Anhui Cleft Healing Home

We had the sweetest day at the Cleft Healing Home. This home has been built and sponsored by Love Without Boundaries. When children with cleft lip and palate are brought to orphanages, it is very difficult for most of the orphanages to take care of these children. Their open palate makes it difficult for them to eat and thus gain weight, and they need more one on one care to give them intensive feeding.

Because the nanny to child ratio in most orphanages is pretty high, 1 nanny to 29-30 children, there is no way she can feed a cleft affected baby as consistently as they need to thrive. These babies also need special bottles. The cleft healing home is the first built, and is designed as a place where the babies can be brought so they can have more 1 on 1 attention and feeding. Once the babies get to 10-12 lbs (usually takes between 3 & 6 months) they have their surgery and then return to the home for 1 month while they recover. They are then sent back to the orphanage where their paperwork can be processed for adoption. The home can take 12 babies at a time and has 4 nannies to care for them. For Alex’s Eagle project he collected donations and bought special bottles for cleft affected children because they can not be purchased in China. We delivered five of these cases today (the rest will go to Xian) to the Cleft Healing Home.

We delivered the bottles and spent several hours holding and playing with the babies. You could tell how loved they were and how happy and healthy they are. Director Zhang Ming was so impressive and you could tell how dedicated he is to these children. The babies smiled and cooed and talked with us. It was so fun to hold so many of these babies. When we left Becca’s orphanage two years ago I cried, feeling so much grief and despair for those babies and all their losses, for all the love they weren’t getting, for all their needs that went un-met. Leaving today was joyful, knowing that these babies were given the greatest gift, more important than the nutrition they receive, or the surgeries they’ll get, is to be in a place where when they cry someone picks them up, when they’re scared someone comes. A place where people know them, people love them and care for them, there is someone who smiles, and notices when they smile back. This home is the first of its kind in China. I wish I had the money or the power to put one of these homes in every Province in China.