at all hours with its loads of dirty cloth diapers; infants wheezed; oxygen machines hummed and toddlers squealed. The day passed in three shifts of ayi--or aunties, the common term for a caregiver--with one ayi for every two children at any given time. The four home directors lived on-site in rooms adjacent to the main office. The night that 1-month-old Li Li almost died, they traversed sleeplessly between the babies' cribs and their own iron bunk beds, monitoring the delicate little girl's crashing oxygen levels. Earlier that morning, the doctors had said the new rattle in her lung was pneumonia. Through the night, the ayi tirelessly worked to support Li Li's dying respiratory system until the medicine could kick in.


Illnesses such as pneumonia were common, especially among the infants with their fragile immune systems. The ayi kept a special quarantine room with restricted access to minimize infections, but when the humidity got bad enough, that wasn't sufficient. Sick babies often spent hours in the nearby clinic, hooked up to IVs with wet towels on their heads, the ayi stroking their tiny hands while doctors hunted for miniscule veins. When Ban Ban first arrived at the home, the pudgy 2-year-old had been in a coma for months. She suffered from a seizure disorder so severe that the constant trickle of medicine kept her unconscious.

Beth, the home director, took the toddler under wing, following doctors' orders as she slowly reduced her seizure medication. Surprisingly, as Ban Ban's medicine decreased, so did her seizures. Not too soon after, Ban Ban awoke and started crying for the first time in months. In a small way, Ban Ban was re-introduced to life.

THE ROAD TO BEIJING
Bao Bao doesn't sound like he was born with a birth defect. But you can't miss it when you look at the 4-year-old. The middle of his forehead protruded into a bump about the size of a baby eggplant. It slipped down his nose, where his nostrils were left slightly open. At the peak of his lips, there was a delicate slit. Bao Bao had been told about another place--America--where he will receive surgery to smooth out his forehead and reshape his nose. When he is big and strong enough, that's when he will go.

But that will come later. For now, Bao Bao, two ayi and I sprawled across the beds of a three-story sleeper car on our way to Beijing, where he was to be taken into the care of a new foster family. He spent the eight-hour ride by singing "Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star" in Chinese and by eating Bugles, peaches, bread, instant noodles, cucumber, dried haw candy and strawberry and milk drinks. "Wo chi bao le, jiu la si le!" he cried, in lispy Mandarin: "I eat 'till I'm full, then poop to death!"

Bao Bao was not the only orphan going to Beijing. Across from Bao Bao and his ayi, 1-month-old Xiao Cong curled up quietly against the breast of his caretaker. Cong Cong was born with anal atresia, which meant he had no anus. Weeks earlier, doctors had attempted reconstruction, but the surgery failed--possibly because Cong Cong was still too young. That left him dangerously susceptible to infection. Staff at the orphanage wanted him treated in Beijing, where hospital resources are better. Halfway through the journey, the man in the bunk above Bao Bao descended. He paged through Bao Bao's photo memory book with him.

"Who is that?" the man asked.

"Bao Bao!"

"Who are your mother and father?"

"He has no mother and father," said Bao Bao's ayi. "Bao Bao, who is your mommy?"

Bao Bao starts listing names immediately.

"Who are these people?" asked the man.

"They're the aunties in the orphanage," the ayi responded, smiling.

*********

THE VALUE OF A DYING LIFE
The building is almost a mirror image of the Beijing children's home across the way. The room has the same large playroom, matching foam play mats on the ground and bedrooms with cribs. The ayi even wear the same blue floral tops.

The difference, though, is immeasurable. This is the place children come when all possibilities of cure are exhausted. This is the orphan hospice. The children laughed and rolled around on the play mats, clear oxygen tubes dangling from their noses. Two toddlers with inoperable heart defects sat on the laps of the ayi. The youngsters were small and thin for their ages. Their mouths, fingers and toes were tinged with purple hue from lack of oxygen, as if they had eaten too many blueberries.


Nearby, a boy and a girl, both 2-year-olds with encephalitis, lay on pillows on the play surface. Internal fluid had inflated the top of their heads to about the size of a soccer balls. Their delicate skin looked shiny and translucent, the tautness pulling a vastness into their eyes, as they looked around wildly. They held my hand tightly when I slipped my finger in their palms. They smiled at dangling toys.

Some of the children had to stay in their cribs, spina bifida curving their backs into an extreme S shape. The ayi wheeled their beds into the main playroom, so they could join everyone else.

This home only gives up when the last thread of hope is severed.

The young girl with encephalitis, Tai Tai, went to doctors around the country to see if an operation could save her. All the doctors said they could not place a shunt to drain the fluid, but the hospice workers still want to try one more doctor in Hong Kong.

A dying life, hospice workers say, is just as valuable as a living one. They bounce the children up and down, played ball with them and hugged them to fill the babies' pitifully last few days with affection. Although the organization itself is not a religious one, some Roman Catholic staff sometimes baptize the babies before they die, hoping to give them a heavenly Father in absence of an earthly one.

ON ADOPTION
Permanent adoption is the best option for these children. Jun Jun was one of the lucky ones. Her ride arrived in the early morning, while the directing staff was still eating breakfast in the kitchen and Jun Jun was still asleep. The ayi gently shook her awake and dressed her in the prettiest clothes they could find--green pants with embroidered flowers, a yellow dress with a collar and tapered sleeves, and pink plastic sandals. When it was time to go, Jun Jun climbed into the van herself. She was smiling as the door closed.

For the most part, where adopted children live remained a mystery to the ayi. Children who still had physical or mental abnormalities could not be adopted within China. But those like Jun Jun, who had come to the children's home with a cleft palate, could go anywhere in the world if they were in perfect health.

Esther, the youngest ayi to take care of Jun Jun, left before Jun Jun rolled away in the orphanage van. I found her inside the kitchen washing applesauce off plastic bowls. Her glasses seemed to need constant cleaning that morning, and she took them off frequently to wipe on her tunic.

Later on the way to the park, I asked her how she felt when she had to say goodbye. She took her glasses off again, wiped them and put them back on. And then she smiled. "I feel happy for them," she said. "I really don't like to say goodbye, but they are going to go to have a new family that loves them. We hope it for them all."

Editor's Note: Names of the children mentioned in this piece have been changed to protect their identities.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/77710/page/1






China-Babies Research

Adoption by the dozen: Couple parents 17 children

By Richard O Jones

Staff Writer

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

FAIRFIELD TWP. — "Christmas can be very loud around here," said Scott Rosenow, looking at the crowd of Christmas stockings hanging from the fireplace mantel.

But that was far from a complaint.

Forgive him if he says that with a fair amount of pride and indescribable joy.

Rosenow, 50, and his wife, Kathy, 48, have worked hard at creating a large and loving family, which in the last week has grown to 17 children with the finalization of three adoptions, plus a new son-in-law and a grandchild on the way.

The Rosenows have four biological children. Erin, their second, now 26, was born with severe learning disabilities and communication disorders, plus a damaged kidney and malformed bladder valves. Her first surgery was at age 3½.

The youngest, Ryan, now 18, was born without a right hand. Doctors at first told them there was nothing that could be done, but they met a team of surgeons in Louisville, Ky., who did the first of 25 surgeries when he was 10 months old. It was to get closer to these surgeons that the Rosenows moved from Alabama.

When Ryan was 2, Kathy heard a radio interview with Tim Burke, who gave up a $600,000 salary as a pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds so that he could help his wife, Christine, take care of the four special-needs children they adopted.

"Their story was fascinating, and we thought we could do that, too," Kathy said. "We had seen the bonding that had taken place between Ryan and Erin. They both were getting beat up by the world.

"Erin would come home from school crying because they were so hard on them, so we determined early on that our house would be a safe place for them. We taught them to treat each other with respect and we did not allow them to make fun of each other.

"When we started finding out about so many kids out there without a place to go, we started talking about adoption."

It wasn't easy for them, nor something they undertook right away. The cost of Erin's therapies and the various operations on her and Ryan had emptied the family's savings accounts, and adoptions — especially international adoptions — were very expensive.

Six years later, they heard about Nathan, a newborn who was abandoned outside an orphanage in Bolivia, so young that his umbilical cord was still attached.

"That's our son," Scott said. "We've got to get him out of there."

And when Kathy protested that they just couldn't afford it, Scott replied, "That's God's problem."

For four months they sent out letters and explained the situation to everyone they knew. They eventually borrowed $7,000 to get the rest of the money so they could go to Bolivia to get their son.

"While we were there, we were amazed at the poverty," Kathy said. "We'd never left the country before, and we realized that in America we have everything and they have almost nothing. We saw disabled people begging in the streets, and we realized that was the life Nathan would have been destined to have had we not gone down there to get him."

After they brought Nathan home, they'd watch him play with his brothers and sisters on the floor.

"Before long, we started thinking we could do one more, but it just kept going," Kathy said.

The family has or will, in the near future, adopt 13 children.

"We weren't trying to build a family," Scott said. "We were trying to save a child."

http://www.middletownjournal.com/hp/content/oh/story/news/local/2007/12/26/mj122607rosenowmain.html





China-Babies Research

Dying orphan saved by Chinese transplant

2007-12-21

The adopted American girl Kailee Wells, her mother Linda Wells and Wang Lin share a light moment at an event organized by the Red Cross Society of China held in Beijing yesterday. This was the first time for Kailee to meet Wang who donated bone marrow to save the 10-year-old girl.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

AN adopted American girl who had been dying from bone marrow failure but survived after a transplant finally met her donor in an emotional get-together yesterday in her homeland of China.

Ten-year-old Kailee Wells presented a tearful Wang Lin with a picture frame inscribed: "You are my hero. I will love you forever," The Associated Press reported.

Wang swept Kailee up in a big hug when they met in Beijing at the gathering organized by the Red Cross Society of China.

"To see her standing before me, I feel so moved, so happy," said Wang, 30, a doctor from the eastern city of Hangzhou. "The fact that we could be matched among this sea of people is a matter of fate."

The bespectacled Kailee, wearing a maroon dress with white lace, stood shyly by and held Wang's hand.

Born in the central province of Hunan, Kailee was found abandoned on the steps of a training institute for teachers in the city of Changde. She spent a year in an orphanage before being adopted by the Wells family of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Just after turning five, she fell ill with aplastic anemia, in which the bone marrow stops producing blood platelets and red and white blood cells.

After a desperate and unsuccessful search on international marrow donor Websites, Kailee's mother, Linda Wells, came to China in 2003 hoping to find a match, preferably from a sibling. But none was found.

In 2005, from a donor pool that had expanded to about 300,000 people, Wang - who is the father of a young son - was found as a suitable candidate.

After one unsuccessful transplant with cells that were not a perfect match, Kailee had her second in November 2005 with Wang's bone marrow but her blood counts decreased.

In February, she had her third transplant - which her mother said was her last chance - and it was successful.

At yesterday's ceremony, Wang gave Kailee a calendar with photos of his family.

When asked how she felt about meeting her benefactor, Kailee said one word: "Pleasure."

Owen Wells, her father, told Wang he was "Kailee's special daddy" as he shook hands with him.

Kailee and her family, who now live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, say they will be spending Christmas in China and want to help recruit more marrow donors. They will also make a trip to Hunan to meet other orphans, The AP said.

The number of China's bone marrow donors on the registry has grown from tens of thousands in 2003 to 700,000 today, thanks to a better understanding of the procedure by ordinary Chinese citizens.

"More people need to have basic knowledge of it. At present they are frightened when they hear about marrow donation," said Hong Junling, director of the Red Cross Society's blood and stem cell program. "They need to know there's no harm to their health."

Even with 700,000 potential donors, only 60 percent of people who need a match will find one, Hong said. Having between 2 million and 5 million people on the registry will mean the demand can be fully met, he said.

http://www.shanghaidaily.com/sp/article/2007/200712/20071221/article_342454_1.htm





China-Babies Research

Love At First Sight Saves Child

By Ann Rubin

(KSDK) - His future was uncertain at an orphanage in China. But his photo struck a cord with a family from Ballwin and they were determined to rescue him.

The bonds have a tight-knit family, though like most, they've faced their challenges. The children, Samantha and Drew were born with ectodermal dysplasia, a genetic disorder that affects their teeth, hair, and ability to sweat.

It was at a support group for the disorder that they first heard about Ben.

Kevin Bond says, "His little needs were pressing he was on his last opportunity to be adopted."

Ben suffered from a variation of the same thing, except he was at an orphanage in China.

Carrie Bond says, "We actually were not looking to adopt at all."

Still she says, they decided to look at his photo and say a prayer for the little boy to get a family. She says, "I pulled him up and fell head over heels in love. It was like I just knew."

Within 24-hours, the Bonds committed to the adoption. Ten months later, they brought Ben back to the U.S. But his condition was much more complicated than they realized. Ben has a cleft lip and palate, as well as cleft hands and feet. He also has problems with his hearing from infections left untreated at the orphanage.

Doctors at St. Louis children's hospital say he'll likely need at least ten surgeries. Dr. Gregory Borschel says, "This kind of stuff would be unlikely for him to get in china so we value greatly this team approach."

Kevin Bond says, "All the extra needs that he has and extra expenses, has really revealed what it costs to adopt. But it just drives our love for him deeper and deeper and deeper."

The costs they say are nothing compared to the benefits they've received. This Christmas, Ben's stocking hangs with the others. This Christmas, the Bonds say their family seems complete.

Carrie says, "Something was missing and we didn't even know it until he was here."

In the coming months, Ben will undergo procedures for his hands and his ears. His family wants to get him ready for pre-school in the fall.

http://www.ksdk.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=137209





China-Babies Research

Study Quantifies Orphanage Link to I.Q.

By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: December 21, 2007

Psychologists have long believed that growing up in an institution like an orphanage stunts children’s mental development but have never had direct evidence to back it up.


Now they do, from an extraordinary years-long experiment in Romania that compared the effects of foster care with those of institutional child-rearing.

The study, being published on Friday in the journal Science, found that toddlers placed in foster families developed significantly higher I.Q.’s by age 4, on average, than peers who spent those years in an orphanage.

The difference was large — eight points — and the study found that the earlier children joined a foster family, the better they did. Children who moved from institutional care to families after age 2 made few gains on average, though the experience varied by child. Both groups, however, had significantly lower I.Q.’s than a comparison group of children raised by their biological families.

Some developmental psychologists had sharply criticized the study and its sponsor, the MacArthur Foundation, for researching a question whose answer seemed obvious. But previous efforts to compare institutional care and foster care suffered from serious flaws, mainly because no one knew whether children who landed in orphanages were different in unknown ways from those in foster care. Experts said the new study should put to rest any doubts about the harmful effects of institutionalization — and might help speed adoptions from countries that still allow them.

“Most of us take it as almost intuitive that being in a family is better for humans than being in an orphanage,” said Seth Pollak, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, who was not involved in the research. “But other governments don’t like to be told how to handle policy issues based on intuition.”

“What makes this study important,” Dr. Pollak went on, “is that it gives objective data to say that if you’re going to allow international adoptions, then it’s a good idea to speed things up and get kids into families quickly.”

In recent years many countries, including Romania, have banned or sharply restricted American families from adopting local children. In other countries, adoption procedures can drag on for many months. In 2006, the latest year for which numbers are available, Americans adopted 20,679 children from abroad, more than half of them from China, Guatemala and Russia.

The authors of the new study, led by Dr. Charles H. Zeanah Jr. of Tulane and Charles A. Nelson III of Harvard and Children’s Hospital in Boston, approached Romanian officials in the late 1990s about conducting the study. The country had been working to improve conditions at its orphanages, which became infamous in the early 1990s as Dickensian warehouses for abandoned children.

After gaining clearance from the government, the researchers began to track 136 children who had been abandoned at birth. They administered developmental tests to the children, and then randomly assigned them to continue at one of Bucharest’s six large orphanages or join an adoptive family. The foster families were carefully screened and provided “very high-quality care,” Dr. Nelson said.

On I.Q. tests taken at 54 months, the foster children scored an average of 81, compared with 73 among the children who continued in an institution. The children who moved into foster care at the youngest ages tended to show the most improvement, the researchers found.

The comparison group of youngsters who grew up in their biological families had an average I.Q. of 109 at the same age, said the researchers, who announced their preliminary findings in Romania as soon as they were known.

“Institutions and environments vary enormously across the world and within countries,” Dr. Nelson said, “but I think these findings generalize to many situations, from kids in institutions to those in abusive households and even bad foster care arrangements.”

In setting up the study, the researchers directly addressed the ethical issue of assigning children to institutional care, which was suspected to be harmful.

“If a government is to consider alternatives to institutional care for abandoned children, it must know how the alternative compares to the standard care it provides,” they wrote. “In Romania, this meant comparing the standard of care to a new and alternative form of care.”

Any number of factors common to institutions could work to delay or blunt intellectual development, experts say: the regimentation, the indifference to individual differences in children’s habits and needs; and most of all, the limited access to caregivers, who in some institutions can be responsible for more than 20 children at a time.

Dr. Pollak said, “The evidence seems to say that for humans, we need a lot of responsive care giving, an adult who recognizes our distinct cry, knows when we’re hungry or in pain, and gives us the opportunity to crawl around and handle different things, safely, when we’re ready.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/21/us/21foster.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&ref=us&adxnnlx=1198591943-rIYawrUM9vlO8Z2NJ3dYiw





China-Babies Research

Kailee Wells - Greets Marrow Donor

BEIJING (AP) — An adopted American girl who had been dying from bone marrow failure but survived after a transplant finally met her donor in an emotional ceremony Thursday in her homeland of China.



Ten-year-old Kailee Wells presented a tearful Wang Lin with a picture frame inscribed with the words: "You are my hero. I will love you forever."

Wang swept Kailee up in a big hug when they met at the event organized by the Red Cross Society of China.

"To see her standing before me, I feel so moved, so happy," said Wang, 30, a doctor from the eastern city of Hangzhou. "The fact that we could be matched among this sea of people is a matter of fate."

The bespectacled Kailee, wearing a maroon dress with white lace, stood shyly by and held Wang's hand.

Born in the central province of Hunan, Kailee was found abandoned on the steps of a training institute for teachers in the city of Changde. She spent a year in an orphanage before being adopted by Owen and Linda Wells.

Just after turning 5, she fell ill with aplastic anemia, in which the bone marrow stops producing blood platelets and red and white blood cells.

After a desperate and unsuccessful search on global marrow donor bases, Mrs. Wells came to China in 2003 in hopes of finding a match, preferably from a sibling. But none was found.

In 2005, amid a donor pool that had expanded to about 300,000 people, Wang — who himself has a young son — was found as a suitable candidate.

After one unsuccessful transplant with cells that were not a perfect match, Kailee had her second in 2005 with Wang's bone marrow, but her blood counts decreased.

In February, she had a third transplant — which her mother said was her last chance — and it was successful.

At Thursday's ceremony, Wang gave Kailee a calendar with photos of his family.

When asked how she felt about meeting her benefactor, Kailee said one word: "Pleasure."

Owen Wells told Wang he was "Kailee's special daddy" as he shook hands with him.

Kailee and her family, who live in Milwaukee, Wis., say they will be spending Christmas in China and want to help recruit marrow donors. They will also make a trip to Hunan to meet orphans.

The number of China's bone marrow donors on the registry has grown from tens of thousands in 2003 to 700,000 today, thanks to increased understanding of the procedure by Chinese.

"More people need to have basic knowledge of it. Now they feel horror when they hear about marrow donation," said Hong Junling, director of the Red Cross Society's blood and stem cell program. "They need to know there's no harm to their health."

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g48xGx93Adopes7iAdoMgqz3zAJgD8TL77VG1






China-Babies Research