It All Started in China
It all started in China in the 1980s, Dwyatt Gantt, Children’s Hope Executive Director and Founder, started the organization, University Language Services. While living part time in China, he was recruiting American and Canadian teachers to teach English in Chinese universities. In less than a decade, Dwyatt had placed over 700 teachers.
Once in China, some of these new teachers started visiting neighborhood orphanages. Their hearts were torn to do something. Several asked the orphanage staff if they could take some of the more sickly children home, for a night or a weekend, in order to give them better nutrition or medical attention. Eventually the teachers wanted to take it a step further and adopt the children they had already made a part of their families.
This gave Dwyatt his first look into the desperate needs of thousands of orphans in Chinese orphanages. A one child policy coupled with poverty and a centuries-old male preference culture, left many Chinese baby girls shivering to survive in cold, poorly staffed child welfare homes.
“Those valiant teachers who visited the orphanages were responding out of the need they saw,” Dwyatt said. “All they were trying to do is save the children. The result is that they ended up adopting.”
Dwyatt meets Melody
In 1989, Gantt met a young Chinese journalist with the Foreign Expert Bureau, Zhang Wen (Melody), who was working for his group on this particular day as a translator during a trip to the Great Wall.
“I was fascinated by them…so loving and dedicated to China. It uplifted me being around them,” Melody said.
Melody was so taken by the University Language Services teachers’ love for the people of China, she soon was writing an article featuring Dwyatt for a national magazine. It was titled, “I Have a Chinese Heart”.
Volunteering to Help
By end of 1991, China was preparing to begin adoptions to foreigners outside of China. On New Year’s Day 1992, Dwyatt rode his bike ten miles to the United States Embassy in Beijing simply to find non-profit organizations dealing with children. He had envisioned volunteering his assistance to one of these groups to help orphans get adopted into loving homes in America.
“My desire was to just volunteer to help…but the phone started ringing and it hasn’t stopped since,” Dwyatt said.
China's Children
While back in the States, Dwyatt contacted Melody to assist in finding orphanages that would agree to work with him in adopting orphans into American families. It was not until Melody met Dwyatt that she even became aware that there were orphanages in China. She had believed there was no need for orphanages since all people in China were taken care of equally by the government.
“I started contacting local orphanages. There was no norm…no one knew what was involved,” Melody recalls about the early days of international adoption from China in 1992.
She called her aunt in Changshu (Jiangsu Province), asking her about orphanages in her area. To Melody’s surprise, her aunt was good friends with the director of an orphanage right in the neighborhood. In June 1992, Melody flew down to her aunt’s to visit her first an orphanage.
“When I went in I got a shock. It was dark… hot…and smelled so bad,” Melody said. “It looked like a refugee camp. They were so pale they didn’t look like normal children.”
In the first 20-by-20-foot room she walked into, Melody saw crib after crib bordering the room. There were two children per crib with a bamboo mat and no sheet. The children were rocking back and forth. All looked malnourished and mosquito bitten.
“I said to the director, ‘We will try to find homes for the children’,” Melody said. “They trusted us with their children.”
A little 8-month-old girl with a huge diaper made from a man’s old trousers stretched out her hand toward Melody, twirling it like a helicopter. Melody picked her up to hold her. This would be the very first baby to be adopted through Children’s Hope — Lian Ortner.
Back in the States, Dwyatt had finalized a working relationship with an established adoption agency. Calling his new organization China’s Children, Dwyatt was quickly given three couples who would be the “pioneer families” for adoptions from China.
Only a few weeks after Melody’s initial visit, three orphans were assigned to those families from the orphanage in Changshu, on August 8, 1992. One of those families, the Ortners from Florida, were already booked on a business/tourist trip to China for August, so Dwyatt contacted the agency to get the other two families ready to fly to Beijing in order to meet up with the Ortners. It was a tight deadline. The families didn’t even receive the referral photos until they were boarding their international flight in California.
“God’s grace was on us…there was no road (adoption procedures), we just had to make the road,” Dwyatt said. “But China was not a mystery to me so I wasn’t worried.”
Melody greeted the families as they got off their plane and then escorted them onto a flight down to Shanghai. The next day they traveled to Changshu and checked into a hotel right across the street from the orphanage.
“I was pretty sure it would all happen. I was so naïve,” Melody said regarding her lack of apprehension about families flying to China to adopt when there was no official adoption procedure yet established by the country.
That first year, 14 Chinese orphans were adopted into American homes through China’s Children. The early part of 1993, another 20 adoptions were completed. China then put a stop to adoptions in order to carefully adjust procedures. With 40 families waiting and more calling everyday, Dwyatt used the down time to ask Melody to assist him back in the United States.
She rented an apartment above his in St. Louis, Missouri. They worked out of the office in Dwyatt’s small living room equipped with a $29 desk from Wal-Mart, a fax machine and laptop computer.
Children's Hope was Born
If it wasn’t for the prayer and faith for their mission, China’s Children could have very easily folded in that second year. Fortunately, the Chinese government got the adoption process re-organized and operating efficiently. Within a few months the moratorium was lifted and children were coming home again by May 1994. That year 66 orphans were adopted into new loving homes. The next year, Dwyatt bought a small office building in Overland, Missouri, so that he could add staff. The year would bring 240 adoptions from China. By 1996, China’s Children became Children’s Hope International when Dwyatt—along with his new Nashville branch director Brenda Barker—traveled to Russia to explore starting an adoption program from that country.
The course was now set for Children’s Hope. Wherever there was an orphan in need with a government that would cooperate within international ethical standards for adoption, Children’s Hope was going to help. Humanitarian aid projects were expanded to all the countries Children’s Hope serves: providing food and medicine to orphanages, building playgrounds, sponsoring career training and providing for over 1,600 surgeries to orphans and children of poor families. Through the new Children’s Hope Orphan Sponsorship program, an individual can now sponsor an orphan to guarantee that child an education, fresh water, and modern medical treatment, but most of all, the sponsor will give that orphan a loving relationship they so desperately long for.
The dedicated Children’s Hope staff, now 200 worldwide, continues to work hard to unite children with their forever families and ease the burden of those who still wait. Over 6,000 orphans have been adopted through Children’s Hope and thousands more have received Hope from its efforts.
“If we really love, then we work to end the suffering. This is a higher call…the depth of our moral responsibility,” says Melody Zhang.
- Melody and Dwyatt in 2006 at CHI's Hope Center in Beijing
