Agency partners with China to arrange surgeries

ST. LOUIS -- Fresh out of university, Melody Zhang came of age in the deadly pro-democracy protest 15 years ago in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, and has been looking to heal her country's hurts ever since.

Her youthful, communist ideals crushed by the June 4, 1989, military assault on demonstrators, Zhang says she sought truth and purpose in Christianity, and at Washington University's graduate school of social work.

"I did not find it there," she says, "the cure for my country."

She kept looking.

Since 1992, Zhang has helped run Children's Hope International, a St. Louis-based adoption agency where she became an international adoption expert.

Starting in November, she'll return to Beijing to help the agency in its new endeavor -- facilitating corrective surgeries for tens of thousands of Chinese orphans with heart, orthopedic and other physical defects, in partnership with the Chinese government.

"I'll see what I can do, what difference I can make," said Zhang, whose lingering passion, at age 37, made her tire of a comfortable, middle-class life here. "I am called for that."

More than 54,000 children live in 199 state-supported orphanages throughout China, whose one-child-per-family policy has led some parents to abandon their children to the state's care.

Mostly, they are girls, or children of either gender with a physical abnormality such as cleft palate, deafness, cerebral palsy or heart defect.

Zhang says China's rural poor have no social net and rely on sons to provide for them in their old age. Nor do they have the means to pay for medical care of special-needs children, who account for more than half of China's orphans, the government says.

In May, the Chinese government launched an ambitious three-year plan to provide corrective surgeries to as many as 30,000 Chinese orphans, and to help more of them get adopted and lead normal, healthy lives. The government is funding the $74 million project through a national lottery and through private donations.

The government initiative is said to have been inspired by the work of Children's Hope International and other adoption agencies that have added surgeries to their humanitarian effort in China.

In 2000, Children's Hope sent a U.S. medical team to help Chinese doctors perform corrective surgeries on 26 orphans. Since then, the agency's Beijing staff has arranged for 600 surgeries, performed exclusively by Chinese doctors.

China's "Project Tomorrow" initiative is being coordinated by four governmental arms, including the China Association of Social Work. Children's Hope is the contractor for that group to do the work of facilitating surgeries.

Zhang will be gearing up Children's Hope in Beijing to handle the influx of applications for surgery from orphanages throughout China. She'll also be setting up postoperative housing for children and their "aunties" or caregiver escorts, and a place for them to receive therapy before returning to the orphanage. Already, more than 1,000 requests for surgery have been made to the agency's Beijing office.

"Melody has the white flame in her for this," Children's Hope executive director Dwyatt Gantt said. "It's no surprise to us that's she leaving to do this."

Until recently, China felt too ashamed to admit its orphan problem out of a need to present itself as a perfect society, Gantt said.

"But China has come to the point where it can take initiative in the care of its children," he said. "It's been an evolution of society from Third World to taking its place alongside the great nations. They feel like they have gained some respect."

In retrospect, Heidi Johnson of Cincinnati said she believes that a surgery made all the difference in her selecting her Chinese daughter, PeiPei, from a catalogue showing children up for adoption.

The 4-year-old was born with a ventricular septal defect, or hole in the heart, and was abandoned at 18 months, near a provincial office in Yuncheng, appearing pale and sickly.

Last year, Children's Hope found her at an orphanage and offered to pay for her surgery. She bounced back.

"She's happy, she's bright, she runs," Johnson said. "She has twice the energy I have."

Johnson said PeiPei wouldn't have been the same child without the surgery.

"She was beaming from the couch," she said, recalling that first look at her daughter's photograph. "I said, 'this is the one."'