Introduction

Bright-eyed, smiling children crowd the orphanages of China, living in conditions that would appall and depress us. The victims of China’s one child policy, these children don’t yet realize why they have been abandoned. In many cases, as they will later discover, it is because they didn’t receive the much-coveted clean bill of health from the doctors that delivered them. A disability, minor or more serious, makes a vast difference in China, where parents traditionally rely on their only child for support when they grow older. Spurred on also by the fear that they may not be able to care for their disabled child, mothers and fathers make a truly desperate decision to abandon their son or daughter.

More heartbreaking still, from our perspective, these children are often separated from their biological parents because of disabilities that can be easily alleviated through surgery or therapy. Disabilities such as deafness, blindness, mild cerebral palsy, albinism, Down’s syndrome, epilepsy, cleft lips and palates, club foot, and other mild physical abnormalities often condemn newborns to an institutionalized childhood when in better conditions they might easily have grown up in the warmth of a loving family.

Deeply troubled by the plight of these special-needs orphans, Matthew Dalio '06 created China Care, a wonderful organization which has already made an enormous difference in the lives of many children. Inspired by his success, students at Harvard founded a club dedicated to helping Chinese orphans through a number of programs.

We hope to make worthwhile, valuable, and life-changing contributions to the lives of these orphans. It is our goal to give these abandoned children opportunities and assistance in any way that we can, so that theirs can be a more hopeful and promising future.

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