In Lebanon, Ramadan Brings New Hope for Orphans : Mideast: An annual fund-raiser coincides with the holy month. Its stars are the poster children whose faces capture the hearts of thousands.

Eleven-month-old Asma Ahd Duaah has no idea that her picture has captured the hearts of thousands of people in Beirut.

The auburn-haired child, shown with eyes still misty from crying, seeks comfort from her thumb. Her long eyelashes frame the dark eyes that look upward toward a mother who isn’t there.

Asma and five other Lebanese children are poster kids for Social Welfare Institutions in Lebanon (SWI), the largest organization of its kind in the Arab world. Established in 1917, it has 13 specialized branches but is best known for the Islamic Orphanage in Beirut.

The SWI holds its annual fund-raising campaign during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, which began in mid-March this year. The use of poster children dates to 1967, and the professionally done portraits have become a familiar sight here during Ramadan. More than a third of SWI’s $3-million annual budget will be collected during this month of Muslim fasting and giving to the poor.

Asma arrived at the orphanage after her parents divorced. Each parent took two of their children. But the mother, who lives in south Lebanon, had a poorly paying job and could not support Asma and her sister.

Of the 4,000 children cared for at the orphanage, the majority, like Asma, are from broken homes or have only one parent.

Poster child Manahel, a 7-year-old girl from north Lebanon, has both parents. But the father is old and does not work. The family lives in an area far from a school, and the parents opted to send their two youngest children to the orphanage in Beirut, where their education would be guaranteed.

The poverty level at which Manahel’s family lives has rendered the children economic orphans.

Shadi, a 10-year-old whose poster shows him playing in a field of yellow daisies, lost his mother a month after his birth. The father, unable to cope, brought the boy to the orphanage.

Like most of the families, Shadi’s father visits his child regularly. But for all the families, an added joy has been seeing their son’s or daughter’s poster everywhere from shop windows to billboards.

The children themselves are delighted with the fame. Shadi at first refused to believe it was him. Manahel was so pleased she took the poster to her family on a recent vacation. “Now it’s hanging in my house,” she said proudly. Asma’s mother, who visits when she can, took a poster with her.

Children who have lost both parents are, according to Muslim law, legally under the care of the next of kin and therefore not orphans in the Western sense of the word.

Orphanage Director Nahida Thahabi said Lebanon’s 15-year civil war “greatly increased the number of social cases we see.”

In 1975, the year the war began, the orphanage had 800 children. Today, the staff cares for 4,000, most of them social or economic cases.

The 5% who have no acknowledged families whatsoever are foundlings, abandoned by their unwed mothers or rejected by parents because they are physically or mentally handicapped.

“Sometimes the babies are left in the garbage, sometimes put on our doorstep,” a SWI social worker said. She tells of a newborn found in February, 1990, in a pile of garbage. Scratched over her entire body by either a cat or a rat, the baby spent two months in the hospital before she was well enough to go to the orphanage.

Thirteen such babies were found in 1990.

Although Islam forbids adoption, the orphanage’s concern for these foundlings and their future won them a fatwa , or religious ruling. A practice, called takefful , or guardianship, allows a childless Muslim couple to “adopt” an abandoned child by claiming in front of a Muslim court that the child is in fact theirs.

Thousands of children have grown up in the Islamic Orphanage through the years. And every year a reunion is held at the end of Ramadan. The “graduates” of the orphanage and its vocational schools who still live in Beirut will lunch together in a room that no doubt displays at least one of little Asma’s eye-catching posters.