A 'village' for Chinese orphans
( 2003-09-16 10:37) (NPR.org)
China's one-child policy often means that parents
will abandon any child that is not physically perfect. American aid worker Tim
Baker is helping build a "children's village" that takes in unwanted babies and
gives them a chance at adoption. NPR's Rob Gifford has Baker's story, the latest
in an occasional series on Americans living abroad.
Tim Baker with one
of the newly arrived orphans at the "children's village" in Langfang,
China. |
Tim Baker, lower left, John Bentley, lower
right, and some other members of the Langfang children's village team,
with newly arrived orphans. | Baker, a native of
Green Bay, Wis., and his wife moved to China 15 years ago to teach English. The
parents of three biological children, the couple became volunteers at a local
orphanage. They have since adopted four Chinese children, all of them with
special needs.
"We wanted to do more, so we organized a foundation," Baker says.
They named it the Philip Hayden Foundation, after a fellow American teacher
and orphanage volunteer who died in China in 1994, at age 28. The following
year, Baker and his wife gave up their teaching and began to work with orphans
full time. Soon they will have room for 170 children in 10 separate houses -- in
what they call a Children's Village -- in Langfang, just outside Beijing.
Most of the children arriving at Baker's doorstep were abandoned because of
physical problems, including cleft palates and spina bifida.
Some of the 8,000 children adopted by U.S. couples every year in China have
come from the Children's Village. The aim, Baker says, is to bring in children
with special needs, fix them up, as he puts it, then look for people who want to
adopt them or become foster parents, either in China or abroad.
Baker says he loves his homeland, but his friends all say that every day he's
becoming more and more Chinese.
"I love America," he says. "I think it's the greatest country on Earth, but I
really don't have a strong desire to move back there. I love China, and I love
the job. I have the best job in the world."
|
