I haven't cried yet, but I might think about it after reading about this whole situation. In Seoul, South Korea, Pastor Lee and his church are doing an amazing thing. They are saving the lives of abandoned babies. How can you save the lives of abandoned babies besides through orphanages whom hardly take children anymore because of overcrowd?
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| A Baby Box that's how you save babies. (Image Source) |
This is only half the story, the good side of the story. The bad side of the story, you ask? The government is trying to shut them down. The government doesn't want it going on anymore. They have been receiving complaints and no longer want to support and transport these children to orphanages. They told Pastor Lee and his church they would have to care for the children themselves.
Here is the letter posted on Mission to Promote Adoption in Korea's blog, written by Ms. Young Ran Jeong from the Jusarang Community Church:
This morning we received a call from the person in charge of the Baby Box at the Kwanak-Ku office. I was told that the city of Seoul and the Seoul Metropolitan Children’s Welfare Center (서울시아동복지센터) and the Seoul City Children’s Hospital (서울시립어린이병원) had a discussion and they have decided they will no longer accept the babies abandoned through the Baby Box.
They have concluded that other than in emergency situations, they cannot accept additional babies as there is no spaces available in the institutions in the Seoul areas. They told the Jusarang Church (where the Baby Box is) that it would be up to them to take care of the abandoned babies from now on. The city was scheduled to come on Thursday to pick up the children, but they will not do that now. They also stated that the best solution is for them to move to another area region other than Seoul. The other regions have enough rooms to accommodate the children, so it would be good for the Baby Box to move there.
I asked whether it would be possible for the city of Seoul to contact the regional areas and arrange to have the children be transported to those regions. But their excuse was that this would not be possible without changing the administrative related laws.
I also asked the city employee to help the Jusarang to host a children’s center, but was told that if the condition was ideal for Jusarang this would be no problem (stipulation that Jusarang does not qualify under the current facility regulation as they are not legally approved to take care of children as the facility is too small).
They were clearly aware of our limitations, and I could not believe the city was telling me these things. The room at our facility for the newborn babies barely can hold seven babies…and what are we suppose to do for all the children that continue to come to our care…and we can’t even help with the birth registration matters.
I think the bottom line message from Seoul is that they want us to close the Baby Box. Because there have been lots of pressures in the past to close the Baby Box, now the government is using this devious scheme to shut us down. Why can’t they understand that closing the Baby Box is not the solution?
Outside the weather is very cold, and how can they think in this way when just a few days ago there was another news article where a baby was discovered abandoned somewhere and the baby was in a critical condition!!!!
We are at a loss as to what to do as they didn’t even give us how much time we have, but they just dropped the news on us. We can only pray.
I don't have anything beyond this to stay except never stop praying for the bad decisions and wrong doings in this world.
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