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December 25, 2016

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Home » Sunday » People

Orphans at risk get loving care

By Zhang Ningning | December 25, 2016, Sunday | Print Edition

SHANGHAI Baby Home Health Care Center, a nonprofit group established in 2008, has helped fund medical care for more than 1,200 orphans with congenital diseases.

Working with more than 105 welfare institutions in 19 Chinese provinces, the organization brings orphans to Shanghai for hospital treatment and post-operative care. Medical and living costs are covered by donations.

The group, located in the Shanghai Children’s Medical Center, can house up to 60 orphans at a time. Most of the children stay there for three months, and 80 percent of them are eventually adopted by families.

One of the founders of the group explained its genesis.

“We were at first a group of young mothers sharing experiences about our own kids on a parenting website,” said Zhang Min, 41.

The mothers, she said, also shared posts about children living in remote areas who needed medical treatment and wanted to come to Shanghai for that. The mothers volunteered to help, and when visiting hospitals in the city, they discovered that many of the young patients were orphans.

Baby Home founders, who came from all walks of life, contributed their spare time to the group. They began in a rental apartment in Sanlin in the Pudong New Area and hired ayi as caregivers for the orphans. The mothers transported the children to and from hospitals for diagnosis, treatment and surgery.

As the number of orphans being helped grew, more volunteers were recruited. Baby Home eventually moved to larger quarters in a rented house in the Minhang District.

“It was a very busy time,” said Zhang, who often used lunch breaks from work to take children to the hospital. “The scale of our work was growing, but we were still operating it as part-time volunteers.”

In 2012, the Ai You Foundation, a charity whose projects included medical assistance to orphaned and poor children, heard about the program the young mothers were running and agreed to sponsor Baby Home.

Zhang and another founding mother, Zhang Xiaohua, resigned their jobs to work full-time for the organization.

Most of Baby Home’s orphans are taken to the Children’s Medical Center, which is considered to be among the best in the nation. About 95 percent of young patients with heart disease and other diseases come from other parts of China.

“Lacking sufficient numbers of beds, the doctors worried that so many children, including orphans, had to take trains back to hometowns just a few days after surgery,” said Ji Qingying, vice president with the hospital. “When the doctors learned about Baby Home from frequent visits by the volunteers, they wanted to lend a helping hand.”

In 2012, the hospital leased two floors of its dormitory for young doctors to the nonprofit group so that the orphans didn’t have far to go for treatment. Nurses and doctors volunteered to teach the untrained ayi how to give post-surgical care to the children.

“The children come here because hospitals in remote areas don’t have the capability to treat serious congenital diseases,” said Zhou Shuping, 64, the medical director of the Baby Home.

Zhou, who has helped Baby Home since its inception, is now one of 10 full-time staff for the project.

The stories of the orphans are heart-rending. One, named Qiangzai, was born without an anus and sent to Baby Home from Henan Province for urgent surgery a few days after birth.

“The last operation in 2014 was the most painful one,” Zhou said. “He cried all night, and the caregiver sat by his bedside to take care of him the whole time. When watching the baby’s suffering, she cried with him.”

A few months after the operation, Qiangzai was adopted by a family.

Li Chongying, 52, one of 40 caregivers at Baby Home, looks after five orphans, ranging in age from three months to two years. One of her charges is a 2-year-old nicknamed Lucky, who looks healthy and energetic after a successful liver transplant a year earlier. He remains at the center for follow-up exams. He and the other orphans call Li and the other ayi “mama.”

Baby Home is all about mothers’ loving care. Zhang said her own family didn’t understand her devotion to the group at first, but have come to accept it. Her 12-year-old son used to be jealous of the attention she lavished on children in the center.

“Some young volunteers who come here consider charity work a sort trendy thing to do,” she said. “They share pictures from Baby Home with friends via social media. I think it’s a good thing if charity becomes a fashionable part of society.” Almost every day volunteers come to play with the children. The volunteers include Chinese and foreigners, individuals and groups organized by local companies. At the end of November, Baby Home had more than 23,092 volunteers on its books.

“We still lack volunteers with specialties like massage for rehabilitation or those who can help in social media operation,” Zhang said.

She said the group wants to become more professional in future and help even more orphans. Better yet, it would be a better world if there were no orphans, she added.

In 2004, China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs Bureau launched the Tomorrow Project to raise funds for sick and disabled orphans needing medical treatment. As of 2014, more than 80,000 orphans had received treatment under the program and nearly 20,000 of them had been adopted by families from home and abroad in ten years.

People


 

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