Barefoot social workers bring hope to China's children

In a mud house in a village 25 miles from China's northwest border with Kazakhstan, 7-year-old Xiao Xiao is taking a hard step forward with a walking aid. Beside him are his parents, and a neighbor, Qi Fengwei.

"We owe Qi a great debt of gratitude," says Xiao Xiao's mother, who regards Qi as a member of the family.

Qi is one of a small army of "barefoot social workers," an informal position established under a pilot program to extend social services to vulnerable children in the vast poverty-stricken Chinese countryside.

Initiated in 2010, the program has been run under the auspices of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), in partnership with China's Ministry of Civil Affairs and Beijing Normal University.

As the "barefoot doctors" tended to farmers in the remote corners of China in the 1960s, the barefoot social workers tend to children. For the 120 barefoot social workers who serve in the five pilot provinces in central and western China, every day begins by visiting neighbors to assess the needs of their children.

In the winter of 2011, Qi visited Xiao Xiao's family and learnt about his disability for the first time.

Born with cerebral palsy, Xiao Xiao could not speak, walk or even grasp things. His parents spent what they earned on treatments for his condition.

"We were rarely at home - always in hospital or on the way to hospital - until we ran out of money," says the boy's mother.

Qi reported Xiao Xiao's case to the local government, and helped the family apply for subsistence allowances and rural medical care in 2012.

With a health-care subsidy, Xiao Xiao had an operation and received medical treatment the following year. "He can now draw simple pictures, and can eat and dress by himself. The doctors say there's hope that he will walk," his father says.

Like Xiao Xiao's parents, other rural people, often semi-literate, have little contact with the outside world. "Over the past years, all I knew was to borrow money to pay medical expenses. I didn't know that the government had allowances to support people like us," Xiao Xiao's mother says.

"It was Qi who told me about the assistance and helped me to apply for it. Now the government pays 80 percent of our medical fees, and we can continue the treatment."

Located at Huocheng County, Yining city in the northwestern Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Qi's village is home to four ethic groups: Han, Uygur, Kazak and Hui. Qi is familiar with all the 426 children in her village: "Six are disabled, 14 have single parents, and one is seriously ill - I visit that family every week."

Despite China's rapid development, the economic gap between eastern and western areas is wide, leaving many children in an environment with inadequate care and supervision, as well as poor health and education services.

The central government has a string of policies to support children in poverty, but not everyone is clear about the welfare system, says Wang Zhenyao, dean of the China Philanthropy Research Institute at Beijing Normal University.