Consider the Odds

Babies are fragile under the best of circumstances and good health isn't exactly a given for any child between birth and toddlerhood, as any fretful parent knows.

So imagine the odds stacked against a baby in a crowded orphanage in underdeveloped western China, especially a child with special needs resulting from a birth anomaly, developmental disorder, or congenital disease. To improve these odds, join us to help Love Without Boundaries begin a nutrition program that will supply high quality formula and cereal to babies at the Pingliang Social Welfare Institute, which was Henry's orphanage in Gansu Province. Specifically we are looking for additional program sponsors able to give a small amount each month because child nutrition is a goal that can only be reached over time. The monthly commitment is up to the sponsor. (For a guide: the program can provide for the full nutritional requirements of one child for less than $15 monthly, of at least two for $30, and so on.) About a half dozen sponsors have pledged to sign on from the small group of international adoptive families with children who also started out at the Pingliang SWI. But perhaps there are others who would also like to help, having learned about this place, and the special children who live there, by meeting or learning about Henry.

Today at the orphanage there are 135 children, including about 55 children under the age of 3. More than 90% have special needs; 40% with cleft anomalies like Henry. New children arrive regularly, but the percentage of nonspecial needs children there seems to have declined. The total number of children has declined only somewhat since the orphanage's previous report in September 2009, when the total had nearly doubled within a year. The children remaining, because of their special needs status, are more likely to be long-term residents. Civil affairs officials and a dedicated orphanage staff raised funds locally for a new orphanage building that will replace the present one damaged in western China's massive earthquake in 2008, and the children may be moved to the new building in August. On its own the orphanage staff often enlists help from domestic charities such as the China Social Workers Association to transport some children needing critical surgeries, including cleft surgeries, to expert facilities outside Gansu Province, including a hospital in Beijing. And Love Without Boundaries is the same stable, non-profit charity noted in many of our previous posts. It helped us deliver general supplies to Pingliang immediately after the earthquake, shoes and coats for older children later that same winter, wheelchairs and other ambulatory equipment for disabled children last fall. To become a sponsor for a LWB nutrition program at the Pingliang SWI go here.

Meanwhile, Henry today is 36 lbs of densely packed enthusiasm; at 3 1/2 years old he can ride 2 mile laps around Audubon Park on his tricycle, absolutely unphased. He is talking and has a lot to say, mostly about his favorite friends of Thomas the Tank Engine, his threadbare beloved Baby Jaguar (still,) and his family. He gets help from a home-visiting speech therapist and mornings at the Bright School, a special preschool for children with acute hearing and communication disorders. We think he will be ready for regular pre-k soon and are aiming for kindergarten on schedule. Medically his ear tubes have fallen out again and will need replacement this summer, and his speech is physically missing a lot of sounds, making p-flap surgery a greater likelihood before his lip and nose revisions already planned. But, having roundly defeated the odds, Henry is now the least fragile child we know, an irresistible force at the head of his own trajectory and a presence who often causes us to wonder if we have been joined by the true 15th Dalai Lama, until he takes a grinning, good natured, little-brother swipe at his sisters.