State's first lady tours Shanghai orphanage and vows to 'shine a light' on girls' plight
Carla Marinucci, Chronicle Political Writer
Friday, November 18, 2005
Shanghai -- California first lady Maria Shriver, walking slowly through the nurseries of the Shanghai Children's Home, stopped short at the rows of orphaned toddlers, mostly girls, in identical silver cribs, holding out their tiny arms and calling, "Mama.''
"It breaks your heart,'' Shriver said Thursday, her eyes welling up. "You can't help but be moved as a mother.''
While Shriver's husband, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, is busy with a six-day trade mission to promote California business in China, the first lady has her own mission: trying to "shine a light,'' she said, on the deeds and needs of women and girls at home and abroad.
"You're struck by how much work needs to be done,'' said Shriver, a former NBC television reporter. She has tried to highlight women's issues on the trip, on Monday visiting the Maple Women's Psychological Counseling Center in Beijing , a women's organization that helps victims of domestic violence, sexual abuse and poverty.
Shiver took reporters on a visit Wednesday to highlight the extraordinary work of Jenny Bowen of Berkeley, the founder and executive director of a program called Half the Sky. Bowen's program, a California-based nonprofit operation that has bloomed into an international organization with 20,000 supporters, has been credited with changing the lives of thousands of orphaned girls in China since 1998.
Bowen, a former screenwriter and filmmaker, says she arrived in China nearly a decade ago and was shocked to see orphanages so understaffed and underfunded that babies were left lying in cribs for days without being touched, hugged or loved. She adopted a 2-year-old girl who was a victim of that system -- so developmentally delayed, Bowen says, that "she didn't know how to come out of herself.''
And after a year of care, nurturing and "just holding her,'' Bowen says she and her husband realized while watching their daughter at a party that "she had become a different kid,'' running, laughing, playing -- outgoing and happy. "I looked at my husband and said, 'Why can't we do this for all the kids we can't take home?' '' she recalled.
Bowen founded her program -- named for the proverb attributed to Mao Zedong that "women hold up half the sky'' -- to train nannies and preschool teachers to give the orphaned children the love and nurturing they need to develop physically and mentally. Today, about 10,000 children have passed through her program, funded through private donations, including from Californians who have adopted Chinese orphaned children. Half the Sky has been embraced and expanded by the Chinese government into more than two dozen cities around the country.
Shriver said this week that part of her work in China would be to encourage such efforts and to seek out more corporate and private funding from Californians.
"I try to mention it to everybody I meet,'' she said. "We'll mention it to the people on this trip.'' And, she said, back home she will continue to push the program as an example of what can be done to improve the lives of girls in meaningful ways.
The theme has been central to her work as California 's first lady since she first took over the role two years ago. She reflected with reporters on Thursday's anniversary of her husband's swearing-in as governor, saying the work had had "great, great highs" and "great challenges" as well.
Shriver described her role as challenging, humbling, exciting and inspiring.
"I feel pretty good about how I've done,'' she said. "I've navigated a gravel road,'' one that has had some bumps for which she wasn't prepared, she said.
Shriver's work has included shepherding the annual Governor and First Lady's Conference on Women and Families, which has sponsored networking, seminars and programs aimed at encouraging women's growth in health, home and business.
Shriver's schedule on the trade mission has showcased programs and causes that have not traditionally received attention in China , such as aid to the intellectually disabled. The Special Olympics, founded by her mother, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, today includes 500,000 athletes here and has been lauded for helping change the lives of families and children across China .
On Wednesday, some Chinese families traveled for hours to Shanghai to meet Shriver and tell her how the program has flung open the doors to a new way of thinking in China , where once disabled children were literally locked away in homes out of shame.
As she travels across China with Schwarzenegger, Shriver says her first and most important job is still at home as mother to her four children. But she says the trip has reminded her about what she calls "the power of ideas'' and the power of her position to shine a light on them.
"Very few people get to do that,'' she said. "I feel blessed in that way.''
Fax from Maria Shriver to Half the Sky
E-mail Carla Marinucci at cmarinucci@sfchronicle.com.