Quan Shiyi, a volunteer of Beijing, China, is caring for a one-year-and-half-old orphan suffering from a life-threatening congenital heart defect.

Gretel, her English name, is 26 years old and unmarried, and had never looked after a baby, even not changed a diaper.

But all that changed in 2009 when she met Qian Baoxin at an orphanage in Beijing, where Gretel volunteered as a translator. There, she learned the meaning of motherhood.

Due to his disease, Qian's lips, tongue, fingertips and toes were all purple from lack of oxygen in his blood, and he struggled to move about. A healthy child of his age would already be learning to walk.

Doctors were unable to perform the delicate operation to the baby's heart in China, and Gretel believes officials of the orphanage were resigned to Qian's worsening situation.

But little Qian is lucky, as the Israeli Embassy in Beijing has arranged for medical treatment for 18 Chinese orphans suffering different diseases, as part of the activities to commemorate the 18th anniversary this year of the establishment of Israel-China diplomatic ties, and Qian is among them and the only one to be flown to Israel to receive a heart operation.

From translator to 'Mama China'

"Originally, an American volunteer was supposed to come with the baby, but the Israeli Embassy said 'we want a Chinese person to go,'" Gretel told Xinhua on Wednesday.

Citing her lack of childcare experience, she at first refused the orphanage's request to make the critical journey with Qian. But the orphanage trusted her, she said, and soon convinced her to become the toddler's court-ordered guardian and accompany Qian on the trip.

On March 6, the pair arrived at the Wolfson Medical Center in Holon, near Tel Aviv, for the operation. It would be performed by doctors and staff from the Israel-based Save A Child's Heart (SACH) organization, who hosted them.

SACH has treated more than 2,300 children from over 30 countries, as well as Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, since its inception in 1995.

While Gretel and Qian are far from home - neither of them has ever traveled outside of China - they are far from alone.

There, Gretel had become so close to Qian that hospital staff came to call her "Mama China," because of how she lovingly tended him as they adjusted to the medical routine.

Gretel and Qian fitted right in. "Little by little, people started to call me 'mommy,' and think that I'm his mommy," Gretel says of the staff and parents, "and I've started to change."

One day at the hospital, she caught a glance of herself in a mirror and said to herself, "you look much older because you're a mom now."