Liu Shan, director of the China Care Home in Beijing, has firsthand knowledge of the challenges facing 'institutionalized' children. Feng Yongbin / China Daily

Frustration and despair

Achieving those goals was both easy and hard, said Liu Shan, whose career as a nanny began at an HTS program in her native Henan Province. Liu later became an HTS trainer and, later still, director of the China Care Home in Beijing. Operated by Half the Sky's sister organization, the Chunhui Bo'Ai ("Love of Spring Sunshine") Children's Foundation, the home provides a temporary refuge for orphaned babies and toddlers brought to the Chinese capital for lifesaving surgery or medical treatment.

"If there's one image from my first visit to an orphanage that has stayed with me ever since, it's the one of a little boy, too young to walk or even to crawl, lying prostrate. He repeatedly knocked his head against the bed, with all the strength he had left," Liu said. "I stood beside his bed for about 20 minutes, but he never stopped or relented.'

Confused and unsettled by what she'd seen, Liu consulted one of the nannies. "'He's just like that' - that's what I was told," the 53-year-old said. "A few days later, an HTS trainer came to the orphanage and solved the puzzle. She told me the boy behaved like that because he had feelings to share, but no one to turn to. Frustration had turned into anger and despair. All he wanted was attention, an affirmation of his oft-ignored existence," she added.

The experience prompted Liu, who had just lost her job, to join HTS. "That insight has kept me working here all these years," she said, cuddling a cleft-lipped infant girl. "Jenny is a pragmatist and an old China hand, if I may say so. From the very beginning, instead of setting up our own places, she's tried to work with government-funded orphanages by providing HTS-trained nannies and offering training to the staff at the institutions. The strategy has proved highly successful," Liu said.

"This space is special, though," she said, referring to the care home, which is located in a quiet residential area in southeastern Beijing, and comprises a two-story building - with total floor space of about 900 square meters - and a small front yard. "We bring children here from our partner orphanages. Children with serious medical conditions that the local hospitals are unable to treat effectively."

In the second-floor playroom, a dozen children, ranging from 6 months to 2 years, were enjoying afternoon playtime, attended by six nannies who they called "Mum". While a few children romped on the floor, tugged at the nannies' clothes, or tried to climb up their backs like animal cubs, others were quieter, content to curl up on their nannies' laps, or simply hold their hands. A few had unusually large heads or purplish lips - indicative of congenital hydrocephalus or heart disease - but generally the atmosphere was one of health and vitality.

"If you looked into the eyes of these children, you'd understand their longings and fears, you'd see a unique window hidden at the far backs of their minds," Liu said. "When you open that window, you will be in awe."

After spending two years working with a young boy thought to be "deaf and mute", that was certainly Liu's impression. "I met him when he was barely 6 months. No one had bothered to speak to him, thinking it would be a waste of time. Then one day, as I closed the door of his room, I noticed him make a slight, almost imperceptible turn of the head," she said. "He was hearing-impaired, but not completely deaf. That discovery changed his life ... and mine."

Liu spent long periods talking to the boy, using slow, exaggerated lip movements while showing him pictures of whatever they were talking about, an animal or a toy, perhaps. By 2006, when the boy, then age 3, left for the US with his adoptive family, he had changed beyond recognition.

"The adoptive parents arrived, only to find a very different child from the one they had gotten to know by reading the materials prepared for them years ago, at the very beginning of their long application process," Liu said. "The boy who lived in silence had gone, replaced by a chirpy, jolly bird who just loved to sing! I received a letter from the couple, saying they were learning Chinese to make sure that their son remembers where he came from."