Through the Children's Faces, Four Volunteers Capture the Heart of CHI's Hope Center (Video)

Four Bank of America employee volunteers visited the Children's Hope International (China) Hope Center in November, and took some great video. It's a wonderful world for these orphaned children, given the opportunity of life-altering or life-saving surgeries!



"The little 7-year-old boy holding the video camera - his pupils are not fully developed and he has a lot of difficulty with his vision," says volunteer Karen Taylor of Jacksonville, Florida. "He might never see things like Tienanmen Square, the Great Wall, or Temple of Heaven in person. But while we toured China, we got it all on video...and he was able to see it - up close, through the camera."

Created in November 2003, the Children's Hope foster home was founded as a post-surgical support center, providing trained medical care for children recovering from surgery. Often these children are available for adoption post-surgery (sometimes through Children's Hope and sometimes through other agencies), as their medical or surgical needs are what kept them from being adopted previously.

"We would arrive as the children awoke from their early afternoon nap and stay until it was time for their dinner. These eleven special needs children were in multiple stages of recovery from surgeries that included open heart, spinal cord, amputees, cleft pallet, and cornea repair," says Karen.

"We played and laughed and held them as close as we could for as long as we could each day. They didn’t want us to leave and we didn’t want to leave them."

Also, while in China, the volunteer foursome visited the Luoyang Orphanage for four days, teaching English lessons, singing songs, playing games, and taking 17 of the over 600 children on an excursion to the park.

More details and photos of this group's trip will be shared in next month's February E-news.

(Video posted originally on YouTube by volunteer, Chung Tsang of New York. Volunteer Karen Taylor may be seen in the video, in the white shirt.)