From China with love

SITTING on the floor, watching a Sooty video together, Suzanna and Catherine Wallis seem like any other pair of sisters. But the six-year-old girls couldn't have had a more different start to life.

Suzanna was born in China and abandoned by her parents. She spent the first four years of her life in an orphanage and, for most of the time, was strapped into a wooden chair. Physically, she was like an 18-month-old baby and couldn't walk or talk.

Around 30 million babies are born in China every year. Up to one million of them, mainly girls and the disabled, are abandoned by their parents and many of them die from exposure. Others are picked up by street gangs and used for professional begging. The lucky ones are taken to state-run orphanages but even there, their chances of survival are slim. A chronic lack of funding and expertise means that some institutions have death rates of 80 per cent or even higher.

In the 1990s, the world became aware of the plight of China's orphans through the television documentary, The Dying Rooms. It was around this time that the charity Childhood Friends was set up by Beverley Wallis. It's not a large organisation but it has launched a number of successful fostering programmes and funded new equipment and additional orphanage staff.

Beverley knew what conditions were like in the orphanages and when her daughter Catherine was less than a year old, she decided to adopt a child from China.

"The main reason I decided to do it was that I didn't want Catherine to be an only child," she explains. "I was single at the time. I didn't necessarily see myself having another baby but I had a good income and a nice home. I know there are children who need adoption in this country but adopting in China seemed like the right thing to do."

She initially planned to adopt a baby but one of her colleagues had met Suzanna through her work and suggested she try to adopt her.

In some countries, like Romania, adopters are allowed to approach families directly, but in China, everything is regulated by the state. Beijing sets a yearly quota for each orphanage of the number of children who can be put up for adoption and, perhaps understandably, the staff choose the ones they think are most likely to find new homes. This means children with disabilities rarely have the chance to be adopted. Suzanna, who had a cleft palette, was one of those children.

"It's fairly unusual to choose a child to adopt but she probably wouldn't have been adopted otherwise. The orphanage director was very pleased, although he thought I was crazy because there were plenty of healthy babies I could adopt."

Beverley had seen photographs of Suzanna but the first time she met her daughter was when she went to pick her up from the orphanage.

"It must have been strange experience for her but she never cried, she never complained. When we came back to this country, she settled in brilliantly. She grew very quickly and within about eight months she'd just about caught up."

The family now live in Corbridge in Northumberland. Suzanna turned six last week and the windowsill in the living room is covered with birthday cards. She goes to the local school, where she is coping well, and has lots of friends.

"She does everything Catherine does and she isn't treated any differently. Some parents send their children to learn Mandarin and teach them all about China but that just makes them different. I'm sure when Suzanna's older she'll be interested in China and I'll be happy for her to learn Mandarin or take her to China. But I think at a young age, you have to treat them as one of your own children, not something you've just borrowed from another culture."

Suzanna is a happy, lively little girl and although she clearly remembers being in the orphanage, she doesn't seem to be affected by it. When I ask her about her life in China, she says without hesitation: "It was very cold and I was just sitting in a seat all the time. I didn't like it very much."

She then disappears upstairs with Catherine and, a few minutes later, they come back, carrying a pile of photograph albums. Suzanna sidles up to me on the sofa and shows me some of the pictures.

"That's me in the orphanage," she says, as she points at the album. The photo shows a small, pale girl with cropped hair and a large scar on her upper lip from surgery. She's almost unrecognisable.

There are other photographs in the albums taken by Beverley during her visits to China. From the outside, the orphanages look impressive, some with gleaming white walls and towers that look like something from Disneyworld. Inside, it's a different story. Row upon row of cots are crammed into small rooms. Disabled children stare despondently at the camera while in others, thin, sickly-looking babies lie helplessly on their mattresses, some of them clearly dying.

"It's an enormous problem," says Beverley. "One woman, who's one of our foster parents, works as a cleaner and she's found 100 children dumped in bins over the last few years. The orphanages just don't have the money or the expertise to look after these children and sadly, a lot of them do die."

And for the ones who survive, the future is bleak unless they are lucky enough to be adopted. Most of them will stay in the orphanage until they are old enough to employed, usually in menial, low-paid work.

"Some of them just disappear and they probably go the factories as slave labour," explains Beverley. She would like to see more people adopt but believes many of them are put off by negative publicity and the lengthy and complicated adoption process.

"One of the major problems in this country is that people are always being told that the children come with problems, they're institutionalised. Of course there's going to be an element of truth in that but what they forget is that children are individuals and different children are going to respond in different ways. There's nothing to say that if you have your own child, there aren't going to be problems."

Prospective parents are assessed by social services in the same way they would be if they were adopting a child from this country and the costs can be prohibitive. In China, this can be as much as £3,000.

There are, however, organisations, such as OASIS, which can guide prospective parents through process.

"Virtually everyone who adopts from abroad is a member of OASIS. They provide all the information and support you need and can put you in touch with people who have already been through it. A lot of people find it invaluable because, without that, they probably wouldn't even know where to start."

l OASIS can be contacted on 0870 241 7069. Anyone who would like to learn more about Childhood Friends or is interested in volunteer work in China, can contact Beverley on (01434) 633831.