Frank and I took a soft-seater express train due west from Beijing to Hangdan—about a 4-hour ride going exactly 137 km/h, according to our ticket, and from there were picked up by two nuns from a convent to drive another 1½ hours to a mere village—-population 700,000--called DaMing. Don't bother with maps. I can't find it even in the smallest print on our huge wall map of China.
Our group from Beijing included me, Frank, Keith–-a fellow American whom I've known since 2002 who has a whole story of his own of how he and his family came to China and what they're doing here, two French ladies--one of which has lived in Beijing for more than ten years, a Chinese-American woman from Houston who was our 'Catholic connection' with this diocese, and a young Chinese man who is a tour guide for parents who have adopted little girls from China who want to bring their daughters back to experience her roots and homeland.
When the nun in our car announced, "Dao le" ("We're here"), I peered out the window to see a run-down, poorly-masoned brick complex with a high wall built around the it and broken bottle glass shards on top of the wall to, I suppose, keep things/people/animals either in or out. Once inside the complex, it was hard for my eyes not to go straight to the huge coal pile in the middle of the yard. I'm not good with guessing measurements, but it took up as much space as, say, a cozy apartment in NYC. It had been dumped there the previous week by the local boiler repair company. Even with all this coal on hand, these huge rubble chunks still would only last them till the beginning of 2006 or so.
That was one of the two reasons our team came—-to help get the boiler fixed. Before coming, I had a vague notion of what a boiler looked like, but this one looked like it should be on display in the Smithsonian as the first model ever created. It was tall and rusty… and broken. Large-machine repairwork is not my best subject, so I was glad that some others came prepared, not to fix it themselves, but had done enough research (including studying the corresponding Chinese translations) to be able to sit down with the local boiler company and have heated discussions (no pun intended) on how to go about heating the orphanage throughout the coming 15 winters so as to never have another child have body parts amputated due to frostbite during his/her sleep again.
Last winter on one especially cold night, the window to one of the children's bedrooms was left cracked open, and one girl consequently had to have both her feet amputated. She already had shown signs of poor circulation, but getting frostbitten was the final straw. Once Keith saw her, he was moved to take her home to his family's foster home right outside of Beijing for a few weeks during the rest of the winter. Keith and his wife helped get her fitted for crutches and prosthetic feet, something not so easy to get, even in China's capital city. Even though they're hard to come by, they still come cheap (it's China—the world's factory) at $100 American dollars a set. Now she's back at the orphanage going wherever she so pleases.
This was my first time to step on the grounds of a real orphanage before in any country. I've been to a few large foster homes and technical training schools for orphans, but never a bona fide orphanage. I've heard the mothers at our small international church, with one foster/adopted Chinese baby in each arm, tell me they just couldn't walk out of there with a good conscience leaving that one baby or child that grabbed their heart to stay in those conditions. On the train ride out, I was asking Keith to compare this orphanage with the other ones he's seen. He rated Daming's in the 4-5 category (out of 10), for several reasons. First, this one in Daming is not a Chinese state-run institution like most every other orphanage; it's under the supervision of 'charity'—-22 Catholic sisters take care of these children in exchange for a bit of religious freedom. They, unlike most all other Catholic churches in China, can call the Pope the head of their church--and not the Communist government. Second, and with the first in mind, it should follow that if you're volunteering to do this kind of work and especially if you're doing so in the name of God-- and not paid to do it as your daily job given to you by the government-- then there should be a little more compassion in caring for these fatherless and motherless children.
St. Bosco's Convent (not sure where they got this name from) began almost two decades ago when some of the sisters, who were all in their mid-teens at the time, decided to come together to devote their whole life to what they believed was God's calling for them. Most of them had been raised in Catholic families, but even so, they claim they had no clue what they were doing at first because at that time, China still had little contact with the outside world. Then, slowly, one by one, people in the community came asking for money for medical care for their sick children. Eventually, after parents had died or had become estranged, someone would bring the orphaned child to the sisters, hoping that out of pity and/or love, they'd take care of them. Eleven years and 32 children later, this orphanage is seemingly well-established in the area. Just last year, an 11-year-old boy, BaoTan, was given to the sisters to care for—-his parents died when he was a baby and was left with his grandmother. But last year, his 80-year-old grandmother knew that BaoTan needed to have a minor operation on his lower back and that she could not afford it. She believed that the local convent could take care of him better than she.
After the coal pile, my eyes next went to the entrance of the orphanage section of convent. In October the orphanage got a new double-paned glass doorway (thanks to the donations of Anne's, one of the French ladies, small church that meets in the French Embassy in Beijing). The glass etching overhead reads, "ST. BOSCO RETARTED CENTER". Besides the spelling mistake, I don't think it exactly represents what the nuns were trying to convey. We have no idea where they (whoever "they" may be) got this translation from. It was the first time for Anne to see it since the donation was given. Needless to say, she was a little disappointed.
I didn't fully know this until after we were on the train home, but apparently it's not so easy for anyone, especially foreigners, to so casually enter the grounds of an orphanage in China. In 1995 there was a documentary made called, "The Dying Rooms", featuring a British television team who entered four orphanages in China posing as American charity fund-raisers/social workers with concealed cameras (how'd they get away with those accents?). It caused a huge stir between Britain/The West and China. However, it seems that many of their charges were proven correct: mortality rates were high, staffing was inadequate, and funding was too low to cover the minimal physical needs of the state's wards. Yes, those statements could be true in any third world country. The problem that the Chinese government had with the documentary was that Human Rights Watch Association (HRWA) attributed this dire situation not to welfare system failures in a poor country but to an intentional government policy to weed out the weak within the orphanage system, keeping the numbers down and expenses low at a time of escalating abandonment by parents. HRWA even suspected that some orphanages were set up to facilitate the speedy death of abandoned babies.
This was probably the main reason for it taking an act of Congress for most everyone to gain official permission to access orphanages, and then only with due scheduling and time limitations.
Beijing's response to the above accusations:
"Our investigations confirm that those reports are vicious fabrications made out of ulterior motives. The contemptible lie about China's welfare work in orphanages cannot but arouse the indignation of the Chinese people, especially the great numbers of social workers who are working hard for children's welfare."
It still doesn't surprise me to hear responses like this.
Because the producers of "The Dying Rooms" had lied their way into the Chinese orphanages, the Ministry of Civil Affairs responded by closing orphanages to all outsiders, including most Chinese. While some early international adopters (China first opened itself up to international adoption in 1992) had been given open access to walk around and photograph inside orphanages, now many are not even allowed to drive by the outside. I've heard many parents say that they had to be driven to the nearest city and go inside some random hotel lobby to be presented their new child. After Anne went through the same rigamarole, she threatened to not hand over her orphanage donations (they ask all new parents to bring toys, clothes, formula, etc.) until they took her to the orphanage from which her daughter came and she took a picture. Even then they drove her to some random place and claimed it was the orphanage. She really wanted to have this picture for her daughter later on to know where she came from. Finally, with some coaxing, she got there and got her precious photo.
Consequently, some officials became suspicious of any offers of help from volunteers, particularly foreigners. Several study-abroad students I've known wanted to volunteer their time at a nearby orphanage, but were turned away either directly at the door or were finally rejected after the endless red tape bureaucracy that they had to go through to gain permission. Even for Keith with his well-established connections, in some places it still doesn't matter. Foreign face = no go. Don't think that this holds some of the more zealous volunteers back. Stories abound of foreigners dressing up as Chinese…
Failure and neglect in a state welfare system, although serious, is a charge one could level against all too many governments, including, for example, the United States for tolerating something such as homelessness in the world's richest (and best!) country. Death rates in all third-world orphanages are comparatively high, and standards of medical care are low. These problems are typical in countries where schools and hospitals are chronically underfunded (I won't start on hospitals/medical care here).
The People's Daily newspaper puts the orphan population at roughly 100,000--a figure thought unusually low for a country with a population of (what they claim is) 1.3 billion. Using official statistics, Human Rights Watch Association has located just over 17,000 of this figure in urban orphanages and fewer than 37,000 in the rural institutions cited by the Chinese embassy. HRWA says that this leaves a shortfall of 46,000.
Where are the other ones that the country claims to have? In Shanghai at the Children's Welfare Institute, the mortality rate almost a decade ago was "probably 90 percent" (according to an HRWA report). Some, when referring to China's post-1979 population control policies, have called it the 20th century's hidden holocaust. That's a serious claim, indeed. I haven't done any research, but even when Frank talks to his adult, well-educated, professional students, one of them has even estimated that at least 90% of female Beijingers (that's slang here for 'people who reside in Beijing') have had at least one abortion. Directly or indirectly forced, most choose this option because that's what society/government says to do in non-ideal situations. Though this is a whole other HUGE topic, abortions and other birth control measures are out of control in this country so much that it may even make a pro-choice American gag.
Within a small radius of Beijing, the political center of the nation and the home to a sparkling newly-built city for the 2008 Olympics, there are five orphanages that house children who have heart disease, cleft lips and palates, clubfeet, terrible skin diseases, and children wasting away because they can not take enough food by mouth to nourish them. And there are lots of healthy children, too. One family in our small international church has three children with cleft lips and palates. One of their other children asked his mom one day if all orphans in China had cleft lips and palates. It would seem to him like there are a disproportionate number in China, but no, one it just as likely to be born with a cleft lip and palate in China as one is in America or anywhere else.
Who abandons their own "fruit of their body," as the Bible poetically puts it? It took me a while to figure out the calculus of orphans in China. From my Beijing-centric frame of reference, I had to step back and remind myself of that amazing fact that I heard: one of every six people in the world are Chinese peasant farmers. These numbers make a little more sense in my mind—-generally, the families who leave these children are rural and poor. They leave them (or at least they are found) in crowded areas, train stations, and shopping areas. It is illegal to abandon children in China, so children who are truly orphaned in China go to live with relatives. This means that most children in Chinese orphanages are abandoned anonymously and usually nothing is known of their background. Were their mothers drug or alcohol abusers? Do genetic disorders run in their family? No one really knows. The vast majority of Chinese orphans are girls, left because they are thought to be less desirable. Girls will make little money and will not be able to provide for their parents in their old age. The ones who go to the orphanages are the 'lucky' ones with a chance at a beautiful life with a family in North America or Europe. Many girls in China simply disappear, perhaps drowned in a rice paddy or smothered with a blanket in a quiet home in the countryside. Yes, it is still true—-the birth of a boy is celebrated; the birth of a girl is not. I hear it more often than I'd like from students or friends that were almost victims. Harvard professor Amartya Sen estimates that perhaps 44 million female babies have gone 'missing' from China's demographics since the one child per family policy was introduced in 1979. If a child is "unplanned", the parents will be heavily fined for exceeding the quota of one child per family (unless they are from a minority group), the largest reason for the escalating abandonment and abortions. The boys who go to the orphanages are usually sick, disabled, or have obvious malformations. The sex ratio now is just shy of 120 boys per 100 girls (the natural sex ratio is about 105 boys per 100 girls). What about those girls/women that were born? From the earliest age, they receive the message that from their families and indeed from their whole society, "Boys are better than girls," or "I wish you were a boy." The devastation to their own self-worth must be immense.
This failure to realize that men and women, boys and girls have equal value in God's sight results in our not viewing male and female as equals in our sight either.
For the last year or so, at least once every month CNN.com has headlined a coal mining accident in China. "160 Killed in Yanzhou Mine Explosion" or "Coal Mining: Most Deadly Job In China". Accidents like this or natural disasters like a typhoon are only one piece of the pie for reasons that children end up in orphanages in this country. Like I said, most of them are abandoned by their parents because (a) the baby not the desired sex, (b) the parents do not want the child because they have one already or they are not ready for one yet, or (c) the baby is seriously or almost irremediably disabled mentally or physically or has contracted a serious illness. As I spent a little bit of time with each child I saw there at Daming's orphanage, I tried to imagine what may have gone through the parents' minds in making the decision to abandon their precious creation. I had a little sympathy for those who could have thought that their sick child would receive the care he or she needed at the orphanage. Like I mentioned earlier, this reason is giving the parents/relatives the benefit of the doubt—-like in BaoTan's situation. But perhaps they were ashamed by their child's clubfeet or misshapen ears, and they did not want anyone in their village to know that they had given birth to this so-called 'monster'. The Chinese people, even in bustling consumer-driven Beijing, still stare at my and Frank's Anglo white American faces. I can't imagine what kind of looks a disabled child receives. In fact, we hardly ever see handicapped people in this city. Hmmmm. As I looked at each child, it was clear that each one of the children had a hidden past. They needed love so badly. It was sad for me to think of the future of each of these children. The ones at this orphanage (and many others) can never be adopted by a non-Chinese family. For some reason or another, they were not issued their "hukou" (national ID card), a must for everything in China. Without one of these, foreign adoption is not an option. Sick children are often considered unfit for foreign adoption anyhow. Foreign adoption of orphans most of the time means that officials pocket a certain amount of the exorbitant fees for international adoption (typically between $15-20,000 USD). Orphanages permitted to do international adoptions (not all can) get to keep a significant portion (what's left over) of the fees that foreign adopters pay. International adoption fees have brought over one hundred million dollars into the orphan welfare system in the past decade at a rate of around twenty-five million dollars per year in the past two to three years. That's a lot. However, the main reason for the children's low chances of adoption at the Daming orphanage and ones like it is that most Chinese families can not afford or do not know how to raise a child with so many special needs. Furthermore, individual foster care is often discouraged since recent legal changes have been made, allowing adoption only in "genuine" cases--that is, where the child has lost both parents by death. Keith and his family found out about this new law when they looked into legally adopting a girl--whose biological parents are prominent city officials—-and were turned down. Yes, I know it doesn't make sense that it's illegal to abandon a child and yet the parents are known and are still able to be city officials. Looking at these kids, I didn't even want to think that these children, most of whom have probably never given their next ten minutes a thought, much less ten+ years, could go on to be the paralyzed or blind beggars that I see so often at the local street markets and under bridges. Yet it happens all too often. At 18, orphans are on their own, left with little or no training for the real world that lies outside the gates.
Inside the Daming orphanage in a baby blue room as big as a country dance hall, a couple babies and a few children sat unattended. Banging their legs and thrashing their arms, they vacillated between dozing and rocking, all of them dressed in a dirty jackets and pants with scruffy faces, shut off from the outside world. During our short visit, the sisters from the orphanage at the St. Bosco convent went in each morning into the poorly-lit fetid room to place the five children with cerebral palsy (CP) into their pale bluish-green wooden hand-fashioned chairs. The children were then left alone in these chairs all morning and all afternoon and all evening, with visits only during feeding times. The nuns did not return for bathroom breaks; there is a bucket underneath each chair for that.
One night while we were painting the kitchen, one child from this room (which was next door to us) kept yelling loudly over and over what sounded to us in English like, "BORING!" He yelled it about 100 times. Keith and I couldn't help but to laugh a little bit. It must be boring. None of them will likely ever learn to speak or walk or feed or dress themselves. They have no stimulation, nothing to play with, no one to touch or hold them. Rocking is their only exercise, their stimulation, their seemingly only pleasure in life.
There is no such thing as physical therapy in China. I didn't know that. I didn't even know that physical therapy is distinctly American. Recently one man from the States has imported this uniquely American practice to Beijing especially for the 1000-days-to-go-and-counting Olympics. I just read this in a newspaper (of course, as with everything else, the Chinese are tweaking it to have "Chinese characteristics"—-just like they've done to make socialism "with Chinese characteristics"). So the difficult work of strengthening young bodies weakened by disuse and disease is left to orphanage workers who haven't the slightest idea of what should be done. Orphanage workers, typically assigned one to four or five children even for the youngest children, probably would never have the time to do the needed intensive physical therapy, even if they were professionally trained.
There is some hope, though, for the orphans of China. The recent spread of foster care programs, particularly for disabled children, is a development that may be fundamentally altering Civil Affairs' long-standing preference for institutional care of abandoned and orphaned children. Only ten years ago, Civil Affairs saw foster care as a last resort, preferring instead to expand and improve institutional care facilities. International child welfare organizations and U.S. adoption agencies have long believed that foster care was far better for children than institutional care, and this view is increasingly shared among experts in China as well. Some officials in the Ministry of Civil Affairs now hope to put up to half of the children under the ministry's care into some form of foster care within five years. Frank and I have met with the man who is spearheading this movement. He is a Brit and lives in Beijing with his family. He his wife and the organization that they started are doing some groundbreaking work, working hand-in-hand with the government, all in Christ's name.
Frank, Keith, and I got both the kitchen and entranceway painted a fresh "eggshell" color. Keith noticed on his last trip that the lead-based paint was peeling off the kitchen walls and likely falling into the food being prepared. This was the main reason that Frank and I came along—-to be Keith's painter elves.
There were no real ladders so we had to make do with setting a chair on top of the refrigerator to reach the high walls and ceilings. By the time we finished scraping the walls, we had made a complete mess of the scraped-off paint chips and plaster all over everything. The first night of scraping, every time I glanced over at the door, I could see a little boy's head peering through the glass through the clouds of dust. For hours he stood there staring. I would smile at him and would get in return a grin four times the size of mine. This was BaoTan. I thought it was too late for this little man to still be up, but he seemed to have the freedom to stay up if he felt like it. So he did. Who knows if he'd ever seen anything like us before? Imagine no television, internet, or magazines ever in your life-—everyone around you all the time was slender, 5'4", yellow/brown skin, black hair, chocolate eyes, and then all of a sudden you see a 6' balding man with light blonde hair, blue eyes, and overweight… [this is Keith; hope he doesn't read this ;-) ]. I'd stare, too. I invited BaoTan in, tied on a mask, and told him what he could do to help. He seemed eager to help. The next morning he was there, too. He left for a few hours to go to school but returned afterwards. When Frank, Keith, and I were called to dinner (the 'chef nuns' prepared a feast for us every meal—-vegetables and meat and special breads—-while they and the children ate rice and steamed buns), BaoTan stayed behind and cleaned brushes and pans so diligently that you would've though they were brand new afterwards. That night I needed some help hanging up some decorations that we'd brought. Rex and Marty (American friends who've been living in Beijing) gave money for, among other things, sprucing the place up a bit other than painting--something the kids could enjoy. Before leaving Marty and I went to a nearby market and picked out some shiny streamers, red paper cut-outs, glittery signs, red paper lanterns, and even some small pin-on toys with flashing lights. After BaoTan and I had hanged the streamers and lanterns across the main upstairs hall (the one where the CP stay all day), I told BaoTan that it was his responsibility to decide where the rest of the stuff was to be put; I'd just follow him wherever he went until we either a) ran out of decorations, or b) it got too late for me. Not surprisingly, choice b came first, but not before we had gone to every bedroom and had hanged a streamer by each child's bed and all up and down the stairwells and the cafeteria, etc., etc. How thoughtful.
While we were hanging on the stairwell, I asked BaoTan why he thought that we came to the orphanage. He shrugged his shoulders. Unsure of whether that was a genuine "I don't know" or just his being shy, I answered for him, telling him that it was not because of anything other than Jesus. I asked, "Do you know who Jesus is?" He nodded. I asked him if he knew that Jesus loved him so very, very much, and he replied, "Yes". "Why does Jesus love you?" I asked next. He shrugged his shoulders again. Frank, before heading to the other side of the camp for the night (the nuns were very uncomfortable about having fully-grown men sleeping in the same place as the women and children, so they pulled me aside the first afternoon and asked if I'd mind if Frank kept Keith company across the yard in another building for the night, and the next night…), came to tell us goodnight as we were the only ones still up at that hour. Frank also reminded BaoTan that Jesus loved him. Keith has a daughter from a Catholic-run orphanage that came into their family at nine years of age without knowing much at all, he says, about Christ's love. Nothing personal against the sisters, but the one real thing that these children need is to know and accept God's love. I pray that someone demonstrates and shares that with each child that comes through that orphanage.
The next morning before daybreak, Keith and Frank had emerged from the other building across the yard and I from the third floor of the orphanage out to the entrance to wait for our ride to the train station. The only other person up at that hour was the head nun, who was to see us off (an important part of displaying hospitality in Chinese custom). So we thought… sweet little BaoTan, sleepy-eyed and in his same clothes as he was in the whole time, came through the doors, apparently to say goodbye one more time to us. The head nun made sure to tell us that she'd never seen him up so early before. I wanted to just stuff him into our little economy-sized car with us and take him back to Beijing.
We got a phone call from Nippon paint company while there saying that they'd donate as many cans in whatever color for our next projects (about $30 per can here). Hopefully we'll get to return someday and take Nippon up on their offer.
