In the later part of October this year, Xiang Xin Zhen, the new director of the Hengdong SWI, reported that he and his staff had packed up the children remaining in the old, crumbling orphanage building and transported them a short distance to a new home, a just completed (although long awaited) modern, multi-story facility.
The new orphanage is said to be built to house children on its ground and upper floors. On the floors in between a variety of administrative social welfare offices are planned as well as a "recovery center" health care unit for children newly accepted at the orphanage and for seniors. The seniors, most of them military veterans, would still be housed in the old building.
Foreign parents who adopted Hengdong children contributed to the new orphanage by raising funds for new cribs, two furnished activity rooms, and furnishings for a kitchen and dining area. This effort was called the Hengdong Charity Fund. Now that the building is complete there is some comfort in the knowledge that children there will no longer be housed under conditions acknowledged as substandard even in mostly rural, south central China.
Still, an open question is how exactly will this large new facility be used? In January 2007 ophanage officials reported that the number of children housed at the Hengdong SWI had dropped from 70 to 55; in April the number dropped to 30 children; in September to 15. The latest report indicated there were only ten children still housed there.
And questions will remain about the old orphanage and exactly where all its children came from during its peak adoption years before the unsettling discovery that some had been purchased; originally abandoned, as reports have indicated, but acquired far away in another province. In any event, it's probably safe to say that winding up somehow at the Hengdong SWI was hardly a secure end in itself.
Almost everything about the Hengdong SWI has always seemed to me contradictory. Early on, former director Chen Ming and his staff appeared genuinely kind both at first during our adoption trip and later when I visited the orphanage. But in our family we had immediately noticed things about this daughter that made us really wonder about what she had gone through under their care. After all, it had been the photos from the disposable camera we'd sent in advance of our adoption trip that originally helped convince me to try to return to see this orphanage first hand. Several of those photos were so grim and the children in them so unhappy that some scenes bordered on being offensive. One typically odd-angled picture showed our Clara-Li holding a wadded up diaper in front of a room full of crying children in walkers. Tears were streaming down and the frustrated, frightened look on her face was heart breaking. I've often wondered who had been given the chore of taking those photos and more so why on earth would the orphanage staff give them to us as they were.
Undoubtedly these are children who needed a lot of hope, love and help.
But time heals. Clara-Li and I went through a stage a while ago when we would regularly go "fishing" at home by our swimming pool after dinner. We would just sit close together and quietly dangle our feet lazily over the side while holding onto our fish poles with our lines in the water. I know the look she would give me as we reeled in occasionally to see if we'd caught a fish is a pretty strong indicator that eventually we're going to be able to talk over pretty much anything. I'll tell her everything I know about Hengdong when she thinks she's ready, but I suspect they'll be a lot of other things she and I will be interested in too.
I suppose a reader might wonder whether this writer and his family would still adopt a child through China's foreign adoption program. Today we know that children continue to be abandoned routinely in China but for a mix of reasons fewer children are finding their way to orphanages in some provinces. Moreover, in this changing landscape many Chinese families and long lines of foreign families from throughout the world now want to formally adopt the healthy children housed in these state controlled facilities.
Still, thousands of children in orphanages who have birth defects, medical issues, or who are beyond the common age for adoption will not so easily find families. So we will soon return to China for a "waiting child," one already identified as having special medical needs and our third adoption.
The first time I visited a Chinese orphanage I was profoundly affected by how here in the United States the discovery of an abandoned child is a major news event and yet in developing China child abandonment is quietly matter-of-fact. Of course there are American families who also struggle to get by and about 500,000 U.S. children in foster care, including those in temporary care. But the 143 million orphaned or abandoned children in the developing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America seem to me apples to oranges and each time I've visited a Chinese orphanage, I've found myself at one point or another hovering over a very sick or malformed child in a rickety crib and promising that I would be back, maybe not soon enough for that particular child, or realistically probably not even to the same orphanage. But if I had the means to someday return for a child with special needs, I've known that I should. It's not necessarily something I believe everyone should do since not everyone is cut out for this form of parenting. But in this family we have somehow, happily, become this way.
So, next stop for us: northwest China, Gansu Province.
China's waiting child program, managed through its China Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA), seeks to find homes internationally for orphaned or abandoned children with the types of special needs that might otherwise make finding a family highly unlikely. These can include treatable medical issues such as congenital heart disease, Hepatitis B, cleft anomalies, or spina bifuda. Some waiting children have more severe issues. Older children not placed through the CCAA's regular foreign adoption program are sometimes also referred to the waiting child program. Not all children in the waiting child program find homes.
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