Babies find 'home' in her arms

Zhejiang woman has cared for more than 30 children, reports Yang Wanli from Jinhua.

Smoke wafts from a coal stove outside her shack and slips through a crack in the door.

Although it is noon on a late March day, the temperature inside Lou Xiaoying's squalid, unheated shack in Jinhua, Zhejiang province, is around -10 C.

Lying quietly on a single bed covered by three cotton quilts that have lost their color after countless washes, Lou glances toward a railway track.

The 89-year-old remembers the cold winter's day in 1972 when she and her husband discovered an abandoned baby as they were picking up garbage outside the railway station.

The little girl, lying in a corner of the station, was almost dead. Although many passengers saw the child, not one approached to help.

But Lou didn't hesitate. As a mother she instinctively took the baby in her arms and carried her "home".

"People who adopt more than one baby, especially those with physical defects, are often not rich or well educated. They don't consider the potential difficulties. They are just driven by a simple idea - to save a life," he added.

The baby Lou found at the railway station proved to be healthy, so she was called Zhang Meixian, Lou's husband's family name plus a given name meaning "As beautiful as a fairy". She was the first of many children Lou and her husband adopted in the following decades. Over the years, they have adopted and taken care of more than 30 abandoned babies, although around 12 died in infancy. So many children have crossed her threshold that Lou can't remember the number. At present, though, she only has one child to look after.

"Most of the babies taken in by my mother were on their last gasp. Some were on the verge of death, but were saved by her tender care. Since the 1990s, her name has spread across the city, to the point where people would just leave babies outside our home," said Zhang Caiying, Lou's eldest biological daughter.