BEIJING – “What?! No, she is alive in the hospital,” exclaimed Zhang Jingjing through the phone lines.

Zhang was responding to concern on Weibo, China’s popular Twitter-like service, claiming that Lou Xiaoying, her adoptive mother, had died.

The worry was understandable, for Lou, 88, has been hailed a hero in China for reportedly saving more than 30 abandoned babies from trash cans and dumps over the past four decades.

Lou is suffering from kidney disease in the hospital, but, according to her daughter, she's still alive.

"My mother has gotten better,” Zhang, 33, reported. “The hospital has spared us much expense. They have also minimized the kinds of medicines that my mom has to use. Money collected from donations has helped us a lot, too."

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Helping others
Lou, who was born in 1924 in Fujian Province, collected and recycled garbage to make a living. She and her husband, who died 17 years ago, had two biological children, a daughter and a son. 

Over the years of scavenging, Lou found 30 children who had been abandoned, mostly as a result of China’s strict one-child policy. She and her husband adopted three daughters while the remaining children, mostly girls, were passed to other people to start new lives.

According to an article in Britain’s Daily Mail, Lou found her first abandoned child, a girl, when she was out collecting garbage in 1972. 

“She was just lying amongst the junk on the street, abandoned. She would have died had we not rescued her and taken her in,” she said, according to the Daily Mail report. “I realized if we had strength enough to collect garbage, how could we not recycle something as important as human lives?”

“These children need love and care. They are all precious human lives,” she added. “I do not understand how people can leave such a vulnerable baby on the streets.”

Zhang told NBC News that "at one point, there were 12 members in the family” living in a deserted temple on the outskirts of the city of Jinhua, about 200 miles south of Shanghai. "It wasn't until 1987 when they were building a railway and wanted to remove our temple, did [authorities] find out about our family,” she added.

The family’s future was complicated by the rigid household registration system designed to control the movement of China’s 1.3 billion people. Known in Chinese as hukou, the central government classifies people as either city dwellers or rural peasants, which determines not only a citizen’s residence but also what kind of social services and schools they are eligible for.

Because they were living “off the grid,” none of Lou’s adopted children had a hukou. But Zhang said that people in the area soon heard about the family and help came along.

"There were some communal donations which helped two of us adopted ones go to school. But my oldest adopted sister, who is now 40, has never gone to school,” said Zhang.  

Even in old age, Lou kept going out to collect trash several times a day. In 2007, Lou discovered a boy, Zhang Qilin, in a dumpster. She adopted the boy, who is now 7, as her grandson; his adoptive father is Lou’s biological son. 

The youngster encountered the same problem of not having a hukou. But after a series of reports about Lou in the local Jinhua Daily, followed by other reports in the Chinese and international press, Zhang was granted permission to attend a public school called Jindong District Experimental School in Jinhua. In addition, his hukou registration process is now under way.   

‘Grandma Lou deserves her dreams to be fulfilled’
Fang Qing, the principal of the public school, spoke with NBC News about Lou’s youngest adoptee.

“I take for granted that every child in China has a right to education, no matter what his background is like,” Fang said, adding that the school would keep a special eye on Zhang Qilin.

“Grandma Lou deserves her dreams to be fulfilled. Good people should be rewarded with good,” Fang said.

Many netizens have chimed in on Weibo about Lou’s heroism.

“What would the world be like if only we have a few more people like Grandma Lou. I respect you, Grandma,” wrote one user.

Lou’s concern for others lives on in her daughter, Zhang, who agreed to be interviewed as long as no foreign donation appeal would be made through NBC.

“We are not in a very positive position financially,” she said, “but neither do we lack money now for my mother’s medical treatments. … We are very grateful, but we are doing fine now.”

Asked if she has ever thought about finding her biological parents, Zhang answered “No” resolutely. “She has always been my mother.”

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An elderly Spanish nun appeared in court on Thursday to face charges of stealing babies, after claims by hundreds of women that their infants were taken from them at birth and given away in illegal adoptions.

Doctors, nurses and religious workers at several clinics and hospitals in Spain are alleged to have sold babies for adoption over decades, after telling new mothers that their infants had died.

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At the hearing at Madrid's Superior Tribunal of Justice, Maria Gomez Valbuena, a Sisters of Charity nun now in her 80s who once worked in the Santa Cristina hospital in Madrid, became the first person accused in the widening scandal.

Clad in a dark habit, she was questioned by a judge but invoked her right not to testify.

The formal charges against her are of illegal detention and falsifying documents in a case dating from the early 1980s.

A crowd of mothers who say they were robbed of their babies shouted "shameless" at the grim-faced nun as she was escorted out of the court through a throng of journalists to a car.

An association of parents and families, Anadir, has presented more than 900 lawsuits alleging child-stealing. Most have been thrown out due to lack of evidence.

Many mothers say they were told by health or religious workers their babies had died at birth or shortly after, but were neither shown a body nor given a proper death certificate.

Anadir says the practice began in the 1940s when, in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, the fascist government stole babies from political prisoners from the defeated Republican side.

In subsequent decades it became a money-making racket, the victims claim. Parents who wanted to adopt babies were often referred to clinics that were known for finding babies for desperate families.

Many of the mothers have said they believe their babies were taken due to a mistaken paternalism on the part of the doctors or religious workers who may have seen them as unfit mothers because they were young, poor or unmarried.

One mother testified in court last week that Gomez Valbuena had told her she could be jailed for adultery. The nun threatened to take her baby away and give it to another family, and later said the baby had died.

The mother, Maria Luisa Torres, has been able to prove through DNA tests the baby she was told had died 30 years ago is alive after being adopted by another family.

"I only hope there will be justice after so much suffering," Torres said last week after testifying in court.

Many other mothers have found it impossible to track down babies they believe would now be adults, since the birth records, death certificates and adoption papers were falsified, according to Anadir and to the Madrid prosecutor.

Alleged victims say they need help from authorities in unearthing evidence of their claims from graveyards and public registries.

"The government will not fail in its duty. We share the pain of the victims and we will go as far as we can," said Justice Minister Alberto Ruiz-Gallardon after meeting representatives of associations representing people who say their babies were stolen.

The Ministry of Justice says it will gather the facts about all of the different claims to be able to investigate them more systematically, and will also handle the results of DNA tests.

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Dr. Catalin Cirstoveanu runs a cardio unit with state-of-the-art equipment at a Bucharest children's hospital. But not a single child has been treated in the year-and-a-half since it opened.

The reason?

Medical staff he needs to bring in to run the machinery would have expected bribes.

So Cirstoveanu has launched a lonely crusade to save babies who come to him for care: He flies them to Western Europe on budget flights so they can be treated by doctors who don't demand kickbacks.

That's what Cirstoveanu did last week for 13-day-old Catalin, who needed heart surgery. Cirstoveanu packed a small bag, slipped emergency breathing equipment into the baby carrier and caught a cheap flight to Italy, where doctors were waiting to perform the surgery.

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The operation was successful. Two days later, though, a 3-week-old baby that Cirstoveanu whisked away to the same clinic in northwestern Italy — with tubes piercing her tiny frame — died before she was able to have lymph gland surgery.

"I was very worried it wouldn't work," said Cirstoveanu. "But in Romania, she would have died anyway."

The soft-spoken Cirstoveanu is fighting an exhausting and largely solitary battle against a culture of corruption that's so embedded in Romania that surgeons demand bribes to save infants' lives and it's even necessary to slip cash to a nurse to get your sheets changed.

It's one of the reasons why the country's infant mortality rate is more than double the European Union average, with one in 100 children not reaching their first birthday.

"To be honest, it's so deeply rooted into our system that it's really difficult to eliminate," Health Minister Ladislau Ritli said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Officially, the new cardio unit that Cirstoveanu runs at the Marie Curie children's hospital isn't functioning because jobs have not been filled. The real reason appears to be that Cirstoveanu has banned staff from taking bribes. That means that high-tech machinery lies idle because qualified experts do not bother to apply for jobs, as they know they cannot supplement their incomes with bribes.

The zero-tolerance policy to corruption makes for a grueling work schedule for Cirstoveanu, who needs to shuttle babies abroad for surgery — and take care of them on the flight. During the two-hour flight with the girl who died, Cirstoveanu fixed tubes, sedated her and hand-pumped oxygen to keep her alive.

In the less than 24 hours Cirstoveanu had in Bucharest between returning from Catalin's trip and departing with the little girl, he even squeezed in a shift at the Marie Curie clinic.

Endemic corruption
Patients in Romania routinely discuss the "stock market" rate for bribes. Surgeons can get hundreds of dollars and upward for an operation, while anesthetists get roughly a third of that, depending also on what a patient can afford. Nurses receive a few dollars from patients each time they administer medications or put in drips. Getting a certificate stamped to have an operation abroad can easily cost hundreds, if not thousands of dollars if you ask the wrong doctor.

While the Romanian state appears unwilling to do anything, it often ends up footing the bill.

At the Marie Curie unit, Catalin's operation would have cost $2,700 to $4,000 without bribes. Romanian state health insurance is paying 10 times that for his operation in Italy — a small fortune in a country where the average monthly salary is about $460 after tax.

Many disillusioned doctors have abandoned the country, which spends just 4 percent of its gross domestic product in health care — about half of the percentage of GDP spent by Western European countries.

Last year, some 2,800 Romanian doctors — discouraged by the antiquated and corrupt health system and low wages — left to work in Western Europe, according to the Romanian College of Doctors.

"Ideally, we would have decent salaries and nobody would be tempted to accept informal payments," said the Ritli, the health minister. "And the population would be educated so people would believe that this is not the only way to get proper health care."

Bribes across Romania accounted for some $1 million a day in 2005, according to a World Bank report; more recent estimates are not available. The culture of bribes — or "informal payments" as they're commonly known — is tacitly accepted.

But anger is rising. One of Marie Curie's donors, Procter & Gamble, has several times gone back to the hospital and the Health Ministry to ask questions about when the unit will start functioning.

The tragic plight of Romanian children is nothing new.

Communist legacy
In a misguided effort to boost Romania's then-population of 23 million, Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu banned birth control and abortion, which led to thousands of infants being left in orphanages in harrowing conditions broadcast around the world after his execution in 1989.

Nearly a quarter-century later, the country's shortcomings are again being seen through the gaze of children and powerless parents trapped in a web of corruption.

For those whose children die shortly after birth, grief is magnified when they do not receive a birth certificate or even see their babies alive. Angela Vasile, whose baby daughter, Cristina, only lived one day, saw her infant just once after she'd died, lying on a metal table.

She was then put in a ward of nursing mothers, adding to her anguish.

Bianca Brad, a Romanian celebrity, spoke out publicly about the pain of losing her baby at birth — calling the situation "criminal." She founded the "EMMA Association" to help grieving parents, offering support for those who do not receive psychological counseling and remain locked in years of grief.

Yet remarkable things are happening at the Marie Curie Hospital. Cirstoveanu is personally overseeing the survival of Baby Andrei, an 8-month-old Roma baby born to underage parents. His intestines are almost nonexistent.

The tiny infant who weighs about 4.4 pounds with limbs that look like gnarled twigs was given only days to live. His bright eyes, alert gaze and lively personality have endeared him to all staff who comfort him in their arms as much as they can outside of his incubator.

Andrei can only have lifesaving surgery in the United States — and a fee of hundreds of thousands of dollars is proving prohibitive. Nurses are so fond of the bright boy that they are playing the state lottery in an attempt to raise funds for his surgery.

Even in this grim setting, there are signs that doctors are mobilizing in a bid to make things better.

Anca Mandache, a child heart surgeon, left her career in France to offer her services to the Marie Curie hospital, taking a salary one tenth of what she would have earned there. Others also are expressing an interest in working at the clinic

Cirstoveanu, who also flies sick babies to Germany and Austria, says he feels "ashamed" that he has to go to the lengths he does to save children, but talks with pride of the moment he sees the joy of relieved parents whose babies survive.

They are in awe of his dedication.

"Cirstoveanu is more than a hero — he is a god for us and the children," said Gheorghe Meliusoiu, Catalin's 28-year-old woodcutter father. "If there were more like him, many lives would be saved."

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