All those years ago, Jin's wife Wang Ge saw that some of the women in their village had begun to serve as wet nurses, so she told her husband that she wanted to do the same thing. Jin rode his bicycle for an hour and a half to the charity house and returned with their first baby daughter, Jin Shuping.
The girl was very weak, and in order to provide her with enough nutrition, Jin fetched a sheep and fed the child with its milk. Although the couple gave birth to three children of their own, they treated the girl just like the others. Before the village became known to the outside world and covered by the media, the girl had no idea she was not the couple's birth daughter.
Jin brought home several other kids successively, and three of them finally went to colleges in different cities. After most of them grew up and were able to care for themselves, Jin's wife became seriously ill.
Unexpectedly, the three kids who had already gone off to college and gotten jobs returned to Sancha to look after their "mother." "The last days of her life were not easy. She was in great pain, but my daughter stayed with her till the last moment," recalled Jin.
Since the founding of the People's Republic of China, there have been 38 villages like Sancha in Datong, and the government provided each family with subsidies to help them. At the beginning, some people agreed to raise the kids just for the money.
Though not a large amount, a family could still save some extra money; but as the economy develops and the situation changes, raising the kids no longer helps to increase local incomes. Now, Sancha is the only village involved in the program there.
Starting from 2003, the Datong government published a local regulation to help settle the orphans. In recent years, more and more foreigners have come to China to adopt children from Datong, and two of Jin's children have already been adopted by an American couple.
"The village will not survive for long because there are too many practical problems, and the government is working on a solution for the kids," said an employee from the local charity house. Now the government is encouraging unemployed females to take care of kids and is also constructing more buildings for them.
