Alice Evans, Managing Editor of Holt Publications

Yunnan province, China—Peasants and water buffalo labor in the rice paddies as we travel by van along a cobbled granite road. Small tractors chug past carrying loads of sugar cane. The economy is slash-and-burn agriculture. The bane is poverty, heroin, HIV/AIDS. Smoke rises in the distance in small clouds. The terraced mountainsides are tinged with green. Bamboo huts and small adobe houses blend and crumble at the edges of the world. Read the rest of this entry »

Alice Evans, Holt Managing Editor of Publications

Nanchang, China—If you ask Yan Meng who she loves most, she will tell you: “my daddy.” He is the one who believed she could be taught. He is the one who homeschools her. He is the one who handcrafted a set of crutches and bought her a little stationary bicycle so she could exercise her legs.

When we visited her a few days ago in the apartment she shares with her foster family, we saw a happy little girl who would have had a very different life if not for the foster care system set up by Holt International in cooperation with the Nanchang Social Welfare Institute (NSWI). Read the rest of this entry »

Alice Evans, Holt Managing Editor of Publications

Nanchang, China—Melinda has a smile that lights up the room. She knits with her fingers. She loves to mess with photographers, making wry faces at the camera. Wheelchair bound, her tiny legs atrophied from lack of use, she is one of the ladies of the Nanchang Social Welfare Institute (NSWI) knitting group.

Until this week, the knitting group ladies met in a room without an accessible toilet, a terrible hardship because of the severity of their disabilities. But now, in a former office newly painted and decorated by visiting Holt families, they have an adjoining sink and toilet, and these lifetime residents of the NSWI no longer need to crawl through an opening too small for their wheelchairs Read the rest of this entry »