Bridget McCain's Bangladesh orphanage revealed

Dhaka, Sept.8 : The location of the orphanage in Bangladesh from where Republican presidential nominee John McCain's stepdaughter, Bridget, was taken has been revealed.

McCain and his wife adopted Bridget as their daughter 17 years ago from a Dhaka orphanage.

She was then a desperately ill baby girl after a cyclone struck Bangladesh in 1991, the Sunday Telegraph reveals.

The paper quotes Sister Olivet of the Sisters of Charity of Mother Teresa Children's Home here, as saying: "When she arrived here she became the child of God. So this must be what God wanted her to be. It just happened for this lucky child."

The orphanage, its walls adorned with fading pictures of babies, photographs of Mother Teresa and images of Christ and Mary, rings to the cries and gurgling laughter of nearly 30 babies and toddlers.

Neat blue baskets, quilted with bright blankets, lie in rows for the smallest babies, while the older ones - up to two years of age - bounce up and down in metal-sided cots.

In another ward, about 15 mentally handicapped children play with the few local women who come to help the nuns.

The nuns at the orphanage, who gave up their family names long ago and are now simply known as sister, work for two or three years at a time in different homes run by the charity around South Asia.

If the babies are not adopted before they reach the age of four, they are given up to other orphanages.

McCain's wife, Cindy, brought Bridget and another little girl, Nikki, back to the US after seeing them in the orphanage.

Nikki was later adopted by one of McCain's aides, Wes Gullett.

Both girls needed urgent treatment for life-threatening conditions and their chances had looked bleak if they remained in Bangladesh, where more than half the population lives on less than 50p a day.

Despite the worldly success enjoyed by Bridget McCain and Nikki Gullett, however, the Bangladeshi government has moved to prevent more young children being given up to adoption by foreign parents.

Now only foreigners married to a Bangladeshi citizen are eligible to adopt in the country.

ANI