LWB Community Blog

Recently, seven-year-old Selia was taken to the hospital with pneumonia and could not easily recover. Doctors told her concerned family that she had a VSD heart defect that needed repair. The hospital told the family about our Unity Initiative, a program to help impoverished families remain together by funding medical care. Next, a generous supporter of our Unity Initiative funded Selia’s heart surgery, and she arrived at the hospital yesterday to prepare for surgery.

Rarely do you meet someone who appears to exude pure light and joy. Last week, my colleague Kate Finco and I had the amazing experience of meeting a young man who did just that. Adam, a seven-year-old student from our Lanzhou Believe In Me School, absolutely stole our hearts! We just couldn’t get over the very big presence of this little guy.  When we found out his adoption file is on the shared list, we couldn’t wait to share our impressions of him in the hope that his family will find him soon. Read more.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live in a world of silence? Six-year-old Jack doesn’t wonder because he was born profoundly deaf.

Jack uses hearing aids and, together with his foster care mother and his teachers, he is putting in the hard work to develop intelligible speech so that he can communicate verbally with his peers and others. He is doing really well! Read more.

In the interest of adoption, LWB Community will be profiling some waiting children whose orphanages have asked for help in finding families for them.  However, we do want to be clear that these children are not in LWB programs, and we have no personal knowledge of them.

With so many children waiting to be adopted, sometimes our efforts at advocacy don’t feel like enough. Some of the children wait so many months that their paperwork is no longer reflective of their age and development, making it even more difficult to advocate for them. While we realize that not every waiting child will find a family, we also realize that many children are overlooked and lost amongst the thousands of waiting child files available. In an effort to make others aware of the various children that are currently waiting, we want to tell you more about XJ.
Read more.

A chance meeting with Cloud by Paula and her Hunan-born daughter during a return visit to her orphanage last year made a permanent dent in their hearts and cemented their determination to help advocate for this sweet girl. Cloud will celebrate her 12th birthday next week. In her short life, she has grown in inner strength despite her tough start. She entered orphanage care just two years ago and in that time has shown that she is a caring and loving girl.
Read more.

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!
Read more.