Archie’s Adoption
In 2017, an eight-day-old newborn named Archie joined our Cambodia foster care program. He was handed to wonderful foster parents who were already fostering two older children. Quickly, Baby Archie won their hearts, and the entire family found themselves in love with this precious baby boy.
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A Glimpse into our Cambodia Education Program
Where we work in Cambodia, the number of children living at the local landfill has risen exponentially. We have been doing everything we can to make sure the older children moving to the landfill have a chance to begin or continue their education. As you can imagine, many of the older children are reluctant to attend school for the first time as they are embarrassed about having to start in kindergarten or first grade. Our solution? We’ve opened a special “catch-up class” for older kids so they could learn with their peers.
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The Gift of Family: India Foster Care
So many times, things that are “normal” or “routine” can be taken for granted or overlooked. The gift of a family is no different. Consider a child’s life without a family to support him or her.
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Meeting Grace
While visiting our Uganda programs this past month, our US team was able to visit a special girl who has been a big part of LWB’s story: Grace from Uganda. If you have followed her journey, you know LWB arranged for her to have surgery in first Kenya and then Belgium to remove thousands of tumors from her abdomen. It would never have happened without countless people around the world lifting her up and funding her life-saving medical care.
Read MoreWhy International Adoption Still Matters
When Russia announced it was closing its international adoption program, social media exploded with opinions. Friends would forward me articles on international adoption and say, “Don’t read the comments section!” So of course I did. And I would read the words posted from people vehemently opposed to international adoption and wonder where our humanity has gone.
“Let them stay in their own country.”
“Why should we take their problem kids?”
“No more importing foreign children!”
Read MoreNew Challenges
I ended Friday’s blog by saying that the shift in orphanage populations has significantly changed the responsibilities of nannies over the years. A decade ago, the nannies were caring for 10-15 children at a time in the main baby rooms….but on the whole, these were primarily “healthy” babies. Now they are often caring for the same number of children, but ones who have medical needs. Their jobs can be difficult indeed. I will never forget walking into a rural orphanage in a western province and seeing a nanny thread a worn looking rubber tube down the throat of a baby with cleft. She then proceeded to pour milk drop by drop into the tube. She explained that the child was unable to suck from a regular bottle, and so she had come up with this homemade NG tube on her own to save his life. Read more.
Read MoreBirth Defects
The first two reasons for the shift in orphanage populations in China are both positive ones – an evolving attitude towards girls and the sharp increase in domestic adoption. The third major reason, however, is quite sad.
Birth defects in China have risen 70% in the last decade. (See Source 1). Mr. Jiang Fan, of the National Population and Family Planning Commission stated that birth defects now affect one in ten households in China, with a child being born every 30 seconds with a medical need. Read more.
Read MoreDomestic Adoption on the Rise
Lilly, who lived in our Healing Homes program, and her adoptive parents.
A second main reason for the shift in orphanage populations is that domestic adoption has increased substantially in China. Many people point to the Sichuan earthquake as one of the major turning points, as the topic of adoption was discussed extensively due to the number of children orphaned in the quake. Thousands of people posted online that they were open to adopting a child. The CCCWA in Beijing (the national agency responsible for international adoptions) now has a separate department specifically for domestic adoption, although most are still handled at the local level. Read more.
Read MoreThe Adoption of Boys
I wanted to add an extra day to this blog series because a reader asked about why there are so many more older boys available for adoption now than there were in the past. Again, I don’t have any way to look at the entire adoption system as a whole and can only go off of the orphanages we have worked with for years, but I do have some thoughts on why more older boys are now available.
One important thing to remember is that when international adoptions first began in China in the early 1990s, most (not all, but truly MOST) families wanted the youngest baby possible. Back then, some families would even turn down the referral of a healthy baby girl if the child was over twelve months of age. Read more.
Read MoreChanging Attitudes
Yesterday we discussed that the orphanage populations in China have shifted dramatically in the last decade. The reasons for this are many, but today I would like to talk about the changing attitudes of the younger generation of adults.
When most Western people think of China in the past, they think of a fairly closed society, where traditional thinking had been passed down generation after generation, especially in rural areas. And of course, part of the traditional thinking was that girls were second class, often deemed “worthless,” as many families felt they needed sons to work the farm and take care of them in their old age. Read more.
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