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aregiver Rita Setiawati says she cried when a pregnant teenager visited the Lestari Sayang Anak (Forever Loving Children) orphanage last year and wanted to abort her fetus, saying she was not ready to face being mocked by society.

The teenager, she said, wanted the abortion because her boyfriend had returned to his wife and had refused to be responsible.

The orphanage'€™s founder, Dutch national Ingrid van der Mark, whose husband is Indonesian, advised her against having an abortion and asked her to continue the pregnancy.

Mark promised her she would take care of the baby at her orphanage located at a rented house on Jl. Terogong in Cilandak, South Jakarta.

The boy has grown into '€œa handsome toddler,'€ said Rita. He is one of eight orphans taken under Mark'€™s wing. Most of the orphans come from low-income families who did not have adequate financial resources to take care of their babies.

Rita said after they gave birth, the parents asked Mark to pay the hospital bills. Afterward, they asked her to raise their babies on the belief they would benefit from a better environment provided by her.

Lestari Sayang Anak was established by Mark on April 18, 2009, because she wanted to take care of abandoned infants after visiting a number of orphanages in Indonesia, Romania and India.

She resigned from her previous job as a lecturer in some private universities in Jakarta.

'€œBabies have a right to live. That'€™s why she [Mark] takes care of them,'€ Rita said.

Besides Mark, another female expatriate, Monica Melinda Kurczveil from Romania, also takes care of children at her orphanage Nusantara Foundation in South Jakarta. She is also married to an Indonesian.

The Nusantara Foundation orphanage on Jl. Karbela 2 in Setiabudi was founded in 1989 by Kurczveil'€™s uncle, Romanian national Muhammad Lorand, who passed away in 2010.

When Lorand arrived in Jakarta in 1976, he could not believe that many children did not go to school and hung around the streets, Kurczveil said.

Lorand, she said, used to be a street child in Romania but he finished his studies at a senior high school because the government supported children to access all their basic needs, including education.

'€œLorand built this orphanage because he wanted all poor children to go to school like those in Romania,'€ she said.

She added that handling the orphanage was not easy, especially in financing her 25 orphans.

'€œI go from door to door to look for donations. Our donors are mostly private companies that help us under their corporate social responsibility programs,'€ she said.

Like Nusantara Foundation, Lestari Sayang Anak also receives donations from private sponsors, such as Australian construction and contract mining group Leighton Holdings Ltd.

In addition the orphanage also receives donations from expatriates. (alz)