The Starfish Story features Amanda de Lange, a native of South Africa, who dreamed of starting a foster home for special needs children in China. But she didn’t think it would ever happen.
After teaching in Xi’an, China for a year or so, she accepted a lucrative teaching position in Korea. At the same time she was making plans to go to Korea, the Chinese government extended the opportunity for her to take special needs children from the state orphanage in Xi’an and establish a foster home.
She plunged into the project with all of her energetic soul, using her own savings to establish a non-profit foster home called Starfish.
After several years of hard work, she was presented with the BYU Alumni Service to Family Award in 2009. It marked a significant milestone in her career. One of her first foster babies, who was then five or six years old, attended the luncheon honoring the award recipients – a live illustration of how Amanda’s hard work had paid off.
Amanda passed away in 2012 of cancer. This video is an example of how we captured an important moment of her life story. It has aired on BYU-TV many times.