Telling Their Stories

Holt Senior Writer Robin Munro is traveling with Waiting Child Manager Jessica Palmer to learn more about a new group of children in Holt’s Journey of Hope program, as well as other Holt-supported programs.

by Robin Munro

At the Jilin City Social Welfare Institute – the third orphanage we’ve visited in China – the beds are empty. Except for one tiny newborn who recently came into care, no children occupy the cribs and beds that line the rooms. It’s a lovely building – a home for the elderly, and orphaned and abandoned children, with a central atrium that lets in abundant natural light. It’s a wonderful sight, all these empty rooms – it means all the children who’ve passed through this orphanage are now in Holt-sponsored foster care, a program that serves 39 children in partnership with the welfare institute.

After a short stay when they come into care, the children occasionally visit the orphanage for physical and developmental exams, and rehabilitation training for those with special needs. But their homes are apartments and houses, where they get to experience family life.

Today, we get to meet five children in Holt sponsorship, a program that funds their clothing, food and other basic needs for 350 Chinese Remnibi, or about $55, per child per month – a cost shared equally by Holt and the Jilin City Social Welfare Institute. We enter a room – the only one emitting any sound – and find four boys in motion, bouncing on giant balls or rolling around in soft tubing, teasing each other and making faces. Two of the boys, dressed in matching striped polos and shorts, look like twins. They are foster brothers, though not related, 8 and 9-years-old – happy, hyper, outgoing boys with telltale scars on their lips from cleft lip surgery. Their foster mom tells us they are both their teachers’ favorites in their 2nd and 3rd grade classes, both very popular with other children.

I can see that right away. The older boy, Shen Ying (name has been changed), has a great sense of humor. He jokingly puts on a scarf and exaggerates his smile for the camera. I bet he’s the class clown – sharp, easily bored, requiring constant stimulation. When he lacks engaging activity, I bet he creates it, entertaining everyone in the room. I like him immediately, and think about how lucky the family is that gets to adopt him.

“He’s very confident,” his foster mother tells us. Both boys help at home, have excellent manners, and sometimes fight as brothers do, she tells us.

“Does he know anyone who’s been adopted?” asks Jessica, Holt’s Waiting Child program manager here to meet the children in hopes of finding them homes.

Through translation, he tells us he loves his foster mother very much, but knows he may be adopted someday. He’s smart. He knows what’s going on.

The Holt sponsorship program that supports these children also enables Holt to learn more about them – not just their medical and physical conditions, but also, whenever possible, about their interests, abilities, goals, even how they feel about adoption.

Holt China staff provide updates on the children’s development every 4 months, after an hour’s worth of interaction with each child. “It’s meant to send to people who sponsor the kids,” she says – the generous donors who enable boys like Shen Yen to live with a family, eat well, go to school in new clothes and carry a school bag like the one he sports now, a stylish black “Just Do It” Nike backpack.

“But we can also get access to that information for home-finding,” says Jessica, who posts photos and information about the children on Holt’s Waiting Child photolisting.

Here in China, we have the extraordinary opportunity to hear the children’s stories directly from their caregivers, and sometimes even directly from the children.

One girl we meet today can’t tell her own story – she’s only 3 and a half. We learn how she came into care, how she developed the brain damage that palsied her movements. Like so many children in China, a country that’s criminalized child abandonment, Rhu Li (name has been changed) was left out in the open for someone to find her. Because she was abandoned in winter, she nearly froze to death.

“But she didn’t give up,” explains Sue, the Holt Beijing office manager and our unofficial translator on the trip. The hospital swaddled the little girl in blankets and warmed her with hot water bottles. “Several hours later, she came back,” says Sue.

Rhu Li came back, but she will never be the same. Though born healthy, she now has Cerebral Palsy, a neurological condition that permanently affects body movement and muscle coordination.

She is a beautiful girl, with short, cropped dark hair and thick eyelashes, wet from crying for her foster mama when she leaves the room. But her crying subsides when Sue comes to comfort her– to give her affection and attention, which she’s clearly accustomed to receiving from her foster mother.

“It’s very hard for foster parents to care for children with mental problems, but most of them give very good care,” says Sue. “Before this little girl came into foster care, she could do nothing. But her foster mom trained her to stand, speak, tell colors.”

Three times per week, Rhu Li’s foster mother brings her to the welfare institute for physical therapy. She spends one half hour walking up and down stairs using a handrail, another half hour walking between two bars, and receives speech therapy. Although CP can never be cured, the therapy and training Rhu Li gets now, early in life, will help her overcome her developmental disabilities, and learn different ways of accomplishing challenging tasks.

As we leave, Shen Yen runs to hug me. I feel so honored. I feel so honored to have met all these children.