The Bowen Archives

Category: History

  • Built with Love and Hope

    Surely some of the most moving and joyful moments of Half the Sky’s early days occurred on our orphanage volunteer builds.

    The first was in summer of 2000 and, like all things in China, final official approvals came just a few weeks before we’d need to start work on the proposed children’s centers. After two years of negotiations and pleas, the Chinese government agreed to give us a chance. But we’d better not blow it! We’d already found our trainers and planned the curriculum; now we needed help keeping our promise to transform gloomy orphanage “playrooms” into happy “learning environments”. Right away.

    Not knowing what sort of response to expect, we sent out a call for volunteers:

     “Now here’s an invitation to adoptive families out there who may wish to make a hands-on contribution to benefit the children who wait. Half the Sky invites a small number of families to join us in setting up preschool and grandma rooms and play spaces in each of two welfare institutions. The work will consist of light carpentry, painting, toy assembly, room and outdoor play space decoration. Children are, of course, welcome. It will be HOT, but it should be fun. We can’t offer any subsidy for your expenses but we can promise a full heart. If this adventure appeals to you, please let us know ASAP. It’s only a month away and this will, of necessity, be a very small work group.”

    Thankfully, even though it was last minute, the volunteer crew applications came in a flood. And for the 50+ orphanage builds that followed, we never had a shortage of eager volunteers. Each build was different in its own way, but, for those of you who didn’t manage to join us, the experience usually went something like this:

    Our volunteer crews (often adoptive families with their children) would arrive at the international airport (Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou) closest to our destination. They’d be laden with big boxes stuffed with all the developmental toys and supplies we couldn’t find (at least not the non-toxic version) in China. We’d then head by train or bus, to our new project site.

    We weren’t usually greeted by a brass band!

    After a brief orientation, the crew would pay a first visit to the children. As soon as they met, there was no doubt why the volunteers had come from so far away.

    All too soon it would be time to leave the children and settle down to a week or so of hard work and new friendships.

    Everybody pitched in. Even orphanage staff!

    As the renovated rooms began to take shape, toys and trikes were assembled.

    And finally, when this…

    …was turned into this…

    …Our newly trained teachers put finishing touches on the preschool and then it was time to celebrate!

    We always hosted a big “wrap” party. Everyone was invited.

    And everyone signed the wall. “Built with Love and Hope”.

    Today, China’s child welfare institutions are adding OneSky programs on their own. That is, of course, what we always dreamed. But we sure do miss those builds!

  • Looking Back and Ahead

    Across Asia, as the Lunar New Year holiday draws near, in even the poorest families debts are paid, floors are swept, homes are scrubbed top to bottom and filled with flowers, fruit and candies.

    Children too are scrubbed clean and adorned in bright new clothes. Everyone is ready for a fresh start…ready for spring. Maybe after a difficult year like the last, it’s not so easy to sweep away our troubles and make ready for a time of renewal. But as I reflect on all the challenges we’ve faced over the years, how far we’ve come, how much there is to celebrate… all things seem possible once again.

    Looking back, I’m perhaps proudest of how a determined little group of foreign adoptive parents somehow managed to forever change the way China’s most vulnerable young children are cared for. And how today, the work those foreigners began is built upon and driven by equally determined and committed Chinese citizens.

    If you follow us, you know this: Once upon a time in China, it was bad luck to be born a girl. Back when Half the Sky was founded, one out of every seventeen baby girls conceived was missing from Chinese society. A million were likely aborted. Others were abandoned, and many thousands ended up in overcrowded, understaffed welfare institutions under the indifferent watch of randomly assigned, untrained government workers.

    The children, forgotten by just about everyone, spent their days without loving care or stimulation. As a result, those who survived the early years often suffered extreme developmental delays, were emotionally vacant, and ill-equipped to ever learn to function socially and thrive in their communities.

    With sheer stubbornness and no small amount of good luck, we foreigners and our resolute Chinese colleagues found a way to partner with the Chinese government to make life better for those little children and the ones who came after. Working together, we have been able, over the years, to help the country re-imagine its entire child welfare system.

    A great sign of success came in late 2012, when after years of effort, the government finally gave us permission to establish Chunhui Children’s Foundation, a 100% Chinese organization, but with the transparency and high standards of an international NGO. At  a special launch party the following year, we happily passed the torch (actually the official torch I carried before the Beijing Olympics!) to the new Chunhui board of directors.

    Chunhui, whose name literally means “the warmth of spring sunshine” and, colloquially, “a mother’s love” now is responsible for implementing all of OneSky’s work in China. It is led, not by foreigners, but by Rachel Xing, OneSky’s former head of China operations and a native of Qingdao. Not only is that as it should be—Chinese citizens running their own child welfare programs—but it also ensures that our work for China’s children will continue, despite whatever political tensions may arise between nations.

    Chunhui CEO, Rachel Xing

    Chunhui  today is a highly-respected public foundation, recipient of over 20 national awards, with a long list of accomplishments, including bringing our OneSky Approach to 115 government orphanages in all 31 Chinese provinces.

    With support from both Chinese citizens and the OneSky Community, Chunhui is our “little” sister no more, not only implementing OneSky projects, but also surpassing us in the scope and variety of services offered. Chunhui continues our work with left-behind children in rural villages, trains child welfare workers, provides life-saving medical care for orphaned children, and more.

    Focusing on bringing systemic change to all aspects of child welfare in China, Chunhui also designs and operates model programs in welfare institutions for children with special needs, trains caregivers for children at risk in poor townships and soon plans to serve child migrants in China’s industrial zones. Deeply important in China and fundamental to all we do, Chunhui enjoys a great reputation among government officials and is promoted by them as a model foundation that should inspire others.

    If I sound like a proud mama, it’s because I am. When I began this work 23 years ago, I didn’t dare dream of such a bright future for China’s most vulnerable children. Today, it feels like nothing can stand in our way.

    With Rachel’s awesome Chunhui team in mainland China, along with those under Morgan’s OneSky leadership in Hong Kong, Vietnam and Mongolia, I think it’s safe to say—we are most definitely ready for a brilliant New Year and whatever Spring may bring!

  • A Challenging New Year

    Well, the Year of the Rat is off to another ominous beginning as the coronavirus (covid-19) spreads across China and beyond.

    Twelve years ago at this time, the last time Rat appeared in the Zodiac cycle, China was hit with a crippling wave of Spring Festival storms that paralyzed the whole country. Some of you may remember OneSky (then Half the Sky) staffers and volunteers ferrying diapers and baby formula to snowbound orphanages across the country.

    Three months later, the disastrous Wenchuan Earthquake struck. OneSky and its amazing community of supporters again sprang into action, delivering supplies and erecting giant BigTops to provide safe spaces for displaced children to play, learn, and receive grief counseling. It was only the 2008 Beijing Olympics that kept that Year of the Rat from becoming a total disaster.

    And this Rat year’s coronavirus crisis brings other painful memories to some of us at OneSky. In 2003, we were with a group of volunteers setting up early learning centers in Hunan Province when SARS appeared on the scene. Although such times are scary and sad, China survived then and it will again today.

    When SARS Came to China

    Right now, as you can imagine, all government orphanages are closed to visitors for the duration. OneSky orphanage program staff are living at the institutions and working in shifts to provide care for the children. Like others, the institutions urgently need surgical masks, protective clothing and disinfectants. Unfortunately, we’ve been unable to help; the shortage is nationwide. The situation in Wuhan (where we launched our programs in 2007) is particularly serious, but thankfully, none of the children or our staff are infected. No one risks leaving the welfare institution campus.

    Wuhan in Happier Times

    Across China, all businesses serving the public (restaurants, cinemas, shopping malls), with the exception of grocery stores, pharmacies, hospitals, and others that provide necessities, have been asked to close their doors until further notice.

    Aside from the welfare institutions, our OneSky teams in Mainland China, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Mongolia are all working from home. Governments have temporarily closed schools. In China, they are using the time to strengthen professional studies and have organized study groups by region, function and programs. We are very thankful to have developed “1BigFamily” online learning communities wherever we work. Even in times like these, we manage to stay connected.

    Meanwhile, in one of Hong Kong’s poorest districts, where we’ve been working so hard to get ready to open the doors of the P.C. Lee OneSky Global Centre for Early Childhood Development—our new regional training hub and demonstration family center, a safe place for at-risk children and families—opening day has been indefinitely postponed. Still, we forge ahead. With protests and pestilence, we have never felt more needed.

    Here’s hoping that the Year of the Rat soon lives up to its promise of prosperity and new beginnings!

    With love and gratitude,

    Jenny

    P.S. Lately, I’ve been trying to learn how to take a little more time out for quiet reflection. Quiet not being my natural state, I’ve begun to contemplate a new book project. If your child (or YOU) participated in our China programs and might be willing to share the story of what came after, I would very much like to hear from you. Please write to me. Thanks!

     

  • For Hong Kong’s Invisible Children

    A few years back, we decided to expand OneSky’s work to serve children left behind in China’s rural villages.

    A massive wave of economic migration from village to factory was tearing apart poor families across China, putting children at risk of abandonment. When we visited some of the affected villages, we could see little difference between the children we met there and the babies and toddlers who brought us to China in 1998. Too many little ones were spending their precious early years without the nurturing love and support of parents. We knew the damage done can last a lifetime. And so our Village Programs began.

    It didn’t take long for the new programs to reaffirm the positive effects of responsive care on young children at risk, whatever the setting. And now it became clear that, as neighbouring countries aspired to imitate China’s economic success, economic migration was affecting children across the entire Asia Pacific region. We resolved to take lessons learned from the orphans and do what we could to help strengthen vulnerable families even outside China.

    In addition to building government partnerships and demonstration model children’s centres country-by-country as we’re now doing in Vietnam and Mongolia, we decided to explore creating a regional training hub—an accessible home base— in a relatively neutral, central Asian location. At the time, Hong Kong was an obvious choice.

    Hong Kong had always been a friendly haven for OneSky. We’d had a tiny office there since 2006 and held an annual fundraising event to support our work in the Mainland. It was a prosperous city, for sure, but we knew there were also thousands of migrant families with small children right there in Hong Kong, living in the shadows, just struggling to get by.

    Now it was time to give something back. In late 2016, we hosted a Roundtable gathering in Hong Kong to share our ideas with the local community and potential partner organisations. It was a full house! We explained to the group that, while creating a training base for the region, we wanted also to be sure OneSky could bring real value to the Hong Kong community that has been so kind to China’s orphaned children. With the Roundtable’s enthusiastic support, we launched a steering committee and an 18-month needs assessment. Our findings were pretty bleak.

    Despite Hong Kong’s glittering facade, one in five children live in poverty. One in ten lives with a single parent. Families of the city’s most vulnerable children include the unemployed, single parent households, new arrivals, ethnic minorities, and teenage mothers. New arrivals, in particular, have a poverty rate of 30.1% compared to the overall average of 14.7%, and many cannot speak Cantonese, the local language. While there are sufficient services for children 3-years and older, there is little available for poor families with babies and toddlers. They are Hong Kong’s invisible children.

    And so, we got to work. We proposed to create a child development centre in one of Hong Kong’s poorest districts, Sham Shui Po, offering training of trainers for caregivers and teachers who work with at-risk children 0-3; parenting skills training; a place for sharing innovations, facilitating workshops, special courses; and a demonstration early learning center that targets very young children who fall through all the cracks.

    It has been 4 ½ years since we began our Hong Kong project. Besides fundraising, permit applications, design, construction, recruiting, and nonstop efforts to engage government and understand how to best serve the community, there have been challenges that no one could have foreseen. Some pretty major challenges! Still, between civil unrest and pandemics and quarantines, we managed to open our doors in May 2020.

    Somehow, our hardworking team has reached out to plan potential partnerships with over 50 local service organisations and, despite frequent closings and Covid restrictions, has already touched the lives of 437 children and their families.

    We have many miles to go before we realize our dreams for the invisible children of Hong Kong, but this month we are proud to be celebrating our centre’s first anniversary. Tough as it’s been, we still see a bright future ahead. Stay tuned!

  • Notes from Our Founder

    Happy New Year and welcome to a new decade – OneSky’s third!

    If you were around in our early days (see antique Bowen photo above), you may remember some of my frequent and often lengthy letters from China. I dearly wanted to find a way to bring everyone along on the incredible adventure of creating Half the Sky, but back then, there weren’t a lot of options. So I sent long emails. Lots of them!

    Today our world is quite a different place. There are zillions of ways to communicate: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, assorted chats and all their offspring. We are swamped with information. But now it comes in bits and bytes—not much substance. I think we could do better by all the good-hearted folks who make our work possible year after year. So I’ve decided to slow down a little and start writing a monthly message to our friends.

    Don’t worry—there is still a solid team of fabulously competent people doing the real work that is OneSky. This new chapter will give me a chance to sit back and tell you about them….

    About nearly 2,000 women and men working quietly and without recognition to give forgotten children a fresh start. About the transition from Half the Sky to OneSky. About all the changes in China since our early days. About the expansion of our work from orphanage to village to factory zone to urban slum, and from China to Vietnam to Mongolia. I want to tell you more about the children—the many tales that don’t get told. And I want to tell you why I believe our work matters so much…today, maybe more than ever.

    Looking back, it always begins with an indelible memory. A room full of sadness like nothing I’d ever seen before. Rows and rows of little girl babies  and toddlers lying forgotten in their beds or sitting in little chairs. Eerie silence. No cries. This was how they spent their days. And if nothing was done, it might be how they would spend their entire childhoods. More times than I can tell, I saw those babies over and over again. I saw them in my sleep.

    Call it destiny or call it delusional, I knew I had no choice but to try and fix things. I was a writer. I needed to rewrite that story. And so WE have. All of us together. Countless stories that now end with “happily ever after”.

    When I took that giant leap of faith 22 years ago, I wasn’t sure what would happen. Now, when I look at what we’ve built together, it’s beyond what I could have imagined. And though our job is far from done, there are a lot of tales waiting to be told.

    One of my favorite things about the holiday season is receiving greetings and updates from families and children whose lives OneSky has touched. You may remember this little girl.

    Two years after her adoptive family returned her to the orphanage, little Juanjuan spent all her days in a wheelie-chair, going nowhere. We were told she was autistic; nothing could be done. Xiamei, a novice OneSky nanny asked to try to help her.

    “I knelt down and softly called Juanjuan’s name, but she had no response. I used a toy to try to get her attention, but she lowered her head even more. I know it will take time for her to feel attached to me and to trust me.”

    But after just a couple of months, Juanjuan’s magical journey began to unfold.

    And in the course of a year, our OneSky team simply fell in love with Juanjuan—one teacher in particular. And so, Juanjuan became part of her family. They named her Ziyi—”Little Joy”. Last week, Ziyi’s mama sent us this holiday message:

    “Our Ziyi is now a third grader and is very popular at school. She’s a good student and loves dancing and ukulele playing. The first thing she does after school is to finish her homework and then immerses herself in music. She knows lots of songs and dance. She keeps her ‘song list” in a little notebook. Like her whole family, Ziyi is an eager volunteer. Her favorite project is ‘Bring Happiness to Left-behind Elders and Children in the Village’ where she performs for the elders and reads books to left-behind children. She is so happy to help others!”

    In these times, when our world sometimes feels broken beyond repair, there is no better feeling than watching a hurt child emerge like a butterfly from her cocoon. And Ziyi’s story is only one of many thousands of stories we are rewriting together. How lucky we are!

    Our work is about doing what is right and fair for all children, yes. But it is also about the future…the world we leave for generations to come. Like our own children, the children OneSky serves—orphaned, neglected, left-behind—hold our world’s future in their hands. How we treat them today…the kind of start they get in life…will likely echo for years to come. In that sense, they are our children too. And they should matter to all of us.

    Stay tuned for next month’s journal. And if, by chance, as you read these tales, they inspire you to send me stories of your own, please do! I’ll be right here, waiting.

    With love and gratitude,

    P.S. We’re aiming for a more ambitious monthly newsletter; my journal’s only part of it. Please watch for it!