On December 8, one of my college classmates suddenly sent a WeChat article - "They Adopted Three Chinese Disabled Children, Now They Are Facing Difficulties" . As a Christian, she also asked me if I could help the family.
I got back to her right away, and as long as I made sure this was true, I could help them. Because this is exactly the counterpart of my “A Perfect Love Foundation".
40 minutes later, the author of the article was found -Xin Luo, our junior student from Peking University, the 84th grade sociology department.
An hour later, the director of the American family documentary filmed in the article was found - Qiong Zheng, a former CCTV advertising company who is now an investment documentary producer.
As a result, I entered this period of the communication between China and US, a highlight moment that is enough to go down in history. Seven days and nights have passed, and I act and be moved every day. As of the writing of this article, more than 3,000 people have participated in this "love connection" across the Pacific Ocean (according to the actual number of donations). Perhaps only these words can be used to describe this ongoing scene, “感天动地，波澜壮阔。”
A child abandoned by his parents and the world was pulled back from the brink of death.
China has a long history of abandoned children, and the recorded history of adoption by foreigners is at least a hundred years old. In Chaozhou, Guangdong, China, there is an "abandoned child island". Many people throw newborn girls into ponds full of swampy mud. Until 1914, the missionary Ms. Bell came here, and she turned the "Abandoned child Island" into a "child Saving Island".
Today, according to incomplete statistics, even after the two-child policy was fully liberalized in 2015, there are still as many as 10,000 children abandoned each year. Before 2015, there were tens of thousands of abandoned children every year.
Among these abandoned children, except for a few girls who have no physical problems, most of the children are disabled.
About eleven years ago, someone found a one year old child boy in a McDonald's in Guangzhou, and people was sent to a local welfare home after confirming that it was unclaimed. This is one of the tens of thousands of abandoned children that year.
It was later discovered that the child had type B "thalassemia" and had to have regular blood transfusions throughout his life to continue his life. Blood transfusions are required on average every two or three weeks, and the average life expectancy of patients with the disease is only thirty to forty years. It seems that's why his parents abandoned him.
Since he was abandoned by his parents when he was one year old, he has not been able to live normally, because the orphanage cannot guarantee blood transfusions every two or three weeks, so the child was abandoned by his parents and the world before he could perceive the world .
This boy is the first small protagonist of this article, and he is named Simon.
Two years later, an American mother of three biological children is about to adopt, and she has set her sights on China, the country she has loved since she was 7 years old. She saw a photo in a Chinese welfare institution, there is a smiling child in a striped shirt. So she started the process of international adoption. The name of this normal American mom is Katie.
Adopting a Chinese abandoned child requires a one-time payment of $30,000. This is not a small burden for a working family like Katie, who only works by her husband and has three children. In order to raise the money, the family tried their best.
All three of their children also acted together. The eldest daughter, Faith, was less than 7 years old at the time, and she took her younger brother to knock on the door to raise money. Although the donations received were all one yuan and two yuan, the children were very happy. In ten days, they raised five hundred dollar.
When Katie couldn't collect the thirty thousand dollar adoption fee and was so anxious that she almost collapsed, her daughter Faith, who was less than 7 years old, said to her: "Mom, there will always be more hope."
Katie and husband Craig took out their savings, accepted donations from friends and family, sold some furniture (including Katie's favorite rocking chair), ate pasta for a month and emptied their wallets ...
Finally, $30,000 is enough! Katie completed all the formalities and crossed the sea to China, just to bring the child back to the United States and give him a home.
Physical illness is painful, and spiritual trauma is even more painful. Simon was five years old when he was adopted and already remembers a lot. The experience of being abandoned by his parents at a young age made him close his heart.
As a 5-year-old, before he was adopted by this strange American mother, he had an inexplicable fear of the future. He asked Katie, "If I get lost, will you come to me?"
As a mom, Katie was devastated to hear about her child's question. She knew what the child was afraid of. She cried and replied, "I will keep looking! My love is forever."
During the process of coming to China to adopt Simon, Katie saw a photo of another little girl in the orphanage—a round face, but born without eyes. She was over three years old, sitting alone in a chair, and Katie fell in love with her from the first sight.
The blind child was named Allie，This is the second character in our article.
After bringing Simon back to the United States, Katie has never forgotten Ellie. A year later, she and her husband Craig agreed to return to China to find Ellie. Find her as their last adopted child.
However, they did not know that Ellie, who was waiting for them, was a blind child with a serious mental disorder that no one wanted to approach. She is at odds with the world. She would growl, spit at everyone, scream for hours at a time, and shred everything she got hold of. Yes, the world is too unfair to her.
In the process of Katie's adoption of Ellie, Katie saw another picture of another blind girl, and she is also our third character Ivy. She looks so much like Ellie, even her age, which makes Katie wonder if she and Ellie are twins.
Katie and Craig checked the girl's file and were convinced they were not sisters. But they also noticed that the child was too small for his age. So they asked the adoption agency for an up-to-date picture and weight of the blind girl to determine her physical condition.
New information from the agency shows that the child has become thinner than ever. The Katies are very worried that if they don't adopt her, she may not survive the day when a family comes to adopt her, and she may leave this world. They also consulted many American doctors. Doctors also believe that Ivy's condition is deteriorating and is likely to die soon. So Katie and Craig decided to change the original plan and adopt two blind children, Ellie and Ivy.
In 2015, after the adoption procedures were completed, they divided the labor at home, and her husband Craig stayed at the American home to accompany the other children. Katie returned to China a year later and brought her 9-year-old daughter to pick up the two. A blind daughter comes home.
They first rushed to Zhengzhou to pick up Ivy, who was dying when they saw this weak life. She has a high fever, and her 4-year-old child weighs only ten pounds! How did the welfare home raise a 4-year-old child to weigh 10 pounds? This is not as heavy as most 4-month-old children. Katie even worries that Ivy won't be able to make it home with them.
Thankfully, under Katie's good care, Ivy ate a lot over the next week, gained a lot of weight, and got much better overall.
Then they rushed to Nanchang to pick up Ellie. When they saw Ellie with their own eyes, they discovered that Ellie had many other problems besides having no eye disease! - Not only is she autistic, but her pituitary gland is abnormal, causing her to have cognitive impairment. She can't walk or talk, and she can't even eat or drink by herself, so while in China, Katie had to put her in a baby swaddle and walk on her back.
In this way, Katie took her 9-year-old daughter and two girls who were congenitally blind and suffering from other diseases and returned to the United States! She and Craig brought back three abandoned Chinese babies who were on the brink of death and formed a brand new family of eight.
2.Love is never give up, love is fearless.
For these three special children, Katie's "receiving" work has been completed, but the "raising" work begins immediately. She never thought at that time that this would be a bigger test!
Simon, whose illness requires blood transfusions every two to three weeks. If the blood transfusion is not timely, Simon's physical condition is not good. Every blood transfusion Katie had to drive for hours to take him to another city and spend a whole day in the hospital.
This year, because of the epidemic, fewer people donated blood, and Simon's regular blood transfusions every two or three weeks sometimes became less secure. However, as long as the blood transfusion is not timely, Simon's condition is not very good, but Katie always tries her best to solve the problem.
In this way, seven years have passed year after year. This regular blood transfusion has long since become something that Katie's family does all year round. It was in this effort that Simon's life continued, and he remained in good condition. In seven spring, summer, autumn and winter, he went to the hospital for more than 100 blood transfusions. The body of this Chinese abandoned baby is now full of American blood.
However, Katie knows very well that the average life expectancy of a person with type B "thalassemia" is 30-40 years. That said, no matter how healthy Simon looks now, Katie is destined to have a day when she's in her 60s.
Simon has come out of the psychological shadow of being abandoned. Educated by Katie, he was very fond of cooking good food. During the epidemic, the 12-year-old tried to cook various foods at home every day. Even when he went to the hospital, he participated in the cooking competition in the hospital. Now he even has his own secret recipe. This is his personal "patent", and he doesn't want to tell anyone.
In contrast, taking care of and educating the two blind sisters Ellie and Ivy is much more difficult than taking care of Simon.
It was especially difficult to bring them home at first. I don't know if I was too hungry when I was a child, and Ivy was often nervous and hungry.
Fortunately, Ivy entered the local ordinary elementary school, and she was the only blind child in the class. However, she is very small for her age. Suffering from autism and obsessive-compulsive disorder, Ivy can't properly recognize words like "okay" and "um", and she screams whenever she hears them, so almost every week Katie is called to the principal's office for an interview. conversation.
Ivy was good at reading and writing, but her math skills were only at the level of a four-year-old, which gave Katie a headache. So, from the end of last year, Katie had to teach Ivy at home.
Over the years, Ivy did a good job reading Braille. She loves to sing and is willing to work tirelessly to sing for everyone. After discovering this, Katie wasted no time in giving Ivy more musical enlightenment. She personally taught her to play the piano, and invited a teacher to teach her to sing. Now Ivy has been able to sing to this world she can't see with great generosity!
One of Ivy's favorite songs is "Sunshine won't give up on me," and it was her singing that helped the family of eight get through some very difficult times.
Today's Ivy can already speak, laugh, sing, and play the piano. Malnutrition in her childhood made her extremely thin, but she had a loud voice and a strong personality.
Of the three adopted children, Ellie was the worst. She suffers from autism, Dandy-Walker syndrome (foramen 4 occlusion syndrome) and an abnormality of the pituitary gland, which causes her cognitive impairment and inability to walk normally. She growls and spit at everyone when she can't pronounce words. She would also continue to scream for hours. The Katies patiently fed her water or food, but she often threw them at them and kept screaming. For the first six months, Katie stayed in the house with the two girls, because everything around them would overwhelm the two children who couldn't see the world.
It took Ellie a long time to build trust in others. Gradually, when Katie was near her, she began to approach her mother. Since she couldn't see Katie's lips, she started pulling Mom's face against her own so she could feel how Katie was speaking with her mouth. In this way, Katie taught her to speak, and she taught her to smile!
In order to master some of the most basic survival skills, Allie needs about 32 hours of treatment per week. However, she still cannot speak normally. In addition, she often couldn't control her behavior, kicking and hitting her mother.
Ellie had a mental problem so she broke everything in the room - broke the closet door, tore off the wallpaper, and ripped off 2 sets of curtains. The drawer in the dresser was also pulled out by her and thrown out of the room...
Since then, Katie has had to make special arrangements for the set-up in the room - Ellie's bed was placed in the middle of the room so she couldn't reach the wall to tear the wallpaper; the wardrobe door was simply removed; Hang the curtains again...
Ellie's mental state has gotten particularly bad this year, and Katie has applied for a psychiatric evaluation for Ellie and her medication has been increased. She's even considering hospitalizing Ellie...
Despite the stress of this life, Katie and Craig have never regretted their adoption decision. In their eyes, no matter which of these three children is, they are their darlings.
We are now able to see the smiles of these children in photos and videos, but who knows how many times Katie broke down and cried behind those smiles!
Since their adoption, Katie and Craig have seen a doctor every three months because of excessive anxiety. They do their best to cope with extreme physical and mental challenges through therapy and medication. It really makes love fearless!
This special ordeal was not only a painful experience for Katie and her husband, but also for their three biological children.
While the adopted children screamed and snarled their anger and fear on Katie and Craig, their own children suffered as well. The eldest daughter, Faith, couldn't sleep properly every night, so the 15-year-old had to move to the boy's room next door, so the four children were crammed into a smaller room and slept on two bunk beds.
Only Katie and Craig know how much their three biological children sacrificed their normal lives for their three younger siblings from China!
The family supported each other like this, bit by bit in the longing for hope to endure the difficult days.
Looking back at the seven-year adoption history, we can clearly see the achievements of Katie's efforts——
In the first step, she pulls them back from the brink of death so they can live.
In the second step, she ensures that the children live a healthy life.
In the third step, she allows the children to live with dignity. ——Simon fell in love with cooking, Ivy fell in love with music, and Ellie began to know how to have limited contact with her family.
Katie uses her hard work day and night to bring the children who have been abandoned by the world on the right track.
From life as death to living with dignity, the experience of these three children reminds us of the classic line - God is not omnipotent, so he created mothers!
This article is written here, just the end of the first half, about the "moving" of Katie and her family. And in the second half of this article, you can see what I mean by "magnificent waves". The addition of (top) and (bottom) completely constitutes the "2020 tear-jerking blockbuster" as the author of the original article Luo Xin said.
Author：The President of A Perfect Love
Photography：Qiong Zheng, Katie.