Simple, nutritious food given with love continues to be one of Holt International’s most important ingredients for helping vulnerable children. But recent cost increases and disasters are threatening Holt’s ability to meet the need. This blog entry includes excerpts from Holt International magazine, Fall 2008.
by Alice Evans, Holt Managing Editor
Since Holt’s earliest beginnings, food and nutrition have been vital components in its efforts to save weak and malnourished children and to help them toward healthy development. Through the years Holt and its partner agencies have brought countless children back from the brink of death simply by feeding them basic, healthy food while coaxing them with affectionate holding and words of encouragement. Recent events, however, are making it more and more difficult to provide this simple but vital component of Holt’s care for vulnerable children.
A Worldwide Food Crisis
Beginning early in 2008, food issues rose to the forefront in many countries served by Holt. In China, the costs of food were already on the rise when severe winter storms spiked prices even more, and lowered supplies. A few months later, a major earthquake hit southwestern China, bringing more stress to those least able to manage it—the poor, and children of the poor. And then came the tainted milk crisis.
In Haiti, four hurricanes struck in less than a month, bringing floods and landslides that destroyed houses and wiped out crops. While children at Holt Fontana Village were safe, Holt stepped up efforts to double the number of cottages, doubling its capacity to care for children. Holt also stepped up efforts to increase its family preservation program, and quickly began delivering food vouchers to help ward off starvation.
Holt International is an adoption and child welfare agency—not a disaster relief organization. But when disaster strikes a Holt project or program area, Holt must find a way to continue meeting the needs.
China: Nutrition and a Hand to Feed Them
“Children’s faces won’t lie,” said Holt China Director Jian Chen. She knows by sight a baby who has been receiving adequate protein and one who has not. “Children in Holt projects don’t get sick as much, they’re more alert. You look at skin color. A baby who is being fed congee and rice milk may be getting fat, but that child is not as healthy as a baby who is getting proper formula.”
Nutrition is key to Holt’s work in China, but so is nurture. In the early stages, Jian said, she used to go into an orphanage and see babies lying on their sides with a bottle propped up against their mouth. There were so many babies that nobody had the time to hold and feed the baby. “Foster care is so much better—somebody has the hand to take care of the children. In an orphanage, even if you have nutrition, there is no hand to put it in. In an orphanage, somebody might not even know if the food is good food or not. Early on in our work in China, I saw an orphanage feeding children from a big pot of noodles, to which they had added only two raw eggs for protein. The children would get sick all the time. They fed them until they were full, but it was not enough protein.”
To help children get the individual attention they need, and to emphasize their nutrition, Holt moves them into foster families. “In our joint projects with orphanages,” Jian said, “we used to split the costs for children to go into foster care—paying half the cost of formula and half the foster parents’ stipend. Now we pay nearly twice what we did before, because we focus on nutrition and the orphanage pays the stipend to the foster family. This way we can guarantee that nutrition goes to the children and is not compromised.”
Holt staff either deliver the formula to foster families or distribute it when a foster family comes in to get paid. The foster family keeps a chart on the wall that tells them how to mix the formula, according to the child’s age. Foster parents bring in their child for a check-up every month or every other month—if weight is not up to standard, the family will lose its bonus, Jian said. “This gives us additional quality control over a child’s nutrition.”
Holt managed to sidestep most of the effects of the recent tainted milk crisis because of the high quality standard it maintains for infant formula. Holt takes into account the content for each level of nutritional requirements, Jian said. “We buy balanced formula—not too little, not too much of any one nutrient. When we started our program we had learned from the South Korea program and other Holt programs what kind of standard to use. We check weight and height in each stage in those early stages. We did not just know from day one what worked best. It took management. We learned from the Korea program, but we have adapted the wisdom gained there to fit the tradition and culture of China.”
Before recent events, food prices were already high for such items as eggs, milk and meat, with prices over a two-year-period moving ever upward. In Guigang, Guangxi province, a kilo of milk doubled in price between 2006 and 2008. In Nanning, the price of a kilo of rice rose by more than 60 percent. Infant formula came close to doubling over a two-year period in many locations.
But this year brought even higher prices to bear. Unusually harsh winter storms—the worst in half a century—drove up the prices of produce right after the Lunar New Year. News sources reported some 220 million acres of crops ruined, with transportation problems adding a complicating factor. Rising prices and food scarcities affected children in Holt projects at social welfare institutes and in foster care, as budgets had to be stretched by special donations and creative planning.
Ethiopia: Stabilizing Children’s Health
When Gary Gamer, Holt’s chief operating officer, visited the Durame Center in southern Ethiopia in February, he met an infant girl who had been brought in several weeks earlier. “She faced a very difficult situation in that her mother died in childbirth,” Gamer said. “Her father was destitute and just felt hopeless about what to do with her. Luckily, we found this child. This child was brought into care. And obviously she was very underweight, undernourished, malnourished… and staff faced a very challenging time trying to get her into a positive weight-gaining mode.”
Recorded on video seen by many people on the Holt website, Gamer held the tiny but attentive girl in his arms—and marveled: “You can tell that she’s responsive to some degree, she’s curious… it’s just a joy that we can see her smile, when she does that occasionally. Bit by bit she’s being nursed back into health, through the loving care of the childcare givers—very attentive—and the doctors. We just pray that she makes it, and we can find just the perfect family for her, because she deserves nothing less than that. This is what this place is all about, is a transitional center to get children’s health stabilized, to learn more about them, and to get them on a path where we can find a family for them.”
Teresa* was brought back to health and is now plump, happy and living with her new family in the United States. Says her mom: “I would love for people to know how she is doing as I know many saw the video. In truth, if not for me seeing that video, she wouldn’t be with us now.”
Haiti: Poorest Country in the Western Hemisphere
Holt International senior executive Dan Lauer visited Haiti in mid-September, just after a series of hurricanes. “The houses in Holt Fontana Village weathered the storms well,” Lauer said. “However, Holt currently must transport water in tanker trucks from Port-au-Prince at $100 per load.”
At Montrouis, about a half hour from the Holt Fontana Village, Holt operates a family preservation program (Fanmi Ansanm) in conjunction with Rotary International and local Rotary Clubs in Haiti and Florida. Lauer said all 60 families who receive help from Holt have been heavily affected by the storms.
“Nobody was killed that we know of,” Lauer said, reporting from the scene. “But we are still struggling to get to them and have contracted with motorcycle drivers who can transport our staff. People are running out of food. We’re seeing a lot of human tragedy. The infrastructure is really busted up from the flooding off the mountains, with flash floods through towns. Many people were killed in one nearby town.” Lauer noted the presence of United Nations helicopters as well as Red Cross trucks. “The greater aid response from the world is happening,” he said. “We want to concentrate on the children and families in our program and help get them through this crisis.” Holt’s goal is to enable children to stay with their parents.
Immediate plans to help include:
• Holt staff will physically visit and assess effects on all Holt-assisted families.
• Holt will provide emergency kits that include a blanket, rice and beans, cooking oil and butter.
• Holt will increase the number of families served by Fanmi Ansanm to 90, bringing the number of vulnerable children under Holt’s family preservation umbrella in Haiti to about 270.
Food Is a Part of Loving
Molly Holt, who has worked to rebuild the lives of relinquished, orphaned and abandoned children in South Korea for more than 50 years, notes that “food is a part of loving.”
Molly, who has seen many stunted, starved and nutritionally dwarfed childr
en in her years of working in Korea, noted that even though it is now rare to see malnutrition in Korea, children from orphanages tend to stuff themselves with food. “If children have no mothers, food is the most important thing in their life,” she said. “This is why some older children go home to adoptive families and hide food under their pillows—they hoard food as a substitute. It’s an emotional thing, food in place of mothering.”
Nurture and nutrition are intertwined in Holt’s work. You can feed a child, but without loving and attentive care, that child will fail to thrive. Molly noted that in the early years, malnutrition was one of the main causes of death, but other factors were cross-infection and lack of loving.
The examples of Harry and Bertha Holt, and of Molly Holt, continue to guide the work of Holt International. Holt International aims to take the model established by the Holt family in Korea, and to adapt and replicate it in all the countries where this agency is called to serve abandoned, relinquished and vulnerable children.
But to successfully help children, Holt International needs the support of adoptive families, adult adoptees, donors and sponsors. The moment a child comes into Holt’s care, they need a sponsor. Holt cares for the children in foster families, childcare centers, and when possible, with their birth parents through family preservation work. Monthly support from child sponsors helps provide clothing for warmth and protection, regular medical checkups and specialized care when children are sick.
In the face of rising food prices, Holt staff overseas and in the United States struggle to meet the nutritional needs of children in our care. And you can help provide nutrition for children in Holt programs.
