Unicef Places Numbers of Abandoned around 100,000 per year

Abandoned and Orphaned Children
Unicef

An estimated 100,000 Chinese children are abandoned each year, most of them disabled or girls. Some studies show this figure increasing. New laws have eased restrictions on domestic adoption, so more Chinese parents are adopting these children, and this is encouraging.

Evidence of neglect several years ago resulted in a significant effort by the government to improve conditions at China's Child Welfare Institutes (CWIs), and progress has certainly been made. China has adopted new policies and guidelines that promote de-institutionalisation in providing protection and care for abandoned children through family- and community-based approaches to child care, such as foster families. Even so, most abandoned children are still placed in CWIs, which basically function as orphanages.

Great Domestic Adoption Story

A special congratulations to our friends Michael and Dawn Hooks, who have just adopted a beautful baby. Follows is a letter from them and some photos of this amazing story.



Dear Family & Friends & a bunch of others on my email list,

I hope you enjoy the pictures of our new baby girl. Yes, we have a newborn baby, Hannah May Hooks, born on Saturday evening, July 28th at 7:12 pm.

God has definitely shown His amazing blessing this last weekend. The story of this blessing still seems unbelievable to me…

On Friday, Antioch Adoptions called to say they are showing our profile to a birthmother. On Saturday at 6:00 pm, the agency called to tell us that this birthmother did not choose us to interview, but there was another birthmother in the hospital in labor and they wanted to show her our profile. Of course, we said sure. We waited to hear what would happen. I was very nervous/excited/hopeful and called at 9:00 am on Sunday to find out what I could. I was told that she gave birth at 7:30 pm the night before (Sat), went home from the hospital, and would meet with the birthparent counselor at 4:00 pm that day (Sun) to choose a family by looking at five profiles (including ours).

At 6:00 pm on Sunday, the agency called us…. The birthparents had chosen us to adopt their baby and we needed to leave early Monday morning to drive up to Monroe, WA to pick up the baby from the hospital!!! We scrambled to cancel appointments for the next day, rushed to the store to buy diapers and formula, and packed for the day. We left our house at 7 am in the morning, dropped Danica off at her Grandma Hooks house, and took off for the hospital. We arrived at the hospital at 11:00 am and were immediately taken to see our little baby girl. After a long and amazing day at the hospital, we arrived back home with our new baby around 11 pm or so.



We are so thankful for this precious amazing baby. She is healthy and so sweet. She is very calm and quiet and Danica is so excited to have her baby sister. There are so many little details (which I didn’t write about) that had to be in place for this to work – God definitely had His hand in every piece – from the birthparents, to the adoption agency, to the FBI who sent in our fingerprint result just on time, to the nurse at the hospital who called our adoption agency…. What a miracle! I hope you enjoy the pictures. Thanks to all of you who have prayed for us to have the baby we desired. God has answered our prayer in an amazing way.




It was quite a shock to us – things happened so quickly! We are sooo busy getting ready for our new baby (buying stuff, setting up her room, and helping Danica adjust) while at the same time taking care of her (bottles, diapers, cuddles, and a trip to the pediatrician) and making sure we do all the legal stuff for the adoption. Today, finally, the birthparents rights will be terminated and we will be her legal guardians. The lawyer goes to court at 2:00 pm. In a few months, the adoption will be “finalized.” I want you all to know about this amazing answer to our prayer – our beautiful healthy newborn baby girl!

Love,

Michael & Dawn Hooks

Best Friends

While conducting research for one of our families, we were able to get some amazing precious photos. With the families permission, this picture is of Shelby and her best friend in China.



View Shelby's Gallery here.

You can read more about this beautiful child and her forever family on Donna's Blog.

USM L-A China Team Spends 18 Days Learning About China's Orphanages

Only two percent of the millions of children in Chinese orphanages will find an adoptive home. The deaf, the disabled, and the disfigured are by far the least likely. But people and organizations are making a difference. In June, a team of 23 Mainers from USM L-A College spent 18 days in China doing just that. This is their story.

By Rex Rhoades
Executive Editor
China's Orphans Sunjournal Website

She arrived in a cardboard box, as Chinese orphans often do. A one-week-old baby girl brought to this orphanage in central China by several blue-suited police officers.


The college students from Maine had spent weeks reading about the abandoned babies that result from China’s population-control policies. But nothing could prepare them for the moment they would peer into the eyes of an abandoned child.

‘I wanted the emotional pain to stop just long enough for me to catch my breath.’
— Deborah Marstaller

‘They are just so needy. Those are the kids that are like lost souls.’
— Deb Como-Kepler

‘It was hard to see suffering and not really know what to do.’
— Melissa Kopka

Deborah Marstaller of New Gloucester had a pained, faraway look in her eyes as she held the tiny bundle, the mid-morning sunlight pouring through a nearby window. She pressed a bottle of formula to the child’s lips.

Cribs lined the plain concrete walls of the infant room. Nearby, two babies with cerebral palsy shared a bamboo mat in one crib, their tiny, thin bodies rigid and contorted. One was thought to be near death.

“This work was like experiencing labor,” Marstaller would later write in her journal. “I wanted the emotional pain to stop just long enough for me to catch my breath.”

For many of the students, this was perhaps the lowest point of their 18-day service-learning project in China. The group included about a dozen University of Southern Maine students, three Lewiston-Auburn College faculty members, several local residents and one reporter.

Some of the students were studying occupational therapy, others early childhood development or psychology. For many, this would be a chance to see severe developmental problems that are rarely found in the U.S., and each hoped to make some difference — even a small one — in a child’s life.

But, emotionally, it was never easy: “The first orphanage we went to, walking in and seeing the disabilities was hard,” said Melissa Kopka, a 22-year-old communications major from USM. “It was hard to see suffering and not really know what to do.”

Travel along

Over the next nine days, the Sun Journal will share their journey, both in the newspaper and at sunjournal.com.
The students and faculty members will talk about their experiences in Web “podcasts” at sunjournal.com, and you are invited to follow Marstaller, a mother and USM student from New Gloucester, in her daily Web Journal.

There also will be stories in the newspaper, plus a daily reporter’s notebook item about China.

The team traveled to three orphanages, each of which presented a different picture of the orphanage system in China. While staffing and training in all three orphanages seemed inadequate, all children were receiving the basics of food, clothing and shelter.

In two of the orphanages, impressive programs had been launched to improve the lives of the disabled and orphaned children. But in another, one faculty member said conditions there had actually worsened since she adopted a child several years before: “They are just so needy,” said Deb Como-Kepler. “Those are the kids that are like lost souls.”

The USM students met people trying heroically to change Chinese attitudes toward orphans and disabled students, they met dozens of loving but often overwhelmed Chinese child-care workers, and they saw how one U.S. charitable organization is making a difference in China.

They saw a system that by all accounts has steadily improved in recent decades, and the students tried to put what they saw in the context of a rapidly developing society where several hundred million people still live in poverty.
And, of course, they couldn’t help but fall in love with the children, some of them disabled, some of them hearing impaired, still others just ordinary children, but all without the support of a family or loving parents, so essential to healthy emotional and physical well-being.

Two Ph.D. L-A College faculty members, Como-Kepler and Rose Cleary, devised the class, titled China’s Orphans. Both have adopted children from China, and they fashioned the service-learning project to help the children who are not yet adopted or never will be.

They recruited a third faculty member, Roxie Black, Ph.D., director of the Masters in Occupational Therapy Program at Lewiston-Auburn College, to lend her expertise.

This is the second year the faculty members have taught this class and led students to China.

Over the past 15 years, the number of Chinese children adopted by U.S. parents has grown from a trickle of 206 children in 1992 to nearly 8,000 in 2005. But many of the children the USM students worked with in China are either too disabled or too old for adoption.

Experiencing China

But it wasn’t all work for the USM L-A College team. The students saw some of the wonders of China, from the Great Wall to Mount Huangshan, the magical mountains featured in Chinese art. They explored the Forbidden City in Beijing, as well as the streets of an ancient Chinese village.

Along the way, they met young people eager to speak English, and sampled a bit of the night life in towns large and small. Everywhere they went, they found Chinese people eager to express a few words of English or to shout “Hullo!” from a passing bus.

And the students experienced some of the contradictions of modern China: businessmen arriving at four-star hotels in $70,000 BMWs, cell phones to ear, while elderly rural residents planted rice by hand in flooded paddies or collected plastic bottles from tour buses.

The students saw a country under construction: New airports, highways, elevated rail lines, tunnels, bridges and apartment buildings were being built as China tries to accommodate the largest migration in human history, millions of Chinese moving from rural villages to ever-expanding cities.

And the students were impressed with the scale of everything, from Tian’anmen Square, the largest public square in the world, to the Great Wall, which runs more than 3,000 miles over some of the most rugged terrain imaginable, to the Yangtze River, the third-longest river in the world.

They tried exotic foods, they visited some horrific public restrooms and traveled some long miles in a bus labeled the “Golden Dragon.”

As they did, they learned not only about China and children, but they came away with new perspectives on their own culture and country.

We hope you will join us over the next nine days, in the newspaper and on the Web, as a group of students from Maine travels to China.

rrhoades@sunjournal.com

New Adoption Requirement Guidelines Article

Adoption rules well received
By Guan Xiaofeng (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-08-04 08:28

New guidelines on foreign adoption have won international support, a senior official with the China Centre of Adoption Affairs said on Friday.

The guidelines, which took effect on May 1, gives preference to more "suitable applicants", such as people with stable marriages, sound health and adequate finances.

Applicants should have a Body Mass Index (BMI), a measure of body fat based on height and weight, of less than 40.

Applicants must be married for at least two years, and those who have been previously divorced, should be currently married for at least five years.

Lu Ying, the center's director, said the guidelines ensure Chinese children are adopted by qualified foreign families.

It also shortens the waiting time of candidate families and relieves their anxiety.

Lu said the centre is still processing applications submitted in November 2005, because of the large number of respondents.

He stressed the new guidelines do not affect applications submitted before May 1.

China's laws, regulations and policies concerning foreign adoptions have not changed, Lu said, referring to the Law of Adoption and the Registration Regulation on Foreign Adoption.

"We continue to hold a positive view toward foreign adoptions," he said.

Lu said the new guidelines have won widespread praise from adoption authorities and agencies abroad.

In a letter to the center, the Adoption Board in Ireland said the new criteria reflect the spirit of the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, which was signed in 1993.

The top legislature approved the convention in 2005.

The Danish National Board of Adoptions also said that it fully respects Chinese efforts to better the procedure for adoptions.

"The new guidelines are aimed at solving the contradiction between too many applicants and the inadequate number of available children," Lu said.

He said the centre, the only institution authorized to deal with foreign adoptions, has received a soaring number of applications to adopt Chinese children in recent years.

"We will make adjustments to the guidelines as the situation warrants," Lu said.

More than 50,000 Chinese children are believed to have been adopted by foreigners in the past 10 years. The United States tops the list.

Lu said the center will host a 10-day summer camp for Chinese children adopted by American families this month.

Weiss Family Gallery

Hello folks, we just got some photos for the Weiss Family.

This picture is absolutely amazing and one of the most beautiful adoption photos I have ever seen (and I have seen alot of them).



To view the entire gallery, go here: Weiss Family Gallery

You can also see their full story a our most recent online newsletter.

Update On Provinces Served

Hello folks, just a quick update on provinces we currently serve and new ones we have opened up in the last 6 months.

Anhui
Chongqing Municipality
Guangdong
Hubei
Hunan
Jiangxi
Sichuan
Zhejiang

New Provinces:

Shanxi
Guangxi
Hainan
Inner Mongolia
Shaanxi

If you have an interest in a province we do not have listed, please email us so we can look at your situation.

Another Great Picture

Ok, here is another picture that was entirely too cute to not post.



You can see the entire gallery for this family here: http://china-babies-dev.com/gallery/leland.m/

Congrats to Leland and April on this beautiful baby!

Ok, this is too cute.

Recently we hosted a gallery for Marsha C. and one of the pictures was so cute I had to repost it here in the blog.



You can see the full gallery of this cute little thing and her sister here: http://china-babies-dev.com/gallery/marsha.c/

China Connection Online

Just saw a cool post from Bob Crawford (author and co-editor of China Connection Online) talking about this website. It appears to be a great source of information in many categories.

Check it out here: http://www.chinaconnectiononline.com/index.htm