Children in Vietnam

Vietnam is close to our hearts. It is where our two sons were born and spent the first year of their lives. It is where we first held, fed and talked to them. Some of our most cherished, joyful and poignant memories will always take us back to the bustling streets of Ho Chi Minh City.

Two major factors that affect vulnerable children in the country are extreme poverty and religious persecution.

It is hard to measure poverty, and hard to picture it with statistics, but Vietnam is by various measures one of the poorest countries in the world. Recently, some citizens have benefited from a more open economic system, but this sometimes makes a few rich at the expense of the poor.

Because of extreme poverty, parents sometimes leave their children at orphanages because they simply cannot afford to feed them. Or parents push their children to life on the streets, to fend for themselves through begging, stealing, or menial work. Many girls are transported to Cambodia, Thailand or China to work as laborers or prostitutes. Because of desperate poverty, thousands of vulnerable children fall through the cracks and end up malnourished, exploited and abused.

There is also much religious persecution. The communist government sees Protestants as a threat, and coerces Christians to give up their faith through imprisonment and torture. Type “Christians in Vietnam” in your search engine and you will find articles and stories about our stuggling brothers and sisters in Christ.

Christians are restricted in their opportunities to openly help impoverished, desperate families – and orphans. The Christian worldview that sees children as precious and loved by Jesus is repressed. As a result, the whole country suffers.

The communist government seeks to control other areas of life as well, including family size. Government policy mandates that couples should have no more than two children, born three to five years apart. For pregnancies outside of these guidelines, abortions are cheap and easy. The average number of abortions is about 2.5 per woman. This is one of the highest abortion rates in the world.

Both people and countries are complex. During our limited experiences in Vietnam's orphanages, we met men and women who seemed to be doing the best that they could with very limited resources. The orphanages were stark and bare, but clean. On one hand, many of the workers seemed warm and affectionate towards the children. On the other hand, there were no toys visible in the orphanages – we were told because any that appear are quickly snatched up by caretakers.

We were also told that orphans in hospitals are ignored and neglected; they do not have the status to acquire good medical care. We found individual men and women to be warm and loving. But they are severely limited, as we would all be, by the difficult circumstances: scarce food, material, good teaching – or Christian influence.

Vietnamese Orphans

They are beautiful! (Yes, we are biased – see our family picture !) There are both boys and girls. Most have been abandoned by their parents at an early age, often because of extreme poverty or out-of-wedlock birth; also probably because of the government policy restricting families to two children. Some children have lost their parents to natural disasters such as flooding or for other reasons. Most are living in orphanages. Information about birth parents and medical history is scarce.

Each child in an orphanage is a child whose life might have been ended before birth. But each of these dear children was carried by his or her birth mother and brought into the world.

Adoption from Vietnam

During the time when we were getting our sons (1998-2001), there was growing concern that localized, loosely regulated adoptions left openings for unethical, corrupt practices. Both Vietnam and adopting countries wanted to change this, so in January 2003 Vietnam stopped all international adoptions. This was terribly difficult for families in the middle of an adoption who were told they couldn’t finalize it. But the hope is that because Vietnam has taken time to restructure their program, children and families will be protected in the future.

In June 2005, the U.S., Canada and Vietnam signed an agreement to resume adoption programs.

Sadly, in a recent letter to the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi, Vietnam said it would stop taking adoption applications from American families after July 1, 2008 but would continue to process applications of families matched with babies before that. Please pray for families that may be caught in the middle of these rulings.

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