LWB Community

Where There’s a “Will,” There’s a Way

This handsome young man is Will, formerly a resident of LWB’s Anhui Cleft Healing Home (ACHH) where his precious life was saved! After recovering enough to be discharged from ACHH, Will now lives in the area of Anhui that we’ve named “Zhang Village.”   Zhang Village is a tightly-knit community of foster families who take wonderful care of children who need a bit of extra tender love and care. Currently we are waiting on news that Will’s file has shown up on the shared list. We feel that this will happen very soon and hope a loving family will come forward for him. In the meantime, we need to help Will’s foster family pay for him to attend kindergarten so he can continue to grow and develop as he prepares for life with his forever family.
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Shayna: LWB’s Featured Child of the Week

Shayna is a beautiful baby girl who is in LWB’s Healing Homes program at our Anhui Cleft Healing Home (ACHH). Shayna was born in Fuyang in February this year with a cleft lip and palate and has a very sweet personality. At three weeks of age, she was hospitalized for myocarditis at a local hospital and overcame this serious illness over the next two weeks. She was brought to ACHH directly from the hospital and slept quite a bit that first week, but she quickly began to show us her curious nature by looking all about the room whenever she was awake.
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Lindsey: LWB’s Featured Child of the Week

Lindsey is our most recent addition to Huainan Foster Care.  She came to us from our Anhui Cleft Healing Home where she had surgery to repair her cleft lip (read more about her in our previous blog).  Lindsey is a bright and curious girl who is interested in her surroundings.  Her face lights up when she spots people who are familiar to her.
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Phillip: LWB’s Featured Child of the Week

Phillip is three years old and currently in our foster care program. This beautiful little boy was born with a cleft lip and palate, and we are so thankful that we could play a part in his healing. As you can tell from the photos below, Phillip loves his foster mom very much, and the feeling is mutual!
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Lindsey: LWB’s Featured Child of the Week

In February, a beautiful, bright-eyed baby girl weighing just eight pounds arrived at Anhui Cleft Healing Home (ACHH). Lindsey quickly became attached to her nanny and would cry loudly whenever the nanny left the room. Even at two months of age, Lindsey had incredible eye contact and was eager to interact with the nannies. They reported that once she locks eyes with you, her face brightens and she expects that you must go to her immediately for a chat or to pick her up. Smart girl!
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Lily: LWB’s Featured Child of the Week

Lily is a lovely four-year-old little girl in our Fuyang foster care program. She entered LWB foster care in February 2007 and has had successful repair surgeries on her cleft lip and palate. She loves her life with her foster family and is a very happy little girl. Lily is attending school and loves it! Her teacher reports that she likes to play with her classmates and is a good student. When our foster care manager visited her at school she was so happy to have her friends surrounding her when she had her photo taken. If you ask Lily what her favorite part of the school day is she will tell you the singing and dancing!
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Announcing LWB’s New Qiandongnan Foster Care Program!

It is with great pleasure that the LWB Foster Care Team announces our brand new foster care program in Guizhou province. We are delighted to be opening a new program in Qiandongnan for initially ten children. In March 2011, LWB’s Executive Director Amy Eldridge and Foster Care Director Arlene Howard traveled to Guizhou (see our blog series which culminated in “Journey to Guizhou — Reflections”) and visited several orphanages in this province. Qiangdongnan felt like the right place to start our newest program, and the staff there were very eager to partner with us. We have now identified ten children for this program who range in age from just under a year to nearly nine years old, most of whom have some sort of medical need.

Please read on and allow us introduce these ten beautiful children to you. It is our wish that the first sponsor to sign up to support each child choose the English name of the child. For now, we will simply allocate a program number to each child. It will be exciting for us to see the names of each of these children appear as they are sponsored, and even more thrilling to get to know each of them better!
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Counting Our Blessings on the Twelve Days of Christmas: Healing Homes

On the eleventh day of Christmas, we give thanks that our four healing homes are in place to take in the most vulnerable babies. When little Jan first came to our cleft medical exchange in October, she was so weak that she was unable to smile, and so thin that we worried whether she would qualify for surgery (please click on this link to see her amazing before and after photos). Following her operation, we knew she needed a safe place to recover and so she was moved to our newest healing home in Fujian province. Within weeks, she graced us with her first smile, and now she continues to make remarkable progress.
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Counting Our Blessings on the Twelve Days of Christmas: Lives Saved

On the ninth day of Christmas, we are giving thanks for all the lives saved this year thanks to our wonderful supporters. You wouldn’t know it from this adorable photo, but little Cody arrived into LWB’s hands in June of this year critically ill. Weighing just two kilograms at two months of age, his initial photos showed a listless baby who was gray in color and too weak to eat. We immediately moved him to the hospital, where he was treated for severe malnutrition, dehydration, and blood poisoning. After being stabilized, he was discharged to our Anhui Cleft Healing Home, where he got the TLC he deserved and where he steadily began gaining weight and confidence that his needs would be met. Soon the somber little baby we all worried so much about was transformed into a healthy baby boy who charms everyone he meets. Cody was ready for his life-changing cleft lip surgery in October and recovered beautifully. He is graduating this month from our cleft home into foster care, and we can’t wait to watch him continue to grow and thrive. We are sure everyone would agree that our world is definitely a much brighter and better place because baby Cody survived!
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Mason and Cody: From Healing to Home

This week we are featuring two wonderful boys who are soon to graduate from the Anhui Cleft Healing Home after their successful cleft lip repair surgeries. Mason and Cody will be entering our Fuyang Foster Care program and be united with foster families, where they will continue to recover with the love and support that foster care offers.

The boys entered LWB’s Anhui Cleft Healing Home (ACHH) in June 2010. As with many children born with cleft lip and palate, they were both malnourished. They needed to gain some weight before their tiny bodies would be ready to handle the stress of surgery.

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