Adoption

This Sunday, several dogs will be available for adoption at WorldCare Pet in Shunyi. They are all rescues from shelters and animal lovers like Beijing Human and Animal Environmental Education Center (BHAEEC), Jeri Lan, WorldCare Pet, and more. This will be an opportunity for families to interact with the dogs, speak to veterinarians, and possibly make a furry addition to their home.

The most impressive part? The dog adoption day is the brainchild of 13-year-old Elise Zimmerman, a Grade 8 student at the Western Academy of Beijing. She organized the event for her Girl Scouts Silver Award, a sustainable service project that requires at least 50 hours of work and planning.

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Some friends of mine were in Beijing over the weekend, on their way to another Province to adopt. It was great for them to be in the capital city for the first time ever, exploring what they could and asking a zillion questions about the culture with which they were melding.

What interested me was their journey to adoption.

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The thought that an adopted child could have been taken from his or her biological parents is unbearable, but that’s exactly what many families are struggling with in the wake of a New York Times report on stolen children. The news brings up a host of other uncomfortable questions: What should adoptive parents do? Should they try to find the birth parents? And if they do, what then?

The newspaper’s front-page story on Aug. 5 highlighted a shocking practice in Hunan province: the abduction of Chinese infants for sale to orphanages. Family planning officials routinely persecuted couples who violated the one-child policy or were too young to get married; those who couldn’t pay the exorbitant fines saw their children snatched away and “disappeared” into the orphanage system.

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