Who What When Where Why?

If you forgot what I look like, here's a stunning reminder...

For the next two months I'll be living at an apartment in the same apartment complex as Amanda's orphanage. The BYU group and I will be helping with adoption paperwork, coordinatting medical procedures, cooperating with government orphanages, fundraising, tending and caring for children, and a participating in a host of other unknown adventures!

Amanda de Lange is the foster mother of Starfish Foster Home. Through contacts in Shanghai, she emailed BYU's Kennedy Center looking for summer interns to help, and she found me! Through a bit of talking and contact-making, I found a group headed up by Professor Steve Hawks that had plans to go to China and do Health-related research, but lacked a "home-base" to do things from. So, putting two and two together, I hooked everyone up. So now there are 4 students, a professor, and two of his family members traveling to Xian.

Amanda takes care of "special needs infants," i.e. those infants most likely to die in the government orphanages, due to malnutrition, medical conditions, and lack of appropriate funding.

Through a rare bureauratic miracle, Amanda (who is actually from South Africa) overstepped what is usually mountains of paperwork, and was given permission to care for the babies. She received her first 6 babies in the fall of 2005, and received 6 more April 29, 2006.

The second batch came days before the BYU group (that's me) will arrive around May 3rd. I plan to be there until July 7, and the rest of the group will be there until the 28th or so.

Being unable to renew her Taiwan Visa after being there 7 years, Amanda moved to Xian, Shanxi Province, China to work. There she got involved with friends who were friends of the orphanages, and when the opportunity came to help, she couldn't pass it by. Xian is in interior China, home of the Terracotta Soldiers and about 3 million folks. We will be cooperating with government officials and overseas agencies to place these children in safe and loving homes, and helping to lay the groundwork for an organization that can help many babies in the future.

In the beginning, Amanda used her own personal savings to fund expenses. Since, she has received donations from various foundations and people around the world, but is still working to find any that can contribute to the effort. Before the children can be adopted, their immediate medical problems must be taken care of, which can only happen as the money comes in. Among other problems, the children have serious cleft-palettes, heart conditions, spina bifida, jaundice, and are malnourished.

There have been many miracles already, and I'm sure there will yet be many more. I think the man upstairs has a special place in his heart for these children. Stay in touch to learn more...