New film challenges global approach to orphan care

Laureen F. Guenther
Times Contributor

 

Lost Kites, a new 48-minute film about orphan care, was shown at Rosebud Church, April 24. The film tells the stories of three orphans in Brazil, India and China, and uses their stories to highlight the situation of orphans around the world.
Sanjoy is a 15-year-old boy who lives on the streets in India. He earns a little money by collecting plastic bottles near major train stations, often running between trains to retrieve them. He’s always in danger of getting killed or maimed, and at constant risk of theft, kidnapping, assault and imprisonment.
Carmela is a two-and-a-half-year-old girl in China, whose birth-family abandoned her because she has a heart defect. She is healthy and bright, and living with a foster family, but she urgently needs heart surgery. And her foster family has no money to pay for it.
Werick is a 17-year-old boy, living in an orphan shelter in Brazil. He’ll have to move out when he turns 18. He works in a factory but uses every spare minute to practice his soccer skills, because national soccer team tryouts are coming to his community.
As I watched the lives of Sanjoy, Carmela and Werick unfold on the screen, they were no longer just part of a statistic for me. I desperately hoped that, by some miracle, Sanjoy could be protected and loved. I urgently wanted Carmela to have surgery and to join a permanent family. And I fervently hoped Werick would make it onto the soccer team so he could build for himself a brighter future.
But the film’s cold, hard information gripped me too. Millions of children around the world live on the streets, and millions more live in orphanages. Nearly all children in orphanages have a living parent, and most of those parents release their children into orphanages because of poverty.
I’d known that typical orphanage-style care – many children, few caregivers – is far from perfect, but I hadn’t known how very damaging it is. Because of the high child-to-staff ratio, the children can’t form secure relationships with adults, and they develop Toxic Stress Syndrome, which causes other aspects of their development to freeze. For every year in an orphanage, the film says, a child’s development is delayed by about 20%. After five years in an orphanage, every child is considered to have a disability.
But I’m delighted by the good news – that this damage isn’t permanent. If the child has an opportunity to form a lasting, healthy attachment with a caring adult, the brain can be healed and the trauma can be overcome.
So what can we Canadians do about it? In the film, and in a talk-back afterward, the filmmakers encouraged us to gradually redirect our donations away from orphanage-style care. They asked us to support organizations that provide family-style orphan care, organizations that help orphanages restructure themselves to family-style care, and to agencies that facilitate adoption. Caring for children in families costs one-sixth as much as orphanage care, they said, but as long as funding goes to orphanages, children will go there too.
If we visit orphanages overseas, the Lost Kites team urged us not to build relationships with the children, because that will cause further trauma when we leave. If we want to help, they suggested background work that releases staff members to spend more time with the children.
Lost Kites has moved from southern Alberta to the Vancouver area, and then to Florida. To follow the team and learn more about orphan care, see their Facebook page or lostkites.com. For specific ideas about how to respond, see the “Take Action” page at lostkites.com.