In the winter of 1979, our founder, Ms. Hui Jin, was a young woman who had just entered society as a new college graduate in Beijing. Because of her love and concern for the education of young children, Ms. Jin opened a private school that taught children music and art through after-school programs. While running the school, Ms. Jin began to see the needs of children around her.
Many of the children within the public school system were struggling, and there were countless others who were not able to receive an education of any kind due to financial difficulties, or physical and mental challenges that public school systems could not address. Special needs children were being neglected and left behind. Children from impoverished backgrounds, who had come to the city with their parents, were also being left behind. Because of lack of space in the public schools, these children from the countryside, who did not possess Beijing citizenship, had no place to go to learn.
All of these children, however, were still well off when compared to the countless number of orphans that Ms. Jin was becoming aware of. Without parents and families that could take care of them, the orphans were left at the mercy of governmental institutions which were in turn overflowing and unable to cope with all the abandoned and orphaned children that were coming into Beijing each day. Among the orphans, the ones with special needs, and those from minority backgrounds were especially under hardship, because they constituted the lowest rung on the societal ladder. Even among the unwanted and abandoned, they were the lowest.
After many years of trying to help these lost and abandoned unfortunates of Chinese society, Ms. Hui felt it was time to do something about all she was seeing. In the Fall of 1996 Meng En Orphanage was founded by Ms. Hui Jin, her younger sister Ms. Weizi Jin, and Mr. Benjamin Lee. Meng En means Grace Received in Chinese. Beijing Meng En Minority Orphanage was founded in 1996 for the purpose of helping orphaned and abandoned children of minority backgrounds with special needs. Children of minority backgrounds who are challenged by special needs have a harder time being placed in the overburdened governmental orphanage system.
Our facility is able to house a maximum of 40 children. Given its small size, the current facility is an ideal environment for children who have never known what it is like to live as part of a family. Our staff all live on the premises, further adding to the familial environment we have sought to establish, as they are all aunts and uncles to our children who look upon one another as brothers and sisters in the extended family. Each year 5 to 8 children are adopted in to loving families from the United States.
Our cooperative network of government run orphanages are more than willing to send us new children for whom they cannot provide a comparable level of care. We have been able to adopt out over 100 children since our beginnings. As one of only a handful of privately run orphanages in China, Beijing Meng En Minority Orphanage has been providing a home for these unfortunates who have nowhere else to turn.
