(click the image to see a three-part slide show)

Alameda hosted its 14th Relay for Life on Saturday and Sunday, with 400 people on 26 teams walking the track at Encinal High School for 24 hours.

The Alameda Relay’s goal was to raise $130,000 in the event to go toward research, education and support of local services, such as driving cancer patients to therapy.

The relay included the first lap dedicated to survivors, and a luminaria ceremony, with candles in sand lining the track to light the way for walkers through the night to dedicated to loved ones who have had cancer.

This year’s theme was “Celebrate, Remember, Fight back.”

“Survivors celebrate that they made it through the treatment. And of course they remember the friends they’ve lost. And we encourage everyone to fight back,” said Emilia Stephens, the Relay’s team captain coordinator.

Production notes: I used the pre-built Soundslides stage for the first time on this project. In the past, I’ve coded a simple HTML page linking to multiple slide shows. This tool made connecting threads of a non-linear story simpler.

Most of the photos are mine, except in the last slide show, Requiem. For that one, I used photos gathered in a Flickr Group I set up for this event. Approval came at the last minute, so participation was low, but I think it’s an effective way to bring people into the story. Reactions to the idea were universally positive.

David DeGeest and Lonnie B. Hodge (aka One Man Bandwidth) somehow landed this job. Theirs is the China Dream Blogue (like travelogue, get it?), and the project aims to raise money for two charities through ad revenue and help deserving people make good one their own best hopes. The pair stopped by Dalian last weekend, and I grabbed them for some barbecue and brought the video camera. Here’s how they explain the project:

The two charities directly involved are Tom Stader’s Library Project and the Reading Tub, run by Terry Dougherty.

Now, I’m a little skeptical of the amount of cash a blog can bring in. I know there are those that make heaps, but there are mountains more that don’t. So I gave Tom a buzz, and he’s optimistic. Even if it just brings his cause more attention, that can translate into money or volunteers or more opportunities. “I have had good luck with getting donations from blogs,” Tom said. “I received one US$300 donation from Lonnie’s previous blog.”

Three hundred dollars built Tom’s first two libraries. Both are in Dalian, and I watched each be hammered together by energetic volunteer teachers who were already thinking of ways to expand the project. Tom’s planning to be back in Dalian next month, so I’ll get a progress report then.

It’s a peculiar sort of family, especially in a country entering its second generation of only children. There is talk of bright futures, and no mention of the past. For most who live in this orphanage, it’s the happiest, most normal, and possibly the only family they have ever known.

Lin began taking in orphans in 1995, drawing on her own experience as a foster child and a wellspring of optimism that comes from somewhere else entirely.

The facility is a 20-minute taxi ride out to the edge of Dalian, an upwardly mobile port city in China’s otherwise sagging northeast. The square building is unremarkable from the outside. There’s a small playground at one end of the driveway and a view of Dalian’s massive shipyards at the other. It could be a strange place to grow up, but so little is conventional in this family it becomes difficult to define what is out of place.

Some children find their way here through government orphanages or other temporary arrangements. Sometimes the police bring in those they find wandering alone in the city who have no place else to go. Many are abandoned by their parents, or their parents are dead.

“We can imagine they walked along the street, so they feel very lonely. Because they are young, still children, they are quick to adapt to the new environment,” Lin says. In one or two months, they’re like normal kids, she insists.

One 17-year-old who goes by the English name Michelle was studying alone on a recent Saturday afternoon, a neat pile of books in front of her and a notebook filled with English phrases under her nose. She has lived under Lin’s roof for a decade. Like the other children, she uses Sha as a surname, after Lin’s son-in-law who she calls “Baba,” or “Father.”

Michelle wants to study in Australia “because it’s beautiful” and be a nurse someday. “My grandma thinks my English is poor,” Michelle whispers after Lin pokes her head in the door, reminding her to study, as if the veritable library covering the desk could let her forget. Really, she speaks quite well, her discipline shows and she grins at an encouraging word from a native English speaker.

The smile melts, though, when she is asked about the past. Her comfortable grin and bright eyes seem to go gray, droop like wax in the sun when there is mention of what her life was like before she came here.

“Because I was a child, so I don’t remember,” is all she’ll say. She changes the subject and perks up again, but the shadow on her face lingers.

It’s the same with Shirley, a 19-year-old in the house. She is focused on vocational school, studies English and wants to be tour guide in Dalian. It’s a promising profession in a city that many hold up as China’s shining example of possibilities. But like Michelle, Shirley doesn’t talk about the past:

“Before here, I don’t know,” she says, turning her eyes to the floor. “At that time, I was very small.”

At this point, Lin steps in and stops any more questioning in that vein.

“It is best not to ask about the past, because they are still children,” she says, glaring a bit at the reporter across the table. “If you ask too much about the past, she may cry. Their hearts are tender. The girl upstairs (Michelle) was about to shed tears just now.”

She reminds her guests that journalists don’t often get to talk to her children. It’s a clear warning about what’s off limits.

“This is no need to mention the past. Right now, they live happily here, and things are OK.”

The prohibition applies to Lin’s past, as well. “At that time, it was a hard time for China,” she says. “China wasn’t modern like now.”

Lin was born in coastal Yantai, the second of eight children, when the People’s Republic was also in its infancy. Her parents sent her away when she was a year old. She doesn’t talk about where she lived or the “others” who took care of her. Only her father worked, and her parents didn’t have enough money, she explains now. She returned to her family 15 years later. “It was very hard,” is all she told her mother at the time.

It was those hidden memories that she says spawned a desire to help Dalian’s orphans back in 1995. She was married, then, and working in one of this consumer-driven city’s shopping centers. Her husband didn’t take to the idea, though, and the couple divorced.

“I didn’t know anything about how to run an orphanage,” she recalls 12 years later, laughing to herself a bit at those early memories. “Everyone has a loving heart,” she adds, when asked why she made the orphanage her life’s work.

Jin Meiling oversees the children’s education and helps run the facility. She comes across as less sentimental and more direct than Lin, but no less dedicated or protective.

She offered one clue about what Lin might not want brought up. Pointing to a girl’s picture, one of many in the entryway, the administrator said: “When she came here, she did not look like a person. She had many secret scars on her body.” Jin didn’t elaborate but said the girl studied cosmetics and then baking, and she holds a steady job now.

The oldest of Lin’s foster grandchildren still living there is 21. He works as a mechanic, but he doesn’t want to leave. “This is their home,” Jin says. “They’re afraid of going into society.”

The orphanage is a private enterprise, entirely Lin’s. Her funding comes from a side business recycling scrap metal and from gifts from wealthy Chinese benefactors. A few others pitch in where they can.

On the day Lin hosted a reporter, interpreter and photographer, a quartet of Pakistani medical students arrived with piles of donated clothes. On the building’s second floor, a spacious room now functions as a classroom and library.

Foreign teachers from the Future School chain of language academies spend their off-time here, teaching English to children who likely could never private school tuition. Some of those teachers became so attached to the place and the woman who runs it that they came back and built the library.

The battered books on the new shelves came from children at Future School who, hearing stories about kids who had no parents, donated around 3600 paperbacks, coloring books, comics and textbooks to the library project.

“Originally we thought we’d just fill their bookshelves, but we got way more books than would fit,” says Adam Godwin, one of the Future School managers involved in the effort. “The idea isn’t just to give books, but to give a space where kids can grown on their own, just a nice little area.”

Back in Lin’s office, Mao’s smiling portrait looks down at the desk adorned with old propaganda posters. The whole room seems anachronistic in Dalian, a place built far more on Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms in the 1980s than Mao Zedong’s revolutionary ideals of the previous generation. Indeed, much of the country seems to be forgetting the Great Helmsman these days, much to Lin’s lament.

“Nowadays, there are less and less in the government like him,” she says, calling Mao a “selfless person.”

The heroic pictures of the Chairman and his premier, Zhou Enlai, diligently planning in their matching drab suits are relics of a troubled Chinese past that, like Lin’s and her children’s, is rarely spoken about openly. The future is brighter, though, and Lin is happy to look in that direction.