Day 11 – New Orphanage – Part 2

The director smiled and led us to the front door of the administrative building. On the front entrance was a big lighted screen lit up with the colorful message – “Welcome Sophie QinXin Rubin!”. As we got out of the car, I heard music playing softly on outdoor loudspeakers. It was Kenny G, the alto sax ‘smooth jazz’ musician.

QinXin is the name Sophie was given in the orphanage when she was a foundling infant there. It means “Musical Heart” or “Music Love”. She was given this name long before she was matched with our family. We are pretty sure she was matched with us because our family portrait photo that we sent with our adoption application, showed us around the piano. We are a musical family. We kept her Chinese name, as her middle name. When she arrived, they called her by her Chinese name. “Chin Shin” is the very rough pronunciation. They said her name with tenderness and familiarity.

Director Wu led us into the building, which was very chilly. He was just beaming. It was obvious that they were thrilled that she had returned to them, and then several others came to greet us. One of them was the director of the children’s department, a woman named Director Xui. She had been a nanny when Sophie was an infant. She put on a coat like a doctor’s lab coat, but it was pink. They wanted to give us tea and show us Sophie’s file, but Sophie asked “Can I see the children first?”  So they took us across the driveway to another building where the children stayed.

During the time that Sophie was found and brought to the orphanage, they had 150 to 300 abandoned children arrive per year. This was during the One Child Policy, when rural families might make the difficult choice to keep the boy, but not the girl. It is against the law to abandon a baby, but it was also against the law to have a 2^nd child. So, Sophie was abandoned at 2 days old, but she was left in a place where she would be found. We don’t expect to ever know anything about her biological parents.

Now they have about 35 children abandoned in the area in the last year. In the larger area, of the 50 children abandoned, only 2 were healthy. The rest are Special Needs which means they are mentally and/or physically disabled. So we were reminded as we entered the children’s building, that the kids were all special needs. We asked if we could take pictures, and at first they said no. They did allow us to take photos of empty hallways which had happy cartoon characters painted on the walls. The hallways were cold, but the individual rooms were warm. We heard the laughter of small children down the hall.

We entered a room with a group of young children. They looked to be from 8 or 10 months old, to 3 or 4 years old. It was lunchtime and several nannies were feeding the toddlers, spooning a rice stew into the enthusiastic mouths. A baby sat in a walker, and we asked if Sophie could help by feeding this baby. She spooned the food into the baby’s mouth until the baby suddenly realized we were strangers, and began to cry. As the kids quickly ate up the rest of the lunch, we peered down a short hallway and saw many small cribs all lined up in a room. We walked into the sleeping room, and I said “This is the kind of room you slept in as a baby.” Sometimes they will put 2 babies to a crib, but they assured us that each child had their own crib.

Then we saw a little hand reaching out from under the covers in one crib. “Oh you missed feeding someone!” Sophie cried out. “Can we say hello to this one?” Sophie walked up to the crib, and then saw the smiling gentle face of a little boy. She spoke to him in English, and he replied softly in Mandarin. She held his little hand and they smiled at each other. They told us they had to feed him later because he can’t walk or get out of bed.

“Can I hold him?” The covers were peeled back and this small boy was placed in her arms. I would guess he was 5, but he was about the size of a 3 year old. As Sophie held him and hugged him close, I suggested she give him a kiss on the cheek to see what would happen. We had discussed earlier that these kids are mostly starved for attention. There was an explosion of happiness, and the boy showered Sophie’s face with kisses and smiled with total joy. Sophie hugged him tighter, and her eyes filled with tears. She held him like that for a long time, but finally they said she needed to put him back down in the crib and say goodbye. It was a long goodbye. They propped him up with pillows so he was sort of sitting up. She held his hand, said goodbye, walked across the room to me, and fell weeping into my arms. We hugged, I stroked her hair, and we walked into the next room.

In these rooms, we were told we could not take photos of the children. After Sophie played with and held the children, she begged them to let her have photos so she could remember the children. They allowed us to take a few photos of Sophie holding the children, as long as the faces were not shown. They said this was to protect the privacy of the children.

In this next room, they warned us, were the very ill children. Some were hooked up to feeding tubes and oxygen. Some were emaciated and pale, breathing shallow, with glassy eyes.

There was one toddler who looked a little healthier, who was not hooked up to anything. They asked if she wanted to hold him. He was wrapped up in a blanket and was tiny like a little fragile bird. Sophie held him very close to her face, and gazed into his eyes. Director Xiu put her arm around Sophie and quietly stroked the toddler’s face. Then they put him back in the crib very carefully. Sophie held one more baby, a chubby boy just under a year old. We couldn’t see anything wrong with him, so we wondered what was his special need.

As we left we saw two children in low chairs with trays. They and some other children in the room had obvious physical disabilities. Many people would turn away from such children, because it is hard for some people to really look at these children, and to really see them. They were the children that nobody wanted, but the nannies hugged them, fed them, stroked their faces and played with them with smiles and gentle hugs. It was the first time Sophie had seen anything like this, and I knew what she must be thinking. Who would love these children? What would happen to them?

(continued, Part 3.)

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