Orphans

The lights were so bright at the packed concert hall in Shanghai, Gianna Horak could barely see past the second row. "Hello, I am Gianna," the 14 year-old from Pasadena said in Mandarin, a language she started studying in elementary school. "I was born in China and adopted as an infant. My parents loved me as their own. This is my first time back to China and it's a very treasurable moment, it is what I treasure the most: being back in my home country."

Surviving family members Sunday were grappling with how to best care for the victims' children after a Christmas Eve slaying in Covina that left nine people dead. At least 13 young people were orphaned after the shooting and two others lost one parent, according to a family attorney. "We have to help them," said Jose Castillo, a relative who came to the Covina home Sunday to pay his respects.

A fast-moving fire at an orphanage in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, killed five babies and injured a nurse and 17 children, officials said. Firefighters rescued 23 children from the blaze, which broke out on the third floor of the orphanage in downtown Sarajevo and spread to three rooms where the babies were sleeping, according to the Sarajevo fire brigade.

Evangelical leader Rick Warren came to the heart of the religious right movement last week to criticize a narrow focus on abortion, homosexuality and pornography as un-Christian. Strikingly, top Christian conservatives agreed. During a three-day summit here, members of Focus on the Family and Campus Crusade for Christ joined Warren and dozens of other pastors from across the nation in a pledge to devote more of their resources and clout to helping children in need.

One photograph shows a skin-and-bones boy lying on a bare floor, leashed like a dog to the pink bars of an unoccupied crib. Another shows boys curled naked on the ground, one of them smeared with human waste. The scenes were ghastly. But almost as jarring was the response of an Iraqi government minister called upon Wednesday to explain how a state-run orphanage in the capital could have kept two dozen children in such conditions.

For 12-year-old Teddy Namuddu of Uganda, the perfect Hollywood movie would star pop princess Beyonc? Knowles and action hero Chuck Norris. She picks Knowles because she can sing and Norris because he can kick. "I like the kicks," she said the other night, to screams of laughter from her friends. "When he acts in a movie, it's not him getting hurt, it's other people getting hurt." Teddy's in Los Angeles this week, but it's not her first trip to the United States.

Defying all odds, they have remained a family. The four Lee siblings were together again in the rambling West Adams district house they've come to call home. The elder three had come back from college to celebrate the 18th birthday of their youngest sister -- and to celebrate their good fortune at being rescued by total strangers when they were orphaned six years ago.

Lisa Misraje Bentley watches the boy in the No. 8 jersey as he careens across the soccer field and she marvels. His lower face a mask of scar tissue, his left arm gone at the elbow, the toes on his left foot missing, he zigzags along the green grass in defiance of his disabilities. "Isn't he happy?" she says. "Look at the joy coming out of him!" Bentley knows the boy probably should not be alive.

Jodie Schooley has sold her car. Lydia Schaeffer has given her furniture away. And Melissa Herrmann is attending a last round of farewell gatherings with family and friends. All this in preparation for an unlikely plan: leaving the comforts of Southern California for indefinite servitude in a sweltering African town devoid of indoor plumbing and electricity but with a surplus of poverty, illiteracy and disease.

There's a fairy tale of sorts in the story of how a group of girls from a foster care program in Compton blossomed into beautiful debutantes at a Cinderella Ball. The tale begins with 29 teenage girls and young women who gathered over the course of three weeks last month at the Pepperdine University campus in Malibu. They were there to be schooled in the basics of life, to learn how to confront their worst fears about their childhood and to map their emancipation from the foster care system.