Dear Sponsors,

Unfortunately I had to cancel the trip I had planned in September to visit the Jiangxi orphanages with the Amity staff.  My flight was scheduled to leave Tuesday evening, the same Tuesday as the terrorist attacks.  I re-booked for Friday but that flight was also canceled and then there was no space available to rebook until the last week in September which was too late.  I'm hoping to get the trip rescheduled, possibly in April. 

But Dr. Hong and Ms. Qiu from Amity did visit the Jiangxi orphanages from August 10 to 28 and sent me their reports last month.  They went to ten of the orphanages during their visit which were Nanchang, Fuzhou (Linchuan), Jiujiang, Leping, Shangrao, Guixi, Yingtan, Xinyu, Yichun, and Ganzhou.

The most pressing current need that they found was that of medical/surgical services.  Dr. Hong has sent a list of 37 children and young adults (grown orphans) that need funding for various needs.  Many need a surgery for conditions such as cleft lip and/or palate, leg deformities from past polio or other orthopedic problems such as club foot.  Some need braces or wheelchairs.  Several deaf children need hearing exams and at least two need hearing aids.  There are also other abdominal or genital surgeries needed.  These children and young adults come from ten different orphanages including Ruijin, Pingxiang and Yujiang which were not visited on this trip but were visited by Amity recently.  We have photos of some of these children and hope to be getting photos of the others soon.  If you might be interested in helping with any of these medical needs please let me know.

There's also exciting news from our Hugging Grannies program.  Yingtan, Xinyu and Shangrao have each received three Hugging Grannies, bringing our total to 32 Grannies!   In addition to bringing extra love and attention to the healthy young children the Grannies are helping to care for special needs children.  Dr. Hong says, "Under these two projects (medical aid and Grandmas) the children with disease or disability have made great progress.  The Grandmas set a loving care example for the orphanages' staff."  

But she also notes that the Grandmas and the orphanage staff are lacking in basic knowledge about disabled children and feels their rehabilitation skills should be improved.  She's hoping to run a rehabilitation training class for them.  The cost of the stipend for each Grandma is $544 per year so we now have a budget of $17,408 per year for this program.  Many of you have been very generous in your support of the Grandmas and I hope you'll be able to continue and that others of you will be interested in helping.  I feel this is a very important project to continue long term.  

A donation in honor of a friend or family member might make a great Christmas gift.  You could send a card to the recipient telling them of the gift in their name.  I wouldn't be able to write a card to each person but perhaps someone would be interested in taking on this project.  You could develop and produce gift cards and mail them to those in whose honor a donation was made.

Ms. Qiu met with many of the schoolchildren during her visit.  The encouragement that she and Dr. Hong give these children at each visit helps them to realize the importance of staying in school and studying hard.  And knowing that someone cares enough to send money to sponsor them in school also means a lot to these children.  Due to the influx of newly abandoned children and because several orphans have reached kindergarten age we will have 166 children in school sponsorship instead of the 123 that we had last year.  This includes one university student, a few students in vocational school, some in vocational high school and several in special schools such as schools for the deaf and schools for the blind.  There are also many children in kindergarten, primary school and middle school.  

If you sponsored a child last year and want to continue your sponsorship please let Peggy Gurrad know as soon as possible at peggy@gurrad.com.  Also contact her if you haven't sponsored a child before but would like to.  We've averaged the costs for all the students (except the university student) so each sponsor pays $118 for the school year.  Donations for school support or any of our other projects should be made out to Altrusa Foundation (tax deductible) and mailed to me at:

Altrusa Foundation
Attention:  Peggy Gurrad
P.O. Box 1354
Longview, WA  98632

I know many of you may not have received them yet but we do have end of the school year reports on the students from last year.  Most of the letters from the students were not translated to English so we have some students helping with this.  And we've also been waiting to find out who will be continuing their sponsorship.  If the schoolchild will need a new sponsor then the photo and info sheet needs to go to the new sponsor and the school report and letter from the child (for those students who wrote letters) would go to the past year's sponsor.  So please be patient just a little while longer.  We have 123 student reports/letters/photos to get out all at once and 166 children for this year to organize sponsorship for.  Unfortunately all this work comes due at once, especially since Amity is understaffed to keep administrative costs low and was late in getting this information to us.

Our foster care program is also going strong.  Ms. Qiu visited 155 foster homes in Jiangxi during this last trip!  She felt the children in foster care had benefited greatly and for the most part was pleased with the quality of the homes.  We do now have the ten school aged children from Nanchang with hepatitis B in foster homes which were found by Holt.  It is more difficult to find homes for these hepatitis B children but Amity is also committed to helping the children with hepatitis B and other disabilities.  Six children severely handicapped with cerebral palsy were recently placed in foster care.  To make sure that the children with mild disabilities and/or hepatitis B at Nanchang are placed in foster homes Amity has developed a waiting list for them.  Whenever there is a new opening in foster care (a child is adopted) then it is one of these children that must be placed in a home.

We now 180 children in foster homes so I'm pleased to have some volunteers that are going to help me manage this project.  Donations will still be made out to Altrusa Foundation and mailed to me at the above address.  But these volunteers will help me with tracking the support each child has and reminding sponsors when some additional support is needed.  They will also be receiving the half yearly updates from Amity and mailing them out to sponsors.  Their help is much appreciated.  This work has become too much for me to do alone but I can never say no to a request to place more children in foster care if we can find the sponsors for them.  So the help of these volunteers will make it possible to continue our foster care program at this level and perhaps expand it some more when additional requests are made.  These volunteers are:

Becky Miklos - Nanchang foster care
Terry Pivec - Guixi and Leping foster care
Lisa Coppola - Xinyu and Yingtan foster care

Foster care at the other orphanages will still be managed by me although I do have a couple volunteers, Dawn Groves and Loyd Law, that help with the Jiujiang updates.

In September Amity held a four day conference on foster care in cooperation with Bethany Christian Social Service from Michigan titled "Every Child Has a Right to a Family".  It was held in Suzhou province but six participants attended from Jiangxi province.  Staff from Nanchang, Leping and Fuzhou (Linchuan) spoke about their experiences with foster care and the dramatic difference in the children after being in foster care.  Foster care is a new concept in China and this conference for orphanage directors and staff stressed the importance of foster care and helped them develop ideas for implementing and monitoring a foster care program at their orphanages.  

Amity started it's first foster care projects in 1996 and now has 449 children with mild disabilities living in foster care.  A report from this conference and some photos are at our website at www.altrusa.ws   Click on "Working with Amity Foundation" and then "Foster Care Seminar".  I think this seminar was a wonderful thing.  Sort of like the parable of giving someone one fish for today's meal versus teaching them how to fish so they can feed themselves.  Giving the orphanage staff the tools and information they need to begin and run a successful foster care program will multiply many times over the benefit to the children in the orphanages in China that Amity can provide.  This is part of Amity's philosophy for their work in China and one of the things I really respect about them.

It is very exciting to hear about all the children that we have been able to help.  You have been very generous with your support and it is much appreciated, we are really making a difference in the lives of many children.  Now when you look at your daughter and wonder about all those children that were left behind you can know that many of them are finding loving foster homes and other needed assistance with your help.

Thank you!

With warm regards,
Peggy Gurrad
peggy@gurrad.com 

Top