Nepal delay agonizing for mom-to-be

By Nancy Bartley

Seattle Times staff reporter



Margaret King holds a picture of Ajaya, the son she was promised.


ERIKA SCHULTZ / THE SEATTLE TIMES

Margaret King, of Seattle's Rainier Beach neighborhood, holds a jacket she purchased in Katmandu for the child she hopes to adopt. She once thought the jacket would be too big for her child's homecoming but now fears it is too small to fit the 13-month-old boy.

In Margaret King's Rainier Beach bungalow sits a white crib that for more than a year has been filled with tiny T-shirts and diapers rapidly becoming too small for the baby she fell in love with.

Across the globe, the son she was promised, Ajaya, remains in a Nepal orphanage, a victim of politics.

Since April, when the Maoist party won seats in Nepal's parliament, all foreign adoptions have been in limbo — including Ajaya's. Some of the adopting families from the Seattle area have moved to Nepal to be near the babies and lobby the ministry in hope of speeding up the process.

The Tacoma-based Faith International is the primary adoption service for Nepali children in the U.S. Before last April, the agency matched about five families with Nepali infants each month, said John Meske, executive director.

The Nepali adoptions were ideal for American families because, unlike Chinese adoptions, which could take up to two years, they could be completed in six months and cost about the same — $19,000. It also was possible to adopt infants.

But in April, Maoist party member Bishwa Karma was given control over the Women, Children and Social Welfare ministry, one of the smaller ministries in Nepal. One of the first things Karma did was halt foreign adoptions and begin re-evaluating Nepal's adoption laws — a process the families see as excruciatingly slow.

As in Guatemala, which also is going through changes in its adoption procedures, there were allegations of Nepali children being given up for adoption for financial incentives and through false documentation, Meske said.

Located between India and China, Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world, with about 40 percent of the population below the poverty line.

The Maoists were elected to parliament after giving up a 10-year battle to overthrow Nepal's monarchy, and Karma "just wanted new terms and conditions" for adoptions, Meske said.

"We, like many other countries, argued that you maintain the status quo" while you're reviewing the laws, Meske said. "You don't stop the processing of adoptions. The longer the child stays in an institution, the more harmful it is to development." But he said Karma wasn't very receptive to the argument.

On Sunday, Pampha Bhusal, a feminist, was appointed to replace Karma, a move that Meske thinks is positive.

In the interim, the changes in procedures have caused a backlog of children at the Faith International-affiliated orphanage outside Katmandu and left no room for new orphans.



And it has caused grief for some 450 prospective parents worldwide who are waiting to be united with the children they were promised. Among them is King.

Her house is filled with photos of Ajaya, now 13 months old, and she receives monthly reports from the orphanage. But she is saddened to think of what she's missing — his first attempts to crawl, to walk and to speak.

It's painful for the parents who have to wait, Meske acknowledged. "They've been matched with children and bonded with them, but they are not their children in the legal sense."

Yet there is hope, he said.

Holly Tanner, 36, an Olympia physical therapist, learned on Christmas Eve that she can get her baby in mid-January. Ashok is now 19 months old. She met him in November 2006 when he was placed in her arms at the orphanage. She visited again over the summer.

"What's been really hard is the suspense. ... If we knew in advance [that it would take much longer] we could have mentally prepared ourselves. So many of the parents are so shy of getting excited. You protect your heart because you want your child home so much," Tanner said.

Nepal requires adoptive parents to make two trips — the first to meet the child they are matched with and the second to pick up the child. In between, numerous documents from both the U.S. and Nepal require approval.

King first met Ajaya in February when he was 10 weeks old.

"I've been trying to become a mother for such a long time; it was kind of surreal," she said.

She went to the orphanage and was suddenly handed a tiny baby. "He was beautiful and perfect and so tiny. It was something I've been waiting for a long time. I stayed there for almost three weeks to give myself time to get acclimated to this new reality."

Like Tanner, King, a 41-year-old social worker, will be a single mother. She returned to Nepal in August to renew her acquaintance with her son. Now that she's back home, nothing is harder than worrying about his welfare and seeing the childless crib, the tiny clothes Ajaya is growing too big for without ever getting to wear.

He's a quiet and serious child who — like most of the babies — was abandoned, King said. Infants are often abandoned in Nepal by mothers who can't afford to care for them or by unmarried women who face harsh consequences for becoming mothers.

King wonders if prolonging Ajaya's stay in the orphanage, even though it has caring nannies, will make attachment difficult for him later. And she is concerned about his health. Like Ashok, Ajaya has had pneumonia.

"It never dawned on me that he wouldn't be here by Christmas," King said.

She wants a chance to introduce her son to her family in Minnesota. She wants once again to look into the dark eyes of the baby she first held as she thought of the years she had spent trying to conceive, her miscarriages and deep longing for motherhood, and the thought that came to her on their first meeting: "So you're the one I dreamed of."

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2004102257_adopt01m.html





China-Babies Research

Fortune’s Sisters

Cary Conover for The New York Times



THREE’S COMPANY Adopted in China, Leah Potoff, left, Hazel Parker-Myers and Annabelle Laserson are best friends in brownstone Brooklyn.

By BROOKE HAUSER
Published: January 6, 2008

THERE is an ancient Chinese myth that people who are destined to meet are connected from birth by invisible red thread. For three Brooklyn mothers who were strangers until a few years ago, the legend has a deeply personal resonance. In early 2004, when they traveled in the same group to adopt year-old girls in China, Martha Laserson, Molly Parker-Myers and Lauren Uram made a discovery that would thread their families together for life.


During a visit to the orphanage where the babies lived, in Anhui Province of southeast China, the women were told that their daughters not only knew one another but were also crib mates.

Before they became Annabelle Laserson, Hazel Parker-Myers and Leah Potoff, the little girls were Dong Dong, Ping Ping and Qiang Qiang, and they slept side by side. Before they developed a taste for New York-style pizza, they ate a rice porridge called congee from the same spoon.

Before the well-tended pigtails and chin-length bobs, they wore matching institutional buzz cuts. And now, living in brownstone Brooklyn, nearly 7,000 miles away from the place they were born, they are best friends.

“It was still dark as we headed out, and we were all in our private bubbles of nervousness and joy. We were going to meet our babies. As it got lighter, I marveled at the countryside — the water buffalo, the fields, the little villages — I wanted to memorize the surroundings to describe to my little girl in the years to come. She, after all, would be raised in Brooklyn (along with two of her crib mates), and not one of these farm villages we passed, although she may well have started out there.”

From Molly Parker-Myers’s diary, Jan. 5, 2005 (the first anniversary of the girls’ adoption)

Four years ago, Mrs. Parker-Myers, Mrs. Laserson and Ms. Uram were delivered to their daughters. These days, the girls see one another regularly, marking the passages of childhood by attending one another’s birthday parties and eating Chinese takeout with their families. Thanks to their daughters’ unique bond, the three women also belong to an exclusive mothers’ group of three.

All these connections played themselves out during a late summer picnic in Prospect Park. The women took turns breaking up bubble-blowing fights and watching the girls collect bouquets of sticks under a canopy of trees. When the mothers weren’t wiping little noses, their talk gravitated to subjects like New York’s ever-growing population of adopted Chinese girls. While there is no exact count of the number of Chinese adoptees in the city, nearly 70,000 have found homes in American families since 1992.

“That’s one of the biggest reasons why we chose to adopt from China,” said Mrs. Parker-Myers, who has a heart-shaped face and thick brown hair. “I felt like it was this sisterhood in a way. Our daughters will have someone else to grow with and bounce around ideas with, but they’ll also have a connection to their babyhood. That’s invaluable.”

Given the local prevalence of children adopted from China in recent years, it is not uncommon for New York families to uncover orphanage ties. Dr. Jane Aronson, a Manhattan pediatrician who specializes in treating children who were adopted abroad and who is known as “the Orphan Doctor,” often overhears her patients quizzing one another in her waiting room about the circumstances under which they adopted their Chinese babies.

“Looking for missing answers — and there are so many — when you have a moment of connection, it’s very powerful,” Dr. Aronson said. “It’s wonderful because it’s history, it’s roots, it’s family — it’s orphanage family. And often it’s the only family the kid has from the country where they were adopted.”

In Search of Memories

“Finally, we were let out at the lobby. We knew we would be leaving this place with our babies in our arms. The lobby was adorned with lavish decorations for the upcoming Lunar New Year, and was a sea of red and gold. We noticed only vaguely, I think, because we were all so thrilled — and because we all had to pee desperately! I remember all the moms-to-be rushing to the bathroom together, chatting, chatting, filled with nervous energy.” Jan. 5, 2005

In an effort to mend their daughters’ broken ties to their birthplace, the three mothers cling to the few scraps of information they have and, in their different ways, try to piece together a patchwork of memories, however threadbare.


Mrs. Parker-Myers, 35, a preschool teacher who lives in a two-bedroom apartment in Kensington with her husband, Lars, a manager of jewelry trade shows, is the writer of the group. She chronicled their two-week journey to China in an eloquent adoption diary that includes comment on everything from the sparrow kebabs and goat testicles that she encountered during her first days in Beijing to the mothers’ attempts to absorb the essence of the country that their daughters never knew.


Ms. Uram, a quiet-mannered illustrator with ginger-colored hair in her late 40s, is the archivist. In the Lefferts Manor brownstone where she lives with her husband, Leni Potoff, an art conservator, she has carefully stored away dozens of artifacts from the couple’s trip to China, among them a Going Home Barbie, a limited-edition doll given to adoptive parents that is accessorized with a detachable Chinese baby, and the clothes Leah wore in the orphanage, carefully wrapped in red tissue paper.

Mrs. Laserson, a social worker with a petite athletic build who is in her early 40s, lives in Park Slope with her husband, David, a stockbroker, and their 9-year-old biological son. Unlike the fastidiously organized Ms. Uram, Mrs. Laserson is a bit of a pack rat. But despite the jumble of toys and books that clutter her two-story brick home, she can meticulously recount each laborious step of the adoption process.

It’s unlikely that the three women would have become fast friends had they not traveled together to Asia. But they waited together in China. They were in the same room when their babies were placed in their arms. They were together at the orphanage when they discovered that their daughters had shared the same crib. They were even together when they saw the locations where the three abandoned babies had been found before being brought to the orphanage.

“I know that if anything ever happened to me, Leah could always come to you with questions,” Ms. Uram recently told the other two women. “Because you were there.”

The Threads of Their Lives

“The main caregiver took Ping Ping in her arms, crying and saying her name and giving her lots of hugs and kisses. It was very emotional. She held Ping Ping and Dong Dong (Annabelle, another future Brooklynite) together, and we told her how they were going to live in the same place in the U.S., and they’d see each other often.” Jan. 8, 2004

The girls are now 5, the age at which many adoptive children are just beginning to understand that they are somehow different.

One fall morning, Hazel Parker- Myers followed her mother into the family’s living room and put to her a tricky two-part question: “How many childs do you have?” she asked, scribbling invisible notes into a pad. “And how did they come into your family?”

Like Ms. Uram and Mrs. Laserson, Mrs. Parker-Myers has often told her daughter the story of her adoption. One Sunday morning over homemade biscuits and marmalade, they looked through the pictures in Hazel’s adoption album while her mother recited the abridged version of Hazel’s story: In addition to Leah and Annabelle, its characters includes the caregivers at the orphanage, or aunties as they were called.

“You were in China living with your aunties, right?” Mrs. Parker-Myers prompted, as they paused over a picture of a tearful Chinese caregiver cradling two toddlers in pink and blue bunting. (Annabelle, the baby in pink, has the identical photograph in her album.) “And we were living in Brooklyn, and we wanted to adopt a baby.”

As the girls get older, their mothers will ration out the precious few remaining details of their stories. But first, they have to decide which story they want to tell.

On the one hand, there is the heartwarming tale of the three orphans who shared a crib in China and are now friends in Brooklyn. But as Mrs. Parker-Myers put it, “We don’t want to be seen as clueless adoptive parents who are just thinking that our child’s life is a fairy tale, because obviously it’s not.”

Soon after the adoption, Mrs. Parker-Myers stopped subscribing to the red-thread theory, which many adoptive parents of Chinese children have embraced as a way to imagine the fated bond between parent and child. “You can’t rely on mythology to explain their story because it isn’t the whole story,” she said.


Nor is she alone in these feelings. Having read about older transracial adoptees, some of whom say they resent having lost their cultural identity, these three mothers worry about what their daughters will think when they are no longer the silent characters of their own stories but their authors — and editors.

The conflict over what to share and what not to share underscores the differences among the three women. At the picnic in Prospect Park, Ms. Uram bristled when Mrs. Parker-Myers began to tell one of Hazel’s favorite stories, about how the orphanage caregivers lined up the babies at the edge of their crib and fed them congee from the same spoon.

“I don’t think you should do it,” Ms. Uram scolded. “It’s a sad story.”

Mrs. Parker-Myers shrugged off the comment. “I think it seems pretty practical myself,” she said. “If I had triplets, I’d feed them like that, too.”

There was a pause. Finally, in an effort to ease the mood, Mrs. Laserson said, “I think it’s a big cultural difference.”

Growing Up, Perhaps Apart

“It’s really been fun to get to know these other families. This is a real bonding experience. The three Brooklyn families are already planning to have a mothers’ group with our girls.”

Jan. 9, 2004

As their memories of the trip to China fade, the three mothers from Brooklyn try to blend subtle touches of their daughters’ first culture into their lives and their homes.

Annabelle and Hazel recently took a Chinese ribbon-dancing class together in Park Slope. At Leah’s house, Ms. Uram and her husband now celebrate Passover with matzo-ball soup served with chopsticks and Chinese ladles. There is already talk of a joint “homeland trip” when the three girls are older.

Still, as their lives unspool in different directions, their invisible red thread will begin to stretch. It already has.

Especially during that first year after their return from China, the mothers relied heavily on one another for support. But as their bonds with their daughters grow stronger, the women are depending on one another less and less.

In part, this is because they have different ideas about child-rearing. Mrs. Parker-Myers wants a progressive education for Hazel, who on a recent afternoon could be found in the family’s living room playing with castanets and shrieking with laughter. Ms. Uram prefers a more structured approach for Leah, who attended preschool at the Red Apple School in Chinatown, perhaps the city’s best-known bilingual school for Chinese students, and is tutored privately in Mandarin.

As the girls grow older, it’s likely that they will also grow apart. The Parker-Myerses are adopting another girl, who is in China awaiting her new family, and they are considering moving away from the city as early as next fall, perhaps to Philadelphia.

On a recent outing to a Chinese restaurant in Park Slope, Mrs. Parker-Myers was tense with expectation and anxiety. “I can’t predict the future,” she said, fumbling with a message from a fortune cookie that offered no clues. “It doesn’t seem very hopeful that we can stay in New York, because, frankly, we can’t afford it.”

The mothers are also preparing themselves and their daughters for the challenges they are likely to face as they get older. But the girls will have to fight certain battles themselves.

“As they move into school, they’re getting the sense that there is a stigma associated with being adopted,” said Amanda Baden, a New York psychologist who specializes in transracial adoptions, and is herself a Chinese daughter of Caucasian parents. “They may get more self-conscious about the fact that their parents look different from them. And they’re starting to understand that for them to have this family means that they might have lost another family.”

It is at that point, the mothers hope, that their daughters’ crib connection, tenuous as it might seem, will be of use to the girls.

“They have other adopted friends from China, but no one else they shared a crib with,” Mrs. Laserson said. “There will be times when they don’t want to be adopted and Chinese. But there will be other times when they need to feel adopted and Chinese. And no matter where they are, they have two other people they can talk to.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/nyregion/thecity/06babi.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1






China-Babies Research

Provinces and SWI's

Hello Friends,

When China-Babies first started out, we were limited to doing reports in Jiangxi province.

Since then we have branched out, and with each new request, we have often been able to open up new areas.

Today, China-Babies has grown to serve 20 Provinces and over 65 SWI's, with more being added every month.

This is due mainly to our clients requests in asking to find out if we can get reports from their child's SWI that is not yet on our list.

Below you will find a pretty current listing of the Provinces and SWI's we serve (I say pretty current, because it grows each month).

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



ANHUI PROVINCE
Xuancheng


FUJIAN PROVINCE
Zhangzhou City


CHONGQING MUNICIPALITY
Chongqing


Diangjiang County
Fuling


FUJIAN PROVINCE
Zhangzhou City


GANSU
Wuwei


GUANGDONG PROVINCE
Dianbai

Dongguan City

Foshan City Nanhai

Foshan City Gaoming

Meizhou

Le Chang

Lianjiang

Qingyuan

Shunde

Wuchuan City

Yangchun



GUANGXI PROVINCE
Qinzhou

Nanning City Yongning District



GUIZHOU PROVINCE
Qiandongnan



HAINAN PROVINCE
Haikou



HUBEI PROVINCE
Dawu County



Xiaonan
Yanxin County




HUNAN PROVINCE
Changde

Changsha

Dao County SWI Yongzhou

Loudi

Yi Yang

**(Currently received approval from adoption center for all international orphanages)



INNER MONGOLIA
Hohhot

Huhehaote

Wuhai City



JIANGSU PROVINCE
Jiangyin City

Changshu City



JIANGXI PROVINCE
Duchang

Fengcheng

Fuzhou

GaoAn

Guangchang

Guixi



Hengfeng
Jianxin





Jiujiang
Nanchang

Nancheng

Nanfeng

Shangrao

Shicheng

Suichuan





Wanzai
Xianjiang

Xinyu



Xinzhou




Xiushui County
Yingtan

Yihuang

Yi Yang

Yugan

Zhangshu




NINGXIA AUTONOMOUS REGION
Ningxia CWI Yinchuan City




SHAANXI PROVINCE
Yan'an City

Yulin City




SHANXI PROVINCE
Datong



SICHUAN PROVINCE
Chengdu




XINJIANG PROVINCE
Urumqi




ZHEJIANG PROVINCE
Hangzhou

Wenzhou

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

As always, we appreciate you allowing us to serve you and your family, and will continue to do our best to provide you with the best information possible regarding the early life of your little one.

If you would like to talk to us about what we do, give us suggestions, or ask us about starting a Research Report for you, please click here to contact us.

All the best,

Alex & Misty Stanczyk
www.china-babies.com







China-Babies Research

Custody Resolved, a Move Looms

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: December 30, 2007

MEMPHIS (AP) — An 8-year-old girl taken from an American couple and returned to her Chinese parents after a seven-year custody fight faces another big adjustment: moving to China.

Karen Pulfer Focht/Memphis Commercial Appeal, via World Picture Network
Anna Mae He with her mother, Qin Luo He. Anna is getting to know her family after years of living with foster parents.

The girl, Anna Mae He, rejoined her parents, Shaoqiang and Qin Luo He, in July, under orders from the Tennessee Supreme Court. She had lived with an American couple who took her in as an infant to help her financially struggling parents and then refused to give her back.

Now, with the custody fight resolved, Anna’s family faces deportation. Her father says it is time to head home to China.

“Next month, we’re going to do the paperwork with a federal immigration judge,” Mr. He said recently at his family’s small, two-bedroom apartment on the outskirts of Memphis.

Mr. He came to Tennessee to attend graduate school at the University of Memphis, but his student visa expired years ago. He was allowed to remain in the United States because of the custody fight, which began in May 2000 and ended with the court ruling in January.

“We always wanted custody to move back to China as a family,” Mr. He said.

An immigration judge agreed four years ago to delay ruling on the Hes’ immigration status, but Mr. He said that decision could come anytime now.

“If deported, we might never come back again,” Mr. He said. “With a voluntary departure, we don’t get an order.”

Mr. He said he expected to return to China by the end of February. A Memphis church, New Sardis Baptist, has begun a drive to help pay for the family’s move.

Ashok Kara, a family psychologist working with the Hes on Anna’s transition, said the girl was warming toward her parents and was getting along well with her brother, Andy, 7, and her sister, Avita, 5.

“At least on the surface, things are moving in a very positive direction,” Dr. Kara said. “She’s happy. She talks. She laughs. She jokes. Although beneath the surface where things are not easily observed, we don’t quite know what’s going on.”

A third grader, Anna earned all A’s and E’s on her latest report card. “She participates well when called up,” her teacher wrote. “I enjoy having her in class.”

Anna’s former foster parents, Jerry and Louise Baker, won a court order five years ago barring the Hes from any contact with Anna, so she is still just getting to know her family.

But piled up on a living room sofa one recent evening to watch cartoons, Anna, Andy and Avita shared the easy laughter of comfortable playmates.

Anna ignored questions about China or the pending move, focusing instead on the TV and a book of children’s poetry called “Falling Up.” She did find time, though, to occasionally poke Andy in the side with a foot, setting off bouts of giggling.

“She has been learning Chinese, but she’s a little bit afraid of the language,” her father said. “She told me it’s very difficult, this language. But she’s becoming more curious about China. She asks about the schools, the teachers, the children, what’s the subjects that are taught.”

Anna was born in January 1999 with her parents facing hard times financially and legally. Mr. He was accused of sexual assault by a female student at the university, a charge that cost him his scholarship and student stipend though he was acquitted at trial.

The Bakers, a suburban Memphis couple with four children of their own, were introduced to the Hes through a private foster-care organization. They volunteered to take in Anna for a few months but decided later to adopt her, even though the Hes wanted her back.

The Bakers accused the Hes of being unfit parents and argued that Anna would have a better life in America than in China.

In 2004, a Memphis judge took away the Hes’ parental rights on grounds of abandonment, a decision that drew widespread criticism as culturally and ethnically biased.

The Tennessee Supreme Court ruled that the Hes thought they were giving up their daughter for a short time so she could get health insurance and lost custody largely because of their ignorance of American law. It ordered the family to be reunited.

Dr. Kara said he had hoped Anna would have more time to bond with her family before moving to a country with an unfamiliar culture and language.

“But the way things were set up, they were allowed to stay here until a resolution, and the resolution has taken place,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/us/30adopt.html?_r=1&oref=slogin






China-Babies Research

You Are Mine

You Are Mine
by Kelly Feichtinger

I love you
Though I have yet to see your face.
You are mine.

I dream of holding you in my arms
My child from far away
You are mine.

I like awake at night
Imagining who you will be.
You are mine.

I prepare our home and my heart
To receive such a precious child.
You are mine.

I pray for your happiness and safety
Until I can be the one to provide it.
You are mine.

I hold my breath
As we wait for the call.
You are mine.

I will the time to fly by
As we wait fir permission to travel
You are mine.

I feel as though my heart will burst
When you are placed in my arms.
You are mine.

You rest your soft cheek against mine
And sigh contentedly.
I am yours.







China-Babies Research

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