Orphanage in China. Three problems of the Chinese family: orphans, divided families and lonely old age. - And what to change systemically
Who in China is engaged in raising a child, how relationships are built in a trilingual family, and whether a Chinese dad can sing a lullaby - our author Anna Zhuneva tells the story of one unusual international family.
We accept guests, a family with a baby, plus or minus the same age as our eldest daughter. We communicate “for life”: we are sitting at the table with cabbage pies, and the children are on the floor, sorting out wooden figures of animals. Suddenly, our little guest hands one figurine to dad and loudly and clearly pronounces a word that makes me look at her mother in surprise and almost blush. "Don't worry guys, it's all right! "Huli" means "fox" in Chinese!
Michelle's father is Chinese. A real, original, ethnic Chinese named Wang Teng. True, everyone calls him Michael, because the new generation of Chinese has such a custom - to acquire second "European" names for the convenience of intercultural communication. It was on the basis of such communication that the union of Michael and Lena arose. Their family cannot be called typical, neither in the Russian sense, nor in the Chinese; intertwining their national characteristics, the principles of conscious parenthood and common sense, the guys created their own rather alternative world in which their daughter Michelle was born and is growing up; by her early 30s, she speaks three languages confidently and effortlessly jumps from one cultural situation to another. Below is the documentation of those very conversations “for life” that Lena and I had.
Marrying a foreigner is a rather popular dream plot among Russian girls. Are you one of them too?
To be honest, I never thought about marriage at all. I just finished in.yaz. and decided to live abroad for a while. So I was thrown into China for several years, but when someone joked about marriage, I always said: “Never for a Chinese!” But in Latin classes, I met and became friends with one uncle, and he began to actively advertise his nephew to me (in general, pandering flourishes in China); Naturally, I did not attach any importance to this.
Once I invited this new friend of mine to some party, where he also brought his previously announced nephew. I spent the whole evening thinking: “Well, what is THIS ?!” But my nephew took my phone number and soon invited me to the cinema. I agreed - out of politeness and love for cartoons. And after another 10 dates, we went to the registry office. Actually, I came across a serious guy, he was not interested in short-term relationships. One day he asked how many children I would like. I said that it depends on many circumstances, but in general, if we take the ideal picture, then four. He immediately took me into his arms and said: "Let's get married!" In general, in vain I swore.
Elena with her husband and daughter
Did you and Michael formulate your views on raising a child? Are there any peculiarities of relationships with children in China?
In general, in China, grandparents are usually involved in raising children, most often on the part of the husband, and parents are in charge of making money. I outlined this moment in advance and quite ultimatum: when the child appears, there will be no talk of any grandmothers - I will leave work and until a certain time I will work only as a mother! My husband took it well, approved my idea. But his parents were extremely surprised and obviously not happy - and still, in fact, they are not happy. But, fortunately, they are a little afraid of me, so they do not dare to argue.
In general, I was very lucky with them, they are extremely liberal, and this is a rarity in China - you usually face total control of children and grandchildren.
So my marriage cannot be called “typically Chinese”. If only because most of the time we live in Russia, together with my parents. In fact, our Chinese relatives have seen Michelle live only a few times, and participate in her life remotely.
Differs from the "typically Chinese" and Lenin's approach to breastfeeding- orientation to a long lactation period. And if in Russia the minimum period of feeding is considered to be a year - which is voiced even by the lips of pediatricians - then in China everything is different: due to the very short maternity leave rare mothers reach breastfeeding for up to six months, more often the child is transferred to food autonomy after 3 months.
Does Michael have some special Chinese "papal" behavior model?
The husband spends a lot of time with his daughter - he is responsible for games and fun.
My mother and her friends, when they watch him play with Michelka, say with admiration: “Not a single Russian man is capable of this!” But they just haven't seen other Chinese men yet - those, in fact, are even less capable. So it's just that I have such a wonderful husband, and not "all Chinese are like that."
In China, there is no cult of children, their adoration as a national trait?
The cult of children here boils down to the fact that the child must be dressed and fed. Always. More often, by force. The cult of food generally wins!
There is a consumer boom in China right now. Moreover, people tend to buy things not “made in China”, but imported, and this is insanely expensive. Therefore, if the family has the financial ability and the feeling that "the child should have everything," they simply fill the room with toys, clothes and other things. As one friend of mine put it, the easiest way is to make money on children, and this is true.
According to my observations, in China, the child is not perceived as a person. Although here in general the concept of personal space is erased - there are too many people around.
Those. it is considered normal to touch or even grab someone else's child, and to say anything about your own in the third person, in his presence. There is not even a traditional lisping with children, the specificity of the language affects: word forms and phonetics cannot be distorted in it. The only thing is that there are diminutive forms for the words “handles”, “legs”, applicable only to babies. It sounds something like “xiao show-show”（xiao – small, show – hand), “siao chiao-chiao” (tiao – leg).
As for the national peculiarities of upbringing, everything is a little sad here: raising children at home mainly comes down to feeding, everything else is on the conscience of kindergartens, if it is not possible to leave the child with grandparents. That is, parents spend very little time with their children. Just going out for a walk with a child is a luxury that only those who have at least some free time can afford. Therefore, I am very happy when I see a young family with children for a walk. Many still leave to work in big cities and see their children only on New Year's Eve.
Elena and Michelle
Describe the language environment in which Michel lives.
Michael and I mainly communicate in English or its Chinese version - “Chinglish”. And with Michele, I spoke English in principle from the very birth, so this language was initially the leading one for her. Of course, while we were living in Russia, she managed to master Russian too - daily communication with her grandparents plus the environment played a role. But Chinese lagged behind - she spoke only a few words, despite the fact that dad cooed with her in Chinese.
When we arrived in China, at first she stubbornly refused to speak. And then suddenly it broke! Of course, Chinese is still more difficult for her than English and Russian, but she developed a desire and interest, and she began to speak it more and more. And recently there was a breakthrough with Russian: now she herself sometimes demands that we play the game in Russian or tell a book in Russian. We read a lot in all three languages. With me - in Russian and English, with dad - in Chinese. Right now, dad sometimes starts showing her hieroglyphs, but so far she only knows her last name - 王.
Mishanya perfectly understands that she speaks three languages, never confuses them and clearly distinguishes between them. And she also understands that this stands out and causes surprise in other people.
Of course, in fact, we are setting up an experiment, we do not use any special techniques- we simply dip the child headlong into different language contexts. But so far, the experiment seems to be going quite well.
Michelka - "Russian soul"? Do you notice any pronounced Chinese or Russian traits, character traits in her?
I generally doubt that such national traits exist. But she has her own, personality traits are very interesting! And if in Russia it is already somehow normal to perceive that all children are different, then in China this surprises everyone.
For example, she does not immediately make contact with strangers. That is, even a word cannot be pulled out of it! And in general, she will press into me or pull me to leave. For the Chinese, this is wildness, because, due to the size of the population and, accordingly, the huge number of relatives, all children get used to macro-collectives from birth. Usually, faced with such a reaction, the Chinese immediately begin to teach me, they say, it is necessary to be with the child more often in crowded places, and they reassure me that they will go to kindergarten, and everything will be fine right away. I smile to myself and remain silent, because the kindergarten is definitely not our story.
Michael and Michelle
There is a standard pool folk tales and sentences with which every Russian person is somehow familiar: all these "Turnip", "White-sided Magpies" and "Koloboks". Is there such a thing in China?
I didn’t hear any folk lullabies and songs, at least no one sang or told Michelle anything like that. Mostly translated classics like the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. There are, of course, modern children's songs, including those based on our Russian fairy tales, for example, about the turnip. Only in the Chinese version - radish, and the mouse is not involved in the process. There is also a song based on "The Wolf and the Kids": there the wolf tries to break into the hare's house, and he says: "I won't open it, my mother is not at home." So with Chinese children's folklore - trouble! Recently, I was just asking my husband for some kind of lullaby, he eventually gave up - there is, he says, one! I prepared to listen, he sang: "Aaaaaaaaaa."
Here is such a special case of Russian-Chinese relations. The Teng family can be called nomads: they live either in Hangzhou, one of the most beautiful cities in China, or in Perm, with Lenin's parents, or in Xiaogang, with Michael's parents. The plans are to move to Kaliningrad for permanent residence. But, given the very fact of her Chinese marriage, Lena decided not to renounce anything anymore.
P.S.: We met the guys during one of their "Russian seasons" in Perm. Michelle had just turned two years old, she was rather laconic. And at the time of our last meeting, she had already become a full-fledged talker and skillfully maneuvered between Russian, communicating with us, and English, talking with her mother.
Orphans in a Chinese orphanage Photo: www.robinhammond.co.uk
More recently, the Chinese media were full of good news: Chinese families are finally allowed to have a second child. This right has already been used by a million couples. The easing in the policy of birth control has finally been lifted. The local media barely reported that the million couples were just a small fraction of those who could exercise this right, and did not write at all about how many Chinese mothers abandoned their children.
How many orphans are there in China? This question seems strange to anyone who knows anything about "family China." In China, the cult of the family and children reigns. Here, children are not abandoned, but on the contrary, they are kidnapped, so that later they can be resold to wealthy childless couples. "South China" decided to find out if there are orphans in China and how many of them - the numbers turned out to be shocking ..
For a million couples who agreed to have a second child, there were almost half a million orphans in China. According to official figures, as of the end of 2014, 514,000 children in China are in orphanages and the same number are adopted or “under public care”. The total number of abandoned children in China has approached a million, and the dynamics are frightening: 500 thousand in 2009, 712 thousand in 2012 and already a million in 2014. Every year, 100,000 orphans are born in China.
These data “break the pattern” even for professionals who have been dealing with China for more than one year. In the country family values- China, where the child is called the "little emperor", where on the streets, houses and almost everywhere you can see images of smiling children - half a million children are abandoned. Of course, for a billion-strong China, the number is not so big, but against the backdrop of a decrease in the desire of the Chinese to have a second child, this is a very obvious signal of a serious undermining of family values in society.
An orphan who lost all her relatives during the Sichuan earthquake
The problem turned out to be so massive that in October 2010, for the first time in history, the central government of China raised the issue of the problem of orphans, for whose support 2.5 billion yuan (about $400 million) was allocated. So far, more than 800 orphan reception centers have been built in China. There are about 4,500 orphanages in the country, most of them private, which provide places for 990,000 children.
For a long time, no one could give an accurate answer to the question "How many orphans live in China?" Until in 2005, the Ministry of Education first paid attention to this question. The study showed that at that time about 573,000 underage orphans lived in mainland China, 90% of them live in villages. In percentage terms, the most orphans, oddly enough, are in Tibetan families, even more than in the megacities of Beijing and Shanghai. Among them are many children who lost their parents during natural disasters - devastating earthquakes are not uncommon in Southwest China. But the main reason for the sharp increase in the number of orphans is associated with the refusal of custody of the child by relatives, after the government allocated a subsidy.
Subsidies for the "extended family"
The ratio of the number of orphans to the total population of China is actually not large, and a sharp increase in the number of orphans after the introduction of the subsidy is the norm,” said Shang Xiaogen, a professor at Beijing Normal University. Thus, the problem of the growth of orphans at the official level is recognized as an indicator of the growth of the well-being of society and the state, but not vice versa ...
Low-income families now know for sure that their child will not be left without guardianship and are more willing to transfer their children to the state. Last year's story with anonymous children's reception centers - the so-called. "safety islands" in southern China's Guangzhou, which closed after a few months, unable to withstand the influx of incoming orphans.
In fact, it is very difficult to calculate the exact number of orphans in China. In traditional Chinese society, the so-called “extended family” is widespread: if the child’s parents die, then grandparents, or uncles and aunts, take responsibility for him. It is for this reason that the government did not provide subsidies for these children. But times have changed - when China's rural society has become more "open", family values have changed, and uncles and aunts do not consider themselves responsible for the future life of their orphaned relative.
At the moment, there are about 4,500 orphanages in China, most of them are non-state institutions.
Orphanage for children of prisoners
The orphanage in Beijing Sunvillage has existed for 20 years, during which time it has "raised" about 2,000 orphans. At the moment, about 100 children live there. All of them are children of prisoners. Due to their background, they cannot get enough sympathy from society. All children are absolutely healthy, therefore they cannot receive subsidies from the state. The only thing they can hope for is the help of volunteer groups consisting of employees of companies, sports organizations, representatives of show business, students, and foreigners. Additional income for the orphanage comes from the sale of fruits and vegetables grown on the territory of the orphanage.
Disabled children
Taiyun Children's Rehabilitation Center for children with hearing problems. There are about 200,000 hearing-impaired children in China. This number increases by 30,000 every year.
If surgery is performed before the age of 7, the possibility of hearing improvement increases to 90%. But an operation on one ear costs 20,000 yuan (about two or three average city salaries), and not every family can afford it. About a hundred children are brought up in this orphanage, most of them disabled boys from neighboring provinces and villages. There is a large flow of children here, because in neighboring cities there are no appropriate personnel to deal with children. However, these children cannot receive support from the state due to registration - China still has a system of “attaching” the population to a particular province through medical insurance, pensions, bank accounts, etc. Last year, the orphanage almost lost its building, the tenant wanted to rent it to a more solvent client.
Mehdi is a fourth-year student at Beijing Language and Culture University. Every weekend he makes a record for those wishing to visit this orphanage in various social networks. Mostly foreign and Chinese students gather.
Mehdi says that there are no orphanages in his native Egypt, and the fact that the state and society leaves these children without help is very bad. The good Egyptian is trying to involve as many financially independent Chinese as possible in this good cause, because he himself is a simple student, and he will still leave China after graduation.
“Sometimes they simply do not have enough parental warmth, attention, and teachers do not have time to take care of them. All orphanages that we visit are non-state, the director pays them a salary from his own pocket.
There are very few really qualified educators, and no one really wants to mess with children, all adults here are volunteers. It’s not worth saying that I don’t have money, or I don’t have time, your presence alone will please the children,” says Mehdi.
The problem of orphans is closely related to the problem of labor migrants, who in China different estimates up to 250 million people. Labor migrants are tens of millions of fathers who left their families and children to earn money in the city, as well as a significant number of parents who left their children to grandparents.
Three societies
The Chinese economic miracle is known to all, but few know at what cost it was created. Its real builders are generations of labor migrants who left their villages for a better life in the cities, where they found themselves in a practically powerless position for many years.
In modern China, in fact, three dissimilar societies have developed. Society of the city, village and labor migrants.
At one pole of the well-being of Chinese society, hereditary citizens are employees of state organizations and large super-modern corporations. They own foreign languages often their children study abroad. Usually in their family there is one child, and they are in no hurry to give birth to the second. They already spend traditional holidays abroad, their income is either equal to or much higher than European citizens - they are the cream of Chinese society. This layer occupies 100-120 million people in China, mostly they all live in the cities of the "first line" - Beijing, Shanghai, as well as in the southern Chinese Guangzhou and Shenzhen.
One of the central districts of Beijing
Chinese peasants, who cannot even imagine life in the city, are on the other "pole of well-being." Without any exaggeration, we can say that many of them still live in the Middle Ages. Life, customs and the level of knowledge there have not changed over the past 300-400 years. In remote villages there is no electricity, roads, communications, not to mention TV and the Internet. It would be wrong to say that the situation is not changing: roads, schools, hospitals are being actively built in rural areas, but it does not yet cover all the villagers. Another 99.98 million Chinese live less than 1 dollar a day, but in the countryside not everything is measured in money, subsistence farming and natural exchange dominate here.
One of the Chinese village courtyards
Here flows a completely different life, not similar to the life of megacities. The border between the village and the city is based on the indicator of users covered by the Internet. There were 649 million of them in China at the beginning of 2015. The other 679 official million are people who do not know what the Internet is, who do not have a mobile phone or computer. This is half of China.
a factory dormitory for labor migrants in the southern Chinese city of Dongguan
Between these two extremes are migrant workers – hovering over the abyss between countryside and city – they are still returning to China. New Year home, but their whole life takes place in big cities. However, their funds are not enough to completely settle here - the apartment is in the city, but at the same time they cannot return to the rural society, which once pushed itself out as "surplus population". Labor migrants bound by the propiska institution cannot receive any free medical care, no pension, no place for their children in schools. And although the issue of solving the problem of registration is on the agenda, migrants remain the most disenfranchised part of Chinese society. Migrants are more than half of the population of modern Chinese cities, the notorious indicators of urbanization, which the Chinese authorities are chasing、
Separated families
The number of labor migrants inside China has grown 33 times in 30 years, and a few years ago it reached 220 million people. The Guangdong Provincial Women's Affairs Committee (South China) reports that there are 48 million married women in the province whose husbands work in other parts of the country. Guangdong is the heart of China's export trade, accounting for almost a third of exports and 20 percent of GDP, and also accounts for the main problems associated with migrant workers.
The state mainly offers local employment options to highly skilled workers, while millions of unskilled workers are forced to choose between profitable work away from home or low-paid work close to their families. Most spouses who are separated because of work consider the separation a temporary measure and hope to earn money and reunite.
Sun Li, 37, works as a housekeeper in the prosperous area of Foshan (an industrial area adjacent to Guangdong's capital, Guangzhou). She has two children, aged 8 and 10, who live permanently with her husband's parents in a rural area near Xiaoning City, Hubei Province, more than a thousand kilometers from Guangdong. Sun Li is lucky, her husband lives with her, working as a taxi driver in Foshan. She only sees her daughters three weeks a year, on the eve
Chinese New Year, when, according to tradition, all family members should gather together. Every month, she and her husband send home 3,000 yuan, which is about a third of their total income. In Guangdong they earn three times as much money as they could in their own province. All of Sun Li's friends live the same way, mostly away from their families. Tickets for a train going to Xining from Guangzhou or Foshan are sold out three times a day a month and a half before the holidays, air ticket prices rise two to three times, but they are also sold out, sometimes before the new year business class tickets remain for the price of the average salary living in Guangdong Xianying. Sun Li misses her daughters, but her childhood was poor and she does not believe that by living with her children, they will be able to save money for their education.
According to sociological studies, 50 percent of spouses living separately almost never see each other, and only 5 percent see each other more than ten times a year. At the same time, 40 percent of all abandoned wives consider their marriage successful because their husbands send them more money than they earned before marriage. Most working parents find it normal to leave their children to be raised by grandmothers. However, as we wrote above, the number of children abandoned by labor migrants is growing every year by 10 percent, indicating serious changes in attitudes towards the family among this population group.
lonely old age
The policy of "one family - one child" not only limited the growth of the Chinese population, but also created a huge burden on the generation of Chinese 80s, on their shoulders fell not only the costly care of the child, but also the care of their own parents. According to a study cited by the People's Daily, 99% of working "eighties" note that they not only cannot support their parents, but are also forced to ask them for financial assistance. There are now more than 200 million elderly people over the age of 60 in China. Half of the survey participants note that they cannot visit their own parents, as they live in different cities.
One of the rural nursing homes in South China
By 2014, more than 40,000 nursing homes (养老院) were created in China - a very unpleasant indicator for a country where one of the pillars of public morality is considered "Xiao" 孝 - the cult of elders. inevitable" by-effect"One family, one child" policies. Official figures for the number of elderly people in nursing homes could not be found, but official statements from officials contain plans for the construction of new nursing homes - they estimate that 5 percent of the total number of elderly people will be forced to live outside the family Based on the current number of Chinese old people, it can be assumed that up to 10 million elderly Chinese are "guests" of such institutions.
To create an objective picture, it is necessary to add that in percentage terms to the total population in Russia there are much fewer old people than in China, but with children, the “flowers of life”, the situation is depressing. If in China there are less than 0.1 percent of orphans, then in Russia there are almost 0.5 percent ...
Bota Masalim, Marina Shafir, Nikita Vasiliev
Difficult question, actually. Because it is believed that orphanages (called orphanage), as such, do not exist in the United States. Here is an extract from Wikipedia on the subject:
In the 1920s, three major cities—New York, Philadelphia, and Boston—established the first orphanages to isolate endangered children from the corrupting environment of their homes and adult establishments, and to some extent replace families and communities. However, the inefficiency of shelters and educational institutions as educational institutions was quickly revealed. Rather, they turned out to be a temporary shelter for a child in extreme situations.
Currently, in the United States, as well as in other developed countries, there are no orphanages for permanent residence of children. There are temporary shelters for children until the child is placed in a foster family (in this case, often it is not about adoption, but about keeping the child in the family to which compensation is paid).
In 2010, there were 408,000 children in the US foster system. 48% of them (194 thousand children) lived with non-relative foster parents, 26% (103 thousand) - in foster families of relatives, 6% (25 thousand) - in group homes, 9% (37 thousand) - in institutions. 50-60% of children from the foster system return to their parents. About 100,000 children from the foster system are awaiting adoption. Approximately 50,000 children are adopted from a foster home every year, in half of the cases they are adopted by the foster parents themselves. Adoption from the foster system is the lowest cost or completely free.
If translated into a digestible language, then children who find themselves without a family are identified in the families that are engaged in their upbringing (foster families). Here is the beginning of the Foster article:
Americans are well known for their unconventional approach to solving any problem. Few people know that every year, for a variety of reasons, over a hundred thousand children are left without parents and relatives, but in the United States there are virtually no orphanages.
The distribution system for single children in America was called "foster", which in translation into Russian means "to educate, care for, patronize." The essence of this system is as follows: children left without parental care almost immediately end up in a foster family, whose members have expressed a desire to shelter the child in advance.
Terry Kramer of the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) says: “Imagine a 5-year-old kid losing his mom, dad, grandparents in one day ... The best thing we we can do for the child in this situation - give him to a family where he will undergo a course of psychological adaptation.
Statistics show that on average a child lives in a foster family for about 12 months. For example, a married couple, Tony and Geraldine Whitburn from Oregon, have adopted about sixty children in their lives.
“Most of our pupils have biological parents who are alive, but they are either in prison or deprived of parental rights Geraldine says. “Unfortunately, we cannot completely replace the children of their parents. American laws are designed in such a way that it is very difficult to adopt a child with living parents.
However, there are shelters, and there are quite a few shelters in America. Basically, this is done by various religious organizations. Just to give you an example, I found one very distinctive shelter called Boys Town.
This orphanage was organized by the Reverend Father Flanagan in 1917. That is, Boys Town has been operating for over 90 years. Here is their website: http://www.boystown.org/ And here is a short video in English:
This guy is a former pupil, and now he works there. Boys Town is a whole network of shelters across America. Here is a picture. If you click, you will be taken to this page on the Boys Town website.
Total shelters or shelters (shelter) in the US 3360. This is only for the homeless, because there are other categories. Here is a picture with a link where you can find a shelter near where you live:
And here is a site showing shelters (shelters) for women. Particularly for those who have experienced domestic violence. The picture is also clicked and you get to their website:
There are also shelters for homeless animals, but today we are not talking about them. Somehow, another time I will tell, because the topic is also alive.
Well, now the conclusion. As such, there are no orphanages in America. I mean state institutions that would be engaged in the upbringing of homeless children.
But there are many other organizations that do this. All of them are subsidized, that is, they exist on donations. Mostly private individuals.
In addition, there is a foster system in which there is a constant and non-decreasing queue. So children who are left without parents, almost without delay, fall into such families.
All, probably. Ask if anything is unclear. Although I am not an expert on American orphans either. True, I worked as a doctor in an orphanage near Moscow, but that's a completely different story.
It turns out that for every one million couples who pluck up the courage to have a second child, there are about half a million orphans in China. According to official statistics as of the end of 2014, 515,000 children in China live in orphanages and the same number are adopted or "under public care." The total number of abandoned children in the PRC reaches one million, and the dynamics are sad: 500,000 in 2009, 715,000 in 2012, and already one million in 2014. About 100,000 orphans are registered in China every year.
Such figures amaze even professionals who have been working with China for a long time. In the state of family values - China, where the child is called the "little emperor", where on the streets, buildings, and everywhere you can see images of laughing babies - half a million children are abandoned. Naturally, for a country with a billion population, this number is not strong and large, but against the background of a decrease in the desire of the Chinese to have a second child, it is a completely unambiguous signal of an exciting undermining of family values in the state.
The problem became so serious that in October 2010, for the first time in history, the national government of the Celestial Empire spoke about orphans, for whose needs 2.5 billion yuan (about 400 million dollars) were allocated. To date, China has opened more than 800 reception centers for abandoned children. There are about 4,500 orphanages in the republic, most of which are private, where 990,000 children can live.
For a long time, no one was able to answer how many orphans there really are in China, until the Ministry of Education in 2005 for the first time took up this question. The study showed that at that time about 573,000 underage orphans lived in mainland China, 90% of whom live in rural areas. Most of these children are in the Tibetan region, even more than in the cities of Beijing and Shanghai. Among them are many children who lost their parents as a result of natural disasters - earthquakes that take the lives of people are not uncommon in the South-Western region of the country. However main reason rapid growth The number of orphans is provoked by the refusal of custody of the baby by relatives, after receiving a subsidy from the government.
Orphanage for children whose parents are arrested
Sunvillage, an orphanage in Beijing, has been in operation for about 20 years and has raised approximately 2,000 orphans during this period. Today, about 100 children live there. They are children of prisoners. Due to their background, they are unable to get the necessary sympathy from those around them. These children are perfectly healthy and therefore cannot qualify for government subsidies. The only thing they can count on is help from volunteer associations consisting of employees of companies, sports teams, show business participants, students, and foreign citizens. Another source of income for the orphanage is the sale of vegetables and fruits grown on the territory. orphanage.
Disabled children
Taiyun, Children's Rehabilitation Center for Hearing Impaired Children. In China, there are approximately 200,000 children with hearing problems. Every year this number increases by 30 thousand.
An operation performed before the age of 7 increases the possibility of hearing correction by 90%. However, for an operation on one ear, 20,000 yuan is needed (approximately two or three average salaries of a city dweller), and not every family can afford it. Approximately one hundred children are brought up on the territory of this orphanage, most of them are disabled boys from the nearest provinces. There is a serious flow of children here, since there are no appropriate personnel in neighboring cities to interact with children. But such children cannot count on support from the government because of their residence permit - the PRC still has a system of “attaching” citizens to a certain province with the help of medical insurance, pensions, bank accounts and other things. Last year, the orphanage almost lost the building it occupied, because the tenant wished to transfer it to a more solvent user.
Israel is an amazing country. But the country, as you know, is made up of people, they represent the society by which the entire state is judged as a whole.Speaking about the Israelis, I would like to note one remarkable fact, which speaks in the best possible way in favor of this people, characterizes it from the best side. It turns out that there are no orphanages in Israel in the sense of the word that we are used to.
In Israel, in general, they love children very much and treat them reverently. So, the newlyweds do not “live for themselves”, but immediately after the wedding they think about the child. If he does not appear a year after the start of their life together, they turn to the center for artificial insemination. Moreover, expensive procedures are paid by the state. Abandoning children in Israel is very rare, but if this happens, the child is immediately adopted. Moreover, women who want to have an abortion are interviewed and offered to give birth to a baby and give it up for adoption, receiving a significant reward for this.
However, unfortunately, there are not entirely honest "mommies" who are trying to make money on this situation by extorting money from adoptive parents. The fact is that in Israel there is a law that protects the rights of biological parents. Within a year of abandoning the child, they may change their mind and return the child. This is explained by the difficult psychological state of a woman who has just given birth, whose postpartum depression, combined with fear of the unknown future that awaits her and the child, pushes the mother to a rash act. Oddly enough, they think about the child in the last place, as, indeed, about the adoptive parents. Although it would be worth thinking just about them. After all, the biological mother, if she really decides to return the child, does this within a few days (which still go to paperwork). In a year, the baby becomes native to the adoptive parents, and he already understands everything and considers them his parents. Taking an almost one-year-old child from one parent and giving it to another is a big stress for a child. But the law is the law, and it is strictly observed.
A sensational case is known about how the adoptive parents went to court, from whom, six months after the birth of a child, a mother who came to her senses, who received a reward at the time of adoption, began to extort money. In court, it was clear to all those present that the biological parents (by that time there was also a father who had not been interested in the birth of a baby at all) did not need a child, they only wanted to squeeze more money out of the situation. However, the court decision was given in favor of the biological parents. But the adoptive parents did not despair and continued to fight for the child in court. While the proceedings dragged on, the child was two years old. It turned out that the father of the child was mortally ill, and only this swayed the judges towards the adoptive parents. Fearing that the baby would be on the street, they decided to give the child to foster parents.
In general, the Israeli orphanage is a place where the child waits until all Required documents for adoption. This place can be different: babies are sent to families where they already have their own children, and the family looks after other people's children for a fee. Schoolchildren are placed in a boarding school, but it differs strikingly from the Russian orphanage.
Sick children are kept in hospitals. They are constantly visited by volunteers who, if they wish to adopt a familiar child, receive priority. One such volunteer organization is Hibuk Rishon, which means "First Embrace". The number of families who wish to adopt a foster child significantly exceeds the number of children in need of a foster family. Sick children and disabled children are not left without attention.
In Israel, there is no such thing as homeless children, in principle. Here they are ready to adopt any child who has lost his parents. This state of affairs best characterizes society! People who care about children, and not only about their own, but also about others, think about the future of their country.