My Grown-Up Christmas Wish

The air is turning cold, the city is beginning to twinkle red and green and kitchens are beginning to smell of cinnamon and cloves. It is coming: Christmas, the most wonderful time of the year. But for too many, Christmas will be just like any other day, tied to the side of a crib, malnourished, neglected, preparing to die. So before you buy that next Christmas gift or new Christmas outfit I challenge you to stop and consider a child powerless to help themselves. Reece’s Rainbow is an adoption Ministry whose passion is to find homes for the most forgotten orphans: the ones with Down Syndrome, or HIV or Cerebral Palsy among many other ailments that make them the least likely candidates for adoption.

The bottom line is that while I pray for both the children and the caregivers, and while not all are in the circumstances that I describe above, (although many are), they are still orphans. They have no mother or father to love them, give them a home and or a sense of security. No matter whether you have faith in God or not, every person I believe has a sense of justice and for a child to be 11 pounds at 3 and half years old is an injustice. It is an injustice that these children only know home as the institutions that are prisoners in. As one mother described:

“Imagine a room full of children dressed only in soiled diapers (they wash disposable diapers to reuse), there is a cold bare floor, no toys, and a few wooden benches around the walls. The children are huddled together in corners and then you realize that two of these little boys are holding each other and rocking each other because they are so desperate to be held. That is a true story. Imagine a room full of baby beds with children’s arms tied with strips of sheets to the bars of the beds so that they will stop clawing at their own faces from sheer boredom and neglect. These children are not TALKED to, much less loved on. Higher functioning children can look forward to a life cleaning the potty chairs of the other kids. A fellow RR mom who has adopted from one of these institutions and has seen some of these horrors up close talked to a precious young man with Down syndrome every day who walked past her carrying these strange wooden benches with holes in them. His hands were always covered in feces and she finally realized that it was because those were the potty seats for the other boys and it was his job to clean them. 
After a child is moved at age four or five, their chance of survival diminishes greatly. In fact, after transfer to an institution 90% of children with Down syndrome and other special needs die within the first year. That’s right, 90% of them DIE. Look at your own small child. Can you imagine your child being left to die? “