Please Help Liliana

My friends already know that I'm a bleeding heart. My parents and my husband know too. Here I go again . . .

I try not to forward things too often, "share" them, "like" them (a la Facebook), or post others' blogs on my blog, but apparently I can't fall asleep tonight unless I post this here. (Thanks, God.)

Please help little Liliana, an 11-year-old girl with Down Syndrome who weighs 10 pounds. She languishes in an orphanage, along with many like her, actually. She is not the only one. Children with Down Syndrome born here (born, not aborted) would receive love, touch, food, and some physical therapy, to grow into happy, fat, bouncing children with Down Syndrome. But children with DS who are put into Soviet-era orphanages as newborns and starve, left not to be touched but a couple times per day, fed watered-down gruel (would they were so lucky to receive true artificial milk formula), well, they stop producing any growth hormone and remain as forever babies with little stick limbs.

A family of ten biological children who are currently adopting such a little "bird" baby (see her daughter: a 9-year-old with DS who weighs 11 pounds) reports from on the ground right now in Bulgaria that these children have their diapers changed once per day. All their food is liquefied to make feeding faster, so the workers pour a cup of food down their throats in 60 seconds. If they throw it all up, then they lose out on food that day. These children never learn to chew or swallow. I don't vilify the workers: how else are 40 staffers supposed to take care of 260 children (and that's during the day shift, as half of them go home at three o'clock, leaving 20 works to take care of the entire orphanage all night)?

And thus money is being raised for Liliana by an adoption warrior: she and her husband have adopted four special needs children and now draw attention and raise money for other qualified families to rescue more. Only one day into her fundraising efforts and--as I type this--$17,000 of the $22,000 total needed for some family to adopt Liliana has been raised.

In one day, people.

And according to the adoptive woman on the ground as we speak--I do believe she is speaking about Liliana when she reports that a family is now committed to adopting her.

And four more families have stepped forward to adopt others like Liliana.

Today.

So please don't think that it's not worth donating money because nobody would ever actually adopt such a child, that it's too late. It's not too late.

The family organizing the fundraising adopted such a wasted-away child: a five-year-old with Down Syndrome who could not walk or even sit up. She looked like a starving one-year-old. And she scratched herself bloody from stress. One year later from being bathed with love, she has gained some weight, she has some fat rolls, and she has learned to walk! Plus she smiles and laughs and is full of joy, an emotion she had never known in her whole life. Of course she will always be irreversibly damaged, but she will live out the rest of her life in love.

I'm sorry for being so tearful, so sappy. My mother's heart simply can't take it, especially after I'd been reading about these babies and my own four-month-old woke up for a night nursing. And I responded to her, unlike those other babies who are touched only a couple of times per day and never with love. And I nursed my baby, giving her the perfect food, and I watched her glowingly fat body that grows through clothes so fast, that has fat rolls I have to pry open in order to clean her.

Not everyone can adopt. Not everyone can adopt right now. But many of us can chip in to help.

If you want to help, go here.