Pacific Stars and Stripes, May 3, 1953
New York, May 3 (UP)- The Foster
Parents' Plan for War Children appealed for help in rescuing thousands
of destitute Korean children from gutters, railroad stations, and
garbage dumps they call home.
The organization, founded 16 years ago to care
for young victims of the Spanish civil war, already has rehabilitated
72,000 victims of both hot and cold wars throughout the world.
Now it sees an almost endless task before it in
South Korea, which has become the most densely populated and devastated
area in the world.
MRS. LENORE SORIN, director of Foster Parents'
relations for the plan, sent out a call for "as much money as we can
get," to provide housing and buy rice and shoes for South Korean children.
She wants-even more urgently-to recruit foster
parents to "adopt" Korean youngsters. The crew of the battleship
Missouri has become the first mail-order "foster parent" in the Korean
project, and Mrs. Sorin hopes thousands of individuals and organizations
also will volunteer.
In other parts of the world-Greece, Italy, France,
Germany, England, and Belgium-the plan spent about 1.5 million dollars
last year on "remote control adoptions" of about 10,000 youngsters
and for medical and surgical care. Now it wants to add thousands more
in Korea.
The work in South Korea has just begun.
Robert W. Sage has started rounding up destitute children in Pusan,
which he said is jammed to the rafters with five times as many persons
as it held in its crowded prewar days.
HE AND HIS aides have started helping 300 children
they found living in fruit markets, in dumps, or wandering hungry
through the streets. Most have been separated from their parents
or are with parents too ill to work. Almost all the orphans are in
institutions.
From now on Sage expects children to wander into
his headquarters at a rate of 100 or 200 a week. For each there will
be money to help pay for lodging and food for him and his family.
Later there will be shoes, clothes, and shipments of rice, powdered
milk, and soap.
Then will come the service for which the plan
was organized-the establishment of a relationship between foster parents
in the United States and the children in Korea.
Under the plan, a "parent" pays $180 a year to
help support the child assigned him. He also may send food and clothing
parcels to the child. Many organizations have "adopted" a number of
children.
Actress Tallulah Bankhead has served as a foster
parent to four or five European youngsters over the last 16 years
Mrs. Sorin said, and an Italian girl receives help from Mrs. Gary
Cooper. C. D. Jackson, one of President Eisenhower's top aides,
still finds time to write to his foster child, a little girl in Greece.
IN ADDITION to the aid given, Mrs. Sorin encourages
the foster parents and children to correspond at least once a month.
They establish a relationship, she said, that gives a child a sense
of security and the knowledge that someone really cares about him,
she said.
"We are not a propaganda agency,"
Mrs. Sorin said, "but our work has a tremendous propaganda value.
We will miss a big opportunity, if we don't do a good deed and help
the Korean children.
By Claire Cox
PSS-191
