For China’s Orphans, Coal Is a Lifesaver

Advocates Brush Off Green Concerns, Citing Children’s Needs First

…As Beijing Olympic officials scramble to clear the air and fulfill its promise for a “Green Olympics,” there remains a small group of Chinese that can’t get enough of the black stuff: the poor, who by the millions use coal to heat their homes.

In 2005, Eulalia Andreasen, director of the Beijing International Committee for Chinese Orphans, discovered a wintry nightmare unfolding outside of Beijing. A small orphanage called Daming had run out of coal to heat its facilities in the middle of winter and the facility had turned into an icebox. “They had run out of coal and children had suffered from severe frostbite,” Andreasen told ABC News. Without heat, a 13-year-old girl had lost her feet. “She had clubbed feet and just had her surgery [to correct them] the summer before. She was recovering and in the middle of winter, it got so cold that she was badly frostbitten. We had no choice but to amputate,” Andreasen said.
Children in other orphanages were losing fingers, toes and ears because the orphanages were running on insufficient funds. Andreasen shared her discovery with Our Chinese Daughters Foundation (OCDF) in Beijing. Together, Andreasen and OCDF searched for a way to help the children fight the cold.

ABC