Rejected Orphan

Last week I heard a really sad story about a young orphan in another province.

As I'm sure you already know, there is a one child policy that applies to many families in China. One of the results there are a great many girls and children with disabilities abandoned, and left to live in orphanages. The Chinese government has been making some efforts to encourage Chinese parents to adopt, however this is something that is not really a big part of Chinese culture and so the uptake is quite small.

This leads into the story about an 8 year old girl, Penny. A family visiting her orphanage fell in love with her and decided they wanted to adopt her. The orphanage advised rather than adopt straight away they should take her home and foster her for a few months. This was wonderful for Penny who had been in the orphanage since she was less than one year old.

Roll forward a few months and the told the orphanage that there are a some problems with Penny and that they no longer wish to adopt her. There actually really only was one problem......that her grades at school aren't good enough.

The Chinese education system is absolutely crazy, not only do the teaching methods stifle creativity but the children are expected to study for 12 hours a day in classes of 50+ students and can start taking exams as young a 5. It is extremely difficult to get into a good university and so parents are always pushing their children really hard to get good grades. Parents can be very disappointed with their children if they don't get high exam marks.

Penny recently scored 78% on a maths paper, which was deemed not good enough.

She now has to look forward to the prospect of returning to the orphanage, she will have spent her whole life looking forward to leaving.

It would be really good if you could remember this poor young girl her in your thoughts and prayers, especially that a family who could give her true, proper love would come along.