GMIQ Advocacy Speech

Good afternoon ambassadors of the United Nations. We are the GMIQ league.
We are here to tell you today disabled children around the world need a family.
What is a disabled orphan? More importantly, what is a disability? A disability,
according to the Merriam Webster Online Dictionary, is a condition that damages or
limits a person's physical or mental abilities. Some common disabilities include
Autism1, Cerebral Palsy2, and Dyslexia3. We are the Gray Matter Intelligence Quartet,
and our purpose is to explain to everyone how many of disabled children in the world do
not have a family or home and are left to die. Disabled orphans are different from
normal orphans because they do not have the same rights. Disabled orphans are so
targeted, more often violence in many places especially in orphanages. In China, 98%
of abandoned children often have disabilities and are abused. One important reason
why disabled orphans need a home because orphanages provide a bad environment for
them.
Orphanages: The Kids Worst Nightmare
Did you know that most orphanages are unregistered and treat children, especially
disabled children, cruelly? Some children with disabilities were seen not being treated
with medical care they needed, and were left to die. Orphans who were interviewed by
the Human Rights Watch said that,[the] orphanage staff beat them, injected them with
sedatives, and sent them to psychiatric hospitals for days or weeks at a time to control
or punish them.4 No children should be treated in this way no matter what type of
problems they may have. When children are being abused in orphanages, they get
worried about what would happen in the outside world. They might feel safer inside an
orphanage, even though it causes them pain. The orphanages are also creating a
dangerous and defensive attitude for the disabled orphans. Since the child are always
bullied and hurt by the orphanage staff, the kids might often feel anger. When they go to
a new family, they would also have those burst of anger or anxiety, making their new
family think twice about them. This is very unhealthy for the child because it would
stress them out and get them frustrated, creating a hard life. This could also hurt the
child physically.Orphanages also provide a bad environment for disabled orphans as to
how they develop. Studies show that orphanages are very unadaptable because for
every three months a baby or toddler is institutionalized, that child loses one month of
1 Autism: where a person has difficulties with social communication and interaction
2 Cerebral Palsy: a disorder that appears during infancy that affects body movement and muscle
coordination

3 Dyslexia: a condition that affects the way the brain processes written and spoken language
4 https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/09/15/russia-children-disabilities-face-violence-neglect

development. Disabled children who arrive in this type of orphanage hardly have any
hope in adapting to the social society.

Major Findings
Remember how some of the movies you watched portrayed orphanages as a bad
guy? Remember how the director made orphanages look like a terrible place, with evil
caretakers? I always thought these movies exaggerated, only trying to make this place seem
way worse than they actually are. And I was right, they do exaggerate-by making them seem
quite nicer than real life.There have been several researches done on this orphanages, and the
findings are shocking. Most of the results are negative, definitally not exactly in their favor.It
seems as though most of these reasearches were made for the very purpose of showing the
dark side of the supposedly nurturing places. In the Washington Post article, Orphanages are
no place for children, the author writes, In work in dozens of countries over two decades, we
have witnessed thousands of children who live in disabling conditions, with heartbreaking
consequences. We have seen neglected babies who rock back and forth, bite their hands and
gouge their eyes as the result of mind-numbing boredom and neglect. We have seen infants
and children, unable to feed themselves, left to starve because there is no one to feed them. In
Romania and Turkey we found teens who weighed less than 30 pounds. This is the work of the
so called caretakers. Young children need to be nurtured and without the proper care, things
can easily go downhill fast. Not to mention disabled children, who need the most medical
attention of all. They are most vulnerable to all sorts of abuse and cannot fend for themselves,
and as long as people like this work in orphanages, disabled children are doomed. They are
already faced with decades of mental abuse that will torture them until the end of their time. But
this could happen even before they get neglected in the supposed safe haven.
In the NPR broadcast, Orphans Lonely Beginnings Reveal How Parents Shape A Child's Brain,
Jon Hamilton says, More than a decade of research on children raised in institutions shows that
"neglect is awful for the brain," says Charles Nelson, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard
Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital. Without someone who is a reliable source of
attention, affection and stimulation, he says, the wiring of the brain goes awry. The result can
be long-term mental and emotional problems. In another NPR broadcast,For Russian Kids, A
Disability Often Means Life In An Orphanage, the author repeats the s, once disabled children
are consigned to state orphanages, there's little chance that they'll be given the attention
needed to thrive. In many cases, she says, they face ill treatment. In the end the findings for
this cause definitely show that orphanages are not the safe haven they advertise themselves to
be.

Letting the World Know

Orphans around the world just want two things: a family and love. In order to
grant the requests they want (and that we usually take for granted), all we have to do is
spread the word. Did you know that there are 397,122 children who dont have families?
Within that number, 32,533 kids will be waiting for 3 or more years for a home of their

own. For that reason, we need to tell everybody we know to help this crisis turn into a
plan that would help take all the children out of the institutions and into the arms of a
loving family.
One way that we could help orphans get adopted is by setting up a Facebook
page, or by using social media. With more than 1 billion people on Facebook and
another 100 million on Instagram, information could easily be spread to people in a fast
and popular way.
You could also hold fundraisers or public speakings to help raise awareness.
Fundraisers could help raise money for the supplies given to the orphans in institutions.
The money could also help fund trips for the newly adopted orphans to get home after a
family has adopted them. Fundraisers could be also held online. Crowdrise is an online
fundraising website that allows you to raise money for a specific cause. Public
speakings would also be useful to help inform larger crowds about the emergency
around the world. As you can see, with some knowledge and perseverance, some
people could make a huge difference in the world and it all starts with speaking out loud.

The GMIQ Solution

There are so many ways to help orphans currently but, they often dont focus on
the emotional support of the children. If there are more solutions to help the orphans
before the adoption and the stages after it, that would help them learn more social skills
and feel more loved, rather than forgotten. One solution for the problem that will
encourage development and social skills is communicating through Skype. There could
be counselors who talk to the children as if it was a one-on-one conversation. That way,
the children would feel less threatened by another person and would have more social
skills they could show off to their new parents.
Another solutions is to train the orphanage workers more carefully. After all, the
children spend lots of time around them. The workers need to learn how to handle kids
in a difficult situation, without injecting them with calming fluids. That way, the orphans
would learn more peaceful attitudes that would help them connect with their new family.
With social skills, the orphans could adapt to the new surroundings and feel like they do
matter.

Current Methods for Solutions

Adoption is not for everyone, but it isnt the only way you and I can help make a
change. Sponsor programs such as World Vision USA brings orphans from all over the
world, both disabled and able-bodied. Sponsoring children helps improve their lives
drastically. Basically, for a monthly pay towards a particular child, you could grant them
education, opportunity, and essential products. Another way of helping the cause is to
donate airline miles to help orphaned children get to their future family, or donating in

general. Raising awareness by documentaries, articles, and public speaking can also
help.
We can also make a change by improving an orphans environment. Certain
orphanages are in no means fit to care for children. Checking the license of an
orphanage can weed out the fake ones. Fake orphanages may harbor helpless orphans
for free labor or other immoral acts.
In an orphans life, especially a disabled orphan, human interaction is extremely
important. In orphanage care, staff need to be judged harshly for their ways of handling
the children. False or negative interaction is not beneficial to a childs well being
whatsoever and can have unwanted outcomes in the future.
Lastly, educating people on the matter is highly important. This goes under the
idea of raising awareness. In 2014 a popular trend, The Ice Bucket Challenge, took
place in todays media. The idea was that the cold sensation of ice water is similar to the
feeling of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrigs disease. Taking a similar course
of action for raising awareness of disabled orphans around the world can bring media
into the mix. By doing this we could make this global problem stand out to the eyes of
the public and help children from around the world get the care they deserve.

Color Coding Key:

Quyen Le

Black

Maricielo Landazuri

Pink

Angela Micelli

Purple

Katherine Wang

Orange