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Children wait in line in the dining room of Straseni's orphanage (Moldova). From the project "Behind the Absence". |
They are average kids, they have mother and father who love them endlessly. But they see their parents at best once a year. “Mom is at work” describes their everyday life. They are called “social orphans” and their parents are labor migrants.
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| From the project "One Family, Two Places". |
Zhang Jianfang and his wife (on the picture: photo project One Family, Two Places) moved to Shenzhen ten years ago to seek work. They left behind two children, and have only been back four times since then.
The situation is typical not only for China: according to research conducted by My Family, a UNICEF-funded NGO in Bishkek, only 6% of the 11,000 children in Kyrgyzstan orphanages are there because they have no living parents. The number of children growing up without parents in many countries around the world increases every month: 58 million children are left behind in China, 9 million in the Philippines, 1 million in Sri Lanka.
These parents are not egoists who left their countries for beautiful life abroad. They save every penny to send back to their children and try to give as much love as they can on rare occasions of being home. They would go through any hardships with visas or finding the place to live, but often they are barred from bringing their families with them by their employers or by registration rules.
So, orphanages sometimes become the only option: especially, in countries like Kyrgyzstan where government uses most of its funds to finance children’s homes instead of low-income families. “It turns out that needy families cannot compete with the government, and they are forced to take their children to orphanages”, says Nazgul Turdubekova, the director of Bishkek-based League for the Rights of the Child, an NGO.
Grandparents seem a better option only at first: they are getting older and sicker every year. Children often become breadwinners and caregivers themselves, exchanging happy childhood for early adulthood. Not to mention a huge generation gap when children don’t find any common language with their grandparents and just retire into their shell.
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From the project ”Behind the Absence”. |
Iulia from Moldova (on the picture), 10 years old, lives with her grandmother who takes care of a girl and her two brothers while their mother is working in Germany. A year ago, this elderly woman was diagnosed with uterine cancer and it’s getting harder and harder to look after three grandchildren when having constant pain.
Nowadays, it is still only Human
Rights organizations that raise an alarm about millions of children who don’t
get to be children. Some Chinese NGO created parent-to-child telephone cards,
or 'love cards', to help regular communication between migrant workers and
their children. But how can telephone calls possibly make up for warmth of a
real parent?
These are just drops in the
ocean without crucial changes in the system of legal and social protection of labor
migrants, as well as without some improvements of economic situations in their
home countries.
These kids might not die
from starvation, but they face a keen hunger for parental love.
