China Care is looking for volunteers who are interested in traveling to China and working with special-needs orphans. If you want to know how the system works and what these kids are really like, this seems like it would be one of the best ways to do that.

China Care also runs foster care services and supports Social Welfare Institutions in China by providing "renovations, foster care funding, infant formula, staff training, donated items and other support," they say. (The pitches for diapers turn up elsewhere on the site.) They also offer grants (between $2,000 and $4,000) to qualifying families who're working on adopting special needs orphans.

And they were founded by a fellow with a fascinating story. Matt Dalio was a 16-year-old Harvard student when he spent a summer working in a Chinese orphanage, and decided to try raising some money to help the disabled kids get the treatments they needed. And he turned out to be remarkably good at it. Turned up on Oprah and everything, and now he's got clubs on campuses across America doing the best they can. Which can be an awful lot.

He does say he "turned a bit Chinese" after living in Beijing when he was 11, which is a little odd, but it's making good things happen.

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If you *do* go to China and wind up doing some shopping while you're there, remember the rules of bargaining in the marketplace... and the proper guidelines for good sales language and bad sales language. (As you might guess, there's some PG-13 language on that second site, but not much.)

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On a different tack, you might remember the old experiment in which kids choose the "good" doll from between the white doll and the black doll, and despite Daughter's recent enthusiasm for her new plaything, as it turns out, most children of all races still pick the black doll as the "bad" one. Which is disturbing.

What *is* Daughter thinking? And what monstrous reality is she up against?

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