Amity once again invited Ms. Pamela Awtrey to help us with the foster care training this time. Pam is now the Director of Social Work Program in Cornerstone University, Michigan.  She worked 17 years in charge of foster care service in the Bethany Christian Social Service in Michigan.  For the last 3 years, she worked in Romania for training and promoting foster care projects there. What's more, she used to be the foster mother for 3 children in her life.  Her rich and unique experience and the skilled training method made the training a very success.  She left all the participants a very good impression. 

The training not only gave the participants the professional knowledge with the child-focused perspectives, but also introduced some specific tools, such as "A Life Book" for each foster child and some children's story books on the subjects of adoption and foster care.  All these books were very new in China.  Although Chinese families don't like to talk about adoptions, but all the participants thought these book were very useful for the foster care children and hoped the Amity could initiate a project to make such books in Chinese and with Chinese context for supporting the foster care projects in China. 

The contents and the key elements covered in the training were:

• A Child-Focused Perspective
  
• The UN Convention of the Rights of the Child: Each child has the right to have a family
  
• The Best Interests of the Child
  
• Normal Child Development versus The Development in Children Separated from Birth-Families
  
• Child-Focused Foster Care/Adoption Practice
  
• The 3 pillars of preparations for ensuring a smooth transition of the child to the family and a successful foster care project: 

1). Community Preparation

2). Family preparation

3). Child preparation

Trying to set up the permanent plan for each child... 

Ms. Wu An An, the Director of the Social Welfare Division of the Amity, worked as the interpreter for Pam in the training.  While interpreting, she also tried to explain and relate the subjects according to the Chinese context.  It helped greatly for the trainees in fully understanding of the topics and bringing them awareness of the differences between the child-focused perspective versus the institution-focused child care system in China.

The seminar was very productive.  At the end of the seminar, the trainees were divided into 4 groups to discuss and writing down the concrete steps they could make for changes and improvement in their work back home based on the child-focused perspectives.  Then each group sent a representative to present to others what they had just discussed in the group.

The seminar ended with the candle-exercise with everyone holding a candle and one person as the child sitting in the middle and the others, as the people of different professions working for the child, circled around the child, to illustrate again the child-focus concept.

On Sept. 8, Pam and Joy were invited to visit the foster care project in Qi Xia Township in the suburbs of Nanjing where 34 children from the Nanjing Orphanage were now living in the foster care families.  This was the first foster care project of Nanjing Orphanage developed in cooperation with the Amity Foundation since April this year.

Together with the Amity's staff and the staff from the Nanjing Orphanage, Pam and Joy visited the foster families there in the morning and had the meeting with the foster parents and the candidate foster parents from the community in one of the schools in the afternoon.

Here are the comments from Pam's email she sent recently to her friends in regard to the visit: " I visited a community that should be written up as a model program - they have put many children with disabilities into families and I visited many of the homes and saw the children with their new moms and dads (and lots of grandparents as they live together or very accepted into the community, the children were obviously cherished and the families were very excited to show off their new skills including poems and songs that they had taught the kids.  In the afternoon, all the parents and many new foster parents who were about to get their children rode their bicycles into the little town and we had a meeting at the school where I spoke to them and tried to encourage them in their "cutting edge" work." 

I hope our friends who have sponsored and supported the Amity's work in this field feel pleased to read this report.  On behalf of all the children being helped in the projects, I would like to take this opportunity to express our sincere thanks to you all.  And I also hope you will continue to join us in working together for the better lives for the orphan children in China in the future.

 ---- Reported by An An Wu, Sept. 21, 2001---

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