Catholic mom organizes ‘virtual’ race for Chinese orphans

After researching adoption in China and learning of the high rates of abandoned children, a Catholic homeschooling mother organized a run to raise awareness of the country’s 147 million orphans.

“I think when your eyes become open to such a need and God uses it to touch your heart, you have to do something. You are called to do something,” Katie Murphy, founder of the Run for the Little Flowers Virtual 5K told CNA Oct. 15.

When she and her husband Peter learned that they may not have been able to have any more children of their own, Murphy said she “naturally” wanted to adopt.

They looked first to Ethiopia and then to China. During the research process, they read about a child who was abandoned on a street corner when he was just two days old.

“All I could do was picture that, a poor helpless newborn, just being left, abandoned,” Murphy said.

From that moment on, she said, “the desire to do something for the orphans in China grew.”

The more the Murphys researched, the more they learned about the large number of Chinese orphans with serious medical conditions who are left to die each year.

“I would not say I was surprised, but I really had not known that so many children were abandoned,” Murphy said.

When it seemed that God was not calling the Murphys to adoption, “at least not right now,” she said she still felt a great need to help the children she learned about throughout the research process.

It was during this time that, through a friend’s Facebook post, Murphy also learned about Little Flower Projects in China.

Founded in 1995, Little Flower Projects is an outreach of China Little Flower, a nonprofit organization that seeks to “build a culture of life” by providing care for orphans in need of medical attention. The children are cared for by live-in nannies who spend six-month stints at the orphanage acting as their mothers, providing for their medically-fragile charges. [More]

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CNA