one of the things i have always wondered about over here is the disparity we see in the incidence of special needs - some orphanages seem to have very few children with birth defects, while in others a high percentage of the children are born with special needs

i generally give very little attention to those who harp on ‘environmental’ issues in the western press, but in recent years i have begun to suspect that things such as air and water pollution may indeed be a factor causing birth defects.. that suspicion was only made stronger when i ran across the article below,

(i should note that we work with an orphanage in the area highlighted in this article and travel there on a regular basis - this orphanage without a doubt has the highest incidence of birth defects of any that we work with)

GAOJIAGOU, China (Reuters) – Ten-year old Yilong is already a statistic.

Born at the center of China’s coal industry, the boy is mentally handicapped and is unable to speak. He is one of many such children in Shanxi province, where coal has brought riches to a few, jobs for many, and environmental pollution that experts say has led to a high number of babies born with birth defects.

Experts say coal mining and processing has given Shanxi a rate of birth defects six times higher than China’s national average, which is already high by global standards.

“They looked normal when they were born. But they were still unable to talk or walk over a year later,” said farmer Hu Yongliang, 38, whose two older children are mentally handicapped.

“They learnt to walk at the age of six or seven. They are very weak. Nobody knows what the problem is.”

Hu’s thirteen-year-old daughter Yimei can only say one word, while her brother Yilong is unable to talk at all. The two spend most of the day playing in their small courtyard, where their mother Wang Caiying tends to their every need and tries to shield them from the neighbors’ prejudice.

“I never let them go out, I don’t want people to laugh at my children. They stay in this courtyard every day,” said Wang, who looks older than her 36 years.

“I am especially worried about my son. He doesn’t know how to take care of himself. I have to do everything for him.”

The number of birth defects in Chinese infants soared nearly 40 percent from 2001 to 2006, China’s National Population and Family Planning Commission said in a 2007 report.

The rate of babies born with birth defects rose from 104.9 per 10,000 births in 2001, to 145.5 in 2006, affecting nearly one in 10 families, the report said.

Infants with birth defects accounted for about 4 to 6 percent of total births every year, or 800,000 to 1.2 million babies, higher than World Health Organization estimates that about 3 to 5 percent of children worldwide are born with birth defects.

“The fact that the rate of birth defects in Shanxi province is higher is related to environmental pollution caused by the high level of energy production and burning of coal,” said Pan Xiaochuan, a professor from Peking University’s Occupational and Environmental health department. Pan has been doing research into the health effects of pollution in Shanxi for several years.

Neural tube defects were the most common form of defect found in babies in Shanxi, Pan said, though congenital heart disease, additional fingers and toes, and cleft palettes were also common.

..

Defects often strike in the poorest families, who can barely afford medical fees let alone care for their children once they reach adulthood.

The meager 10,000 yuan (1,600 US dollars) a year Hu earns transporting goods leaves almost nothing to pay for medical expenses for his two children.

The family’s hopes are now pinned on their youngest, a six-month old boy named Yiwu, whose blood tests show he was spared his siblings’ afflictions. His parents want Yiwu to be a doctor when he grows up.

Like many other villages in southwest Shanxi, Gaojiagou is surrounded by at least a dozen mines that spew out millions of tons of coal every year to feed China’s power plants and steel mills.

Many Gaojiagou villagers suffer from coughs or respiratory illnesses caused by the dust that clouds the air. Their water source has also been polluted by mining, they say.

“Before every family got drinking water from the well in the courtyard,” Hao said as water the color of weak tea rushed out of a hose into a metal washbasin. “But now the water in the well is so polluted by the coal mines and washeries around our village, we cannot drink it any more.”

.
this is not an issue i am called to trumpet, but it does give understanding.. and compassion, for the many, many thousands of families in these areas that can do little to protect themselves or their children from the air they breathe and the water they drink
.

there is a lot that goes on in the operation of a ‘foster home’ - the arrival of a new child, the medical checkups, hospital trips, and the anxious hours of surgery.. the singing, coloring, cutting paper, tracing hands, learning to count (in chinese and in english!), and all the other stuff that happens in preschool.. of course there are the play times in the backyard, the birthday parties, the holiday celebrations and the field trips.. and then there are those moments when the child first leaves on the back of his new foster mom’s bicycle, the excitement that ripples through all of the staff when we learn a child is ‘matched’, watching the child’s face when he sees the first pictures of his waiting family..

but today was one of those days that we all live for.. when “God makes the solitary to dwell in a family” (Psa 68:6), when mom and dad show up and our job is finished, when we get to see a new family coming together for the first time..

one of our little guys in his first hour with his new mom

time for a little diversion..

i have been struggling along for four years now trying to learn ‘putonghua‘ (the official chinese dialect, commonly referred to as ‘mandarin‘ in english).. this is not an easy language to learn for a lot of reasons, one of which i’ll try to demonstrate in this post..

when you first start learning to speak chinese, you quickly learn that mandarin is a tonal language.. i.e., each sound, or syllable can be pronounced in one of four different tones, and depending on the tone, the meaning can change dramatically (the example most often given: ma1 means “mom”, and ma3 means “horse”)

oh, if it were only that simple! what they don’t tell you is there are often many different characters with the same tone for any given syllable (for example, bing1 can mean “soldier” but bing1 can also mean “ice”).. in other words, the chinese language has many homonyms that even the tones can’t help you with..

take the following poem as an example - first, the chinese characters:

got it? ok, believe it or not, here’s how those several dozen distinct characters are pronounced:

and finally, for those who might be interested, here is the english translation of all those shi’s, showing that there is indeed some meaning to these homonyms:

now admittedly, this is an extreme example and the same story in common language would no doubt be told with more verbal clarity, but to rest my case, my chinese dictionary shows 26 chinese characters pronounced “shi” in the 1st tone, 34 characters pronounced “shi” in the 2nd tone, 13 characters pronounced “shi” in the 3rd tone, and over 60 chinese characters that can be pronounced “shi” in the 4th tone!

greg smalley, son of gary smalley, was in china recently and dropped by to spend a few days with us here at the foster home.. (i’m sure most of you know of gary smalley, author of many books, including the ‘five love languages’).. greg, who is quite a gifted author, speaker and minister in his own right, is in the ‘paperchase’ stage of adoption right now and hopes to return to china later this year to bring home a new daughter..

on his way home, while sitting in the shanghai airport, greg put to words some of the things he learned while he was here.. thought you might enjoy:

• love changes lives
• we all want to be loved by our papa and our heavenly papa
• nothing feels as safe as being held
• if you can’t get someone to pay attention to you, bite them (I have a huge bruise to prove this truth)
• loving someone doesn’t mean they’ll love you back
• color means nothing when seen through the eyes of love
• prayer changes lives
• kids will overcome and adapt to whatever special needs they might have
• we all have special needs
• we were all orphans once
• we all can be adopted by God our papa
• to belong and to have a family is the best thing in the world
• a nanny is a walking, breathing saint!
• people who follow God’s calling can change the world
• buying something will now always be measured in how many surgeries it could have purchased
• Christ is the great equalizer when you don’t speak the same language
• God truly has a special place in his heart for the orphan
• a smile means the same thing in chinese as it does in english
• no matter how amazing the opportunity, it will never be as good as if my family was here to enjoy it with me
• Jesus is the father to the fatherless
• the love for a child that grows in your heart is just as powerful as when that child comes from you
• you can’t make someone love you but you can always love someone
• hearing a little girl call you “papa” can make your day

we have been blessed to get to know - via email contact over the last several years - a very special couple in westchester, ohio, scott and kathy rosenow… the rosenows have adopted 13 (yes, thirteen) special needs children from around the world, in addition to their own 4 biological children.. kathy emailed me recently that they are beginning the process of trying to adopt #14, a six year old boy from china paralyzed from the hips down,

right now, they have an uphill battle before them in getting approval to adopt another child in a family so large.. kathy’s words to me: “we know that we have been equipped to provide all that he would need and a real love for him has grown in our hearts.. we are waiting for word, and know that it will take a whole string of miracles. but we have seen them before…”

the rosenow family

when i think about the rosenows, i am reminded of isaiah 8:18: “behold, i and the children whom the Lord has given me are for signs and wonders” (nasb) - the purpose of “signs and wonders” is first, to get our attention, and then, to open our hearts to receive truth..

what the rosenows have done with their lives certainly gets my attention.. and as i stop and ponder, my heart starts hearing things, about the value of one child, about the difference that one family can make, about the possibility of doing the impossible, about giving tangible expression to the things we say we believe..

(the rosenows actively advocate for special needs adoption through their organization, the shepherd’s crook.. i invite you to visit their website to learn more about the rosenows and their work to bring “hope for the neediest orphans of God’s flock“)

from a 2005 chicago tribune article.. i copied this article on our first blog back in 2006, its a bit long, but a good read and well worth the revisit:

Chen Shangyi and his wife, Zhang Lanying

Chen Shangyi makes a living as a scavenger. He prides himself on having a good nose for unusual finds. So when he saw a crowd clustered around a white bundle at the local train station one day while he was hunting for empty soda cans and soy sauce bottles, he couldn’t resist taking a peek.

It was a baby, wrapped in a thin sheet.

“Everybody was just looking. Nobody would do anything,” recalled Chen, who was 65 on that bitterly cold, snowy day 17 years ago. “When I took her home, she was frozen stiff. My wife and I wrapped her in a burlap bag. We started a fire. We fed her soup and put some old clothes on her. A while later, she started to wriggle.”

Chen named her Ling-Ling.

Today, Chen still makes a living as a scavenger in Anding, a remote Chinese town of 460,000 people on the edge of the Gobi Desert. And he is still bringing home children - 42 in all, at the last count.

Many had been abandoned because they had physical disabilities. Over the years, Chen has developed such a reputation as a keeper of castaway kids that even local officials have sent them his way. They know Chen would never reject any child, no matter how imperfect.

“Nobody else wants them, because they are afraid of trouble,” said Chen’s 81-year-old wife, Zhang Lanying. “They think these children are dirty. But I pity them. They are human beings.”

…

Local officials say they have sent castaways to Chen because they have no other way of caring for them. A new orphanage sits empty because it takes too much money to operate. A handful of staff are paid to guard the vacant building.

Instead of using the orphanage, local officials pay Chen and his wife to do the work for them: Less than US$80 (HK$624) per month for the eight children the elderly couple now care for.

That meager sum, plus the little cash Chen brings in by picking through trash and all the love the couple can muster, has been enough to save dozens of children from death.

Chen, a sturdy 82-year-old with deep lines in his sun-baked face, has the equivalent of one year of primary education. When he was younger, he worked as a laborer. After the economic reforms of the late 1970s, he started peddling tea at the local train station and collected garbage on the side. After becoming a full-time parent, he gave up the tea business.

His first wife left him long before that, taking with her their two children, now in their 60s. He married Zhang more than 50 years ago. They have no children of their own. But they say they have cherished every one of the youngsters who have come into their three-room brick shack across the street from the train station.

Their oldest now is 12-year-old Yuan-Yuan. She was born with a lump on her skull the size of a peach. Someone had left her in the yard of the local municipal building. No one wanted anything do with this frightening-looking child who was probably then a year old. Chen took her home.

Chen and Zhang finally saved enough money three years ago to pay for an operation to remove the growth and allow Yuan-Yuan to live a more normal life. It cost about US$80.

Like the rest of the children, Yuan Yuan calls Chen and Zhang Grandpa and Grandma, or Yeye and Nainai.

“We love our grandparents. They work so hard for us,” said Yuan Yuan who, during a lunch break from school, helps wash the dishes, pour hot water into thermoses and bring chairs for Yeye and Nainai.

“I don’t miss my parents,” Yuan-Yuan said. “They are so cruel. They left us because they knew we were sick.”

The youngest child now is two-year-old Ling-Ling, named after the baby Chen found at the railway station. The first Ling-Ling never recovered fully from being left in the snow and suffered from frequent coughs and seizures. She never crawled or walked and died when she was four.

Chen found Ling-Ling’s namesake crying in an alley. Born with a hunchback and uneven legs, she was just days old. Now the round-faced girl with pretty eyes loves to cling to Yeye and Nainai and keep them company while most of the older children are in school.

“If you throw a puppy out on the street, someone might pick it up, but throw a baby out on the street and no one bothers,” Nainai said as she cuddled Ling-Ling close to her chest.

The sickest child in the household is nine-year-old Long-Long, paralyzed and suffering from liver disease. Chen found him one day when he went to fetch water for the house. Long-Long, then a baby, was in a paper box under a blazing sun, crying.

“I came home and told my wife. She said, `We already have too many children; we can’t take on any more,”’ Chen recalled. “I sat on my stool and just couldn’t get over it. So I went and brought him home.”

Whereas Long-Long requires a walker to get around and needs help for virtually everything, Jin-Jin, four, can’t sit still.

Chen found the mentally impaired boy sleeping on a hospital lawn. He was three or four months old and naked. Nothing appeared to be wrong with him. The older Jin-Jin got, however, the more his problems became apparent.

Another child in the house, Quan-Quan, was born with a cleft palate. Chen found him when he was about a year old at the local farmers’ market, crawling on the dirt and eating rotten vegetables.

“Everybody knew he had been abandoned for days and was starving,” Chen said.

“He couldn’t walk yet, and his neck was this thin,” Zhang said, shaping her thumb and forefinger into a ring. Today, six-year-old Quan-Quan is smart, performs well in school and loves to help his brothers. When not guarding Jin-Jin, he plays with a tiny kitten and 10-year-old Qiang-Qiang, an undersized boy with a bad heart.

Of the 42 children Chen and Zhang have taken in over the years, 21 turned out to be healthy or suffering from very mild disabilities and were adopted. Thirteen very sick children died. The loss of Ling-Ling, their first child, still hurts the most.

“She was very pretty,” said Chen, pointing to a wall of collage photos showing all his “grandchildren.”

“We buried her in a ditch by the river,” he said. “We couldn’t afford cremation.”

Even when the children are doing well, it’s not been easy supporting such a large family on the income of a scavenger.

Now Chen worries that local officials may take his children away on the grounds that he is too old to be their caretaker. He believes a recent flurry of news reports about the children that suggested official negligence had embarrassed local officials.

Wang Yanfu, deputy head of the district civil administration bureau, said officials were prepared to rent a house and hire two workers to feed and care for Chen’s children.

“We sent him the kids before because he was young, in his 60s. Now he is too old,” Wang said. “We are trying our best to convince him [to quit]. But if he doesn’t want to, there’s nothing we can do. It has to be voluntary.”

Chen says he can’t trust the government to do what’s best for the children. He said local officials continued to offer him abandoned children until only a few years ago.

“I don’t understand policy,” he said. “All I know is that when they were little, no one would help them. They say I am too old. I say I will raise them for as long as I can. They’ll have to kill me first before I let them take the kids away.”

who said there aren’t any heroes anymore?

jesus said, “go, and do thou likewise”

like most families coming to china to adopt their children, we knew very little about our daughter’s past, and thus for us, our gotcha day was very much like the birth day of a new baby.. this was a beginning and we would always look back to that magic moment..

we of course did wonder about the circumstances of our daughter’s birth and the issues that may have led to her abandonment, and we found ourselves at times, as our daughter is doing more and more now, thinking about her birthmother, what kind of person she was, what did she look like, did she have other children, and of course, why?..

but although we knew she was in foster care, we never really thought that much about her foster mother, and we were certainly unaware of the tears that I now know are often shed in the days and hours prior to these magic moments.. when the orphanage employees come to take the children away and the foster mom and her family have to say their goodbyes..

now, having worked among children in foster care for several years, having visited the homes of dozens of foster families, and having been a foster dad myself a few years back, i have such a greater appreciation for these very special people that so often remain hidden in the background but yet contribute so much to these children’s well-being

(visit the photos in honor of foster parents on our photo website)

we have been blessed with the privilege of getting to know our daughter’s foster mom, and have been in her home several times now.. she lives differently, she thinks differently, and she cares for children in ways different from ours, but we have so come to appreciate this lady and the place she had in our daughter’s life

sarah visiting her foster dad, mom & their granddaughter, april 2009

last time around, i did all the talking (sorry! didn’t mean to be rude..) this time, we have enabled you to weigh in with your comments, and we really hope many of you will.. you will have to register once and log-in (see META), then simply click the ‘leave a comment’ link shown beneath each post

and for any who may have an inclination to follow this blog that closely, we have also enabled you to subscribe to RSS feeds (see links on top right, and also in the META section on the bottom right)

after a one-year hiatus, we are now blogging again.. anyone that was here before will probably notice that we have substantially revised the format and functionality of this site.. also, it is our intent to have a bit more content in the postings this time around now that some of the newness of living here in china has waned a bit (moving on from the ‘look what we saw and did today’ that what so much a part of our first blog)

but first, let me invite you to take a bit of time and visit the pages (listed at top and also under our picture on the right) to learn a bit about who we are, what this blog is about, and what we are doing here in china