Chi Fan For Charity: Bethel China Foundation Founder Guillaume Gauvin Discusses Why Blind Orphans Are 'Beautiful' and 'Worth It'

Bethel China Foundation is a charity partner of 2015 Chi Fan For Charity, which will take place this Saturday (Nov 7). Great seats are still available for one of Beijing's best homegrown charity events, click here to see available restaurants.

Founded in 2003 by Guillaume Gauvain, Bethel China Foundation has worked with disabled orphans in Beijing. Along with providing housing and education, Bethel offers training every three months in different provinces in China to parents and caregivers, special education schools, and orphanages on how to care and raise a child that has a visual impairment. Through their outreach efforts, Bethel has noticed that families really craved more support and educational opportunities for their children so since last year, leading them to open a preschool to children from families as well. There are practically no early intervention services for children with visual impairments and it is Bethel’s goal through the preschool to prepare these children to be able to attend school and function with their peers. We hope that by equipping families to raise their children we can reduce the rate of abandonment for visually impaired children.

Originally from France, he is the founder of the Bethel China Foundation, which has helped countless disadvantaged children in China live more fulfilling lives. Bethel is now in their 12th year. Although Gauvin now lives in the Philippines full-time and oversees Bethel’s efforts there, he talked to Nick Richards during their 10th anniversary celebration.

Blind Chinese orphans. That’s a scary issue to tackle. What was the spark, the one moment were you said to yourself, “Right, I’m going do this?”
When I got home with David, my adoptive son, I was overwhelmed with the feeling of how big of a difference it was to bring an orphan into a family. That was the spark that led to Bethel. For blind orphans specifically, we found that even though blindness is not a mental illness, they were treated as such with little hope of moving forward, so we decided to do something about it.

How did you feel/react the first time you met these disabled children over here?
I still remember coming back from the orphanage with the first three blind children in my van and looking at them and thinking, "what am I doing?"

What is the first thing you try to teach Bethel’s children?
The first thing we teach is, "You are beautiful, and you’re worth it." 

Where do you hope these kids will end up? What kind of future is there for them? Well, like any parent you want to kids to be the best they can be and achieve independence. But above all, I want them to feel good about themselves and have a fighting spirit since society will not make it easy on them.

What were the main steps to get things started here? Any bureaucratic or official hurdles? 
In the beginning, there were no steps [no roadmap].  For foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs), everything is in the gray, no matter how many new so-called laws and regulations there are, in the end there is no clear way to independently register a foreign NGO in China. So yes it created a lot of challenges when the organization began to grow, such as not being able to have a professional bank account, for example.

Bethel China Foundation is a charity partner of 2015 Chi Fan For Charity. To learn more, visit www.bethelchina.org. To participate in Chi Fan For Charity, visit www.chifanforcharity.org.

An edition of this article appeared previously in the December 2013 issue of the Beijinger.