By Paloma Haschke
Created in 1956 and renovated in 2002, the Lalla Hasna Foundation for Abandoned Children is now home for 200 kids. It also has an annex specially dedicated to the 75 mentally and physically handicapped children the foundation has taken in. The King’s sister, the Princess Lalla Hasna is the honorary president of the foundation and is at the origin of the renovation of the building and the creation of this annex.
This orphanage is under the supervision of the Moroccan Health Ministry but it’s financed and managed by associations and NGOs.
The building is divided in three main parts where children only stay to sleep and to eat. The first floor is dedicated to kids from 18 months to 3 years old, the second floor to kids from 3 to 9, and the last floor is equipped for babies up to 18 months. The rest of the time children are in class or playing outside in the large and colorful yard of the foundation.
This building is a preschool educational structure for the kids the foundation takes in. From 18 months to 6 years old children are divided by age in five grades – the nursery (until 2), the Chicks (2-3), the Rabbits (3-4), the Butterflies (4-5), the Stars (5-6). Teachers use modern pedagogical methods approved by the Education Ministry of Morocco.
The Butterflies class is bilingual, one day is taught in Arabic, the following one is in French. Until recently the Stars level was also bilingual but after 5, orphans have very few chance of being adopted and will thus have to be sent to a public school, where French is not taught before the age of 8. The orphanage team realized that kids coming out of a bilingual grade before entering the public system were having difficulties to follow classes in Arabic. They thus decided to stop teaching them French after they turned 5.
The organizations funding the foundation had to create a pedagogical system that could take into consideration kids of all ages. They thus had to train the team working with the children. The staff had to learn on the job since preschool structures don’t exist in Morocco. They have been helped by a group of researchers specialized on infancy, known as the Atfal (children in Arabic) team, and active on this field for more than 20 years in Casablanca.
The head of the foundation put a particular emphasis on having a room dedicated to improve the abandoned children’s psychomotricity. As she explained, these kids are usually late for their age in comparison to those who have the chance to grow up with their family. Since they never had any kind of relationship with their own mother, orphans thus need to be continuously stimulated. They start to do physically stimulating exercises around the age of 16 months. Each age has its own set of activities and practices it every day for an hour.
Kids are admitted upon police requests. They usually arrive in very poor conditions, with their umbilical cordon still attached or bitten by dogs. The vast majority of them is found in the streets or in hospitals when mothers run away after giving birth. But some women deliberately go to the police station to abandon their baby. A growing number of associations nowadays try to talk to the mom offering to help her raising her child if she changes her mind. Women who abandon their baby in the streets usually stay around to watch and wait until someone finds the child. Knowing that, the Lala Hasna foundation lets the mothers up to a month to change their mind. But when a mother decides to do so, she’s not allowed to see her child until she has completed the procedure with the police to take the baby back.
More than 90% of the kids under the age of 5 are adopted. Procedures are free and not restricted to Morocco. Foreign couples or single women can also adopt as long as they are Muslims. For every applier, an enquiry is lead by national authorities, and the Moroccan consulate in the case of foreigners, to certify that the future parents, or the future mom if she’s single, are actually Muslims.
Only 20% of the orphans are girls and they can’t be adopted. In Morocco, said the director of the building, women don’t abandon their daughter because they feel they’ll have a much stronger connection with their child once she grows up. So girls in orphanage are usually either handicapped or have been abandoned by a sick mother. Even if it’s against the law – that says that once a kid has been abandoned it’s not possible to take him/her back – the foundation refuses to declared a child as abandoned if there is a chance that the mother might come back once she is cured.
Unfortunately this high rate doesn’t apply to handicapped children. When a mentally or physically disabled child is found in the streets or diagnosed later as handicapped, s/he is transferred to the annex around the age of 3. In fourteen years, the team said they have only seen 3 handicapped kids get adopted. Since there is no structure to welcome them once they turn 18 and become legal, the foundation keeps them. It also does the same thing with orphans that are older than 9. The Lalla Hana Foundation supposedly shelters kids until the age of 6 but in this case too, the lack of infrastructure forces the orphanage to keep those children. The only reason why the foundation could ever refuse a child is if the building has reached it 300 kids capacity or if the kid is older than 6.