Mothers' message of hope

IT started, appropriately enough, with a taxi-driver. Chan Kit-ying, a young woman from Hong Kong, was visiting the province of Guangxi, and had asked a driver to ferry her from place to place.

As she sat in the car, bouncing down the dusty roads, she had a lot to think about. The 30-year-old social worker had made several visits to the state orphanage of Guangxi's biggest city, Nanning.

What she had seen had set her mind racing. Workers at the institution seemed overwhelmed by the huge challenges facing them. Abandoned or orphaned babies were arriving at a rate of about 45 a month, and it was tough to cope, since space, money and hands were in short supply. Curiously, the children tended to arrive neatly boxed. This, she discovered, was because there was a major cardboard box factory on the outskirts of the city, so packaging was easy to find.

The conditions concerned her, but also spurred her to look for a solution.

There were many parents in the city with the skills to look after the infants. People with whom she had spoken at the Ministry of Civil Affairs in Nanning clearly wanted the best for the babies.

And she knew from her experience working overseas that there were thousands of parents around the world who would be thrilled to take such children permanently into their homes.

But there was no precedent in China for setting up a system of fostering, and overseas adoptions were difficult to arrange. How could one person make a difference? She talked to the taxi-driver, and was pleased to find he was genuinely interested in the ideas she was proposing. He was an ordinary Nanning citizen, eking out a reasonable existence, and married with one child.