Good morning from Guangzhou! Zoe has been up for an hour and is busy playing with her new toys. She still has hardly spoken but I understand that it took her four months to start talking after she went to the orphanage from the foster parents.
Yesterday we left at 8 am for the long drive to Yangchun City to visit the House of Grace where Sasha lived most of her life here. It is right next to the Yangchun Social Welfare Institute but is run by a Christian lady named Sandra from New Zealand and therefore it was a privilege for Sasha to have the special care there. Unfortunately, Sandra was out of the country and we did not have the opportunity to meet her.
It was wonderful to see in person what we had only seen in pictures. I am so grateful that Sasha had such wonderful care. It is heartbreaking to walk into these orphanages and see the children who wait for families. Many with special needs a result of a poor nutrition and diet. Their sad eyes stared at us as they cried for arms to pick them up and love them. These are the children families extend their lives to regardless of their special needs – some needs that I could have never imagined possible. Newborns newly found, little ones with cleft palates, visible and invisible scars. Totally undeserving of the world’s hardship, they represent each of us at our smallest and most vulnerable. The human family is meant to fill such loneliness. A father’s hug, a mama’s embrace – yet these children have lost everyone at once. These are real children who come to us with ravaged bodies and broken hearts and when they weep out their sadness, their faces streak with tears and wetness and drool soaks their shirts as we hold them and use the love of Jesus to help heal their little hearts.
Chinese adoption will gather you up from one place and spin you around and set you down somewhere else, facing backwards. It changes your life in ways you never could imagine.
If you think you can walk into an orphanage and take one child out, leave the others behind and wake up the same person the next morning you are mistaken.
The faces of the children left behind will forever be etched in my mind. We are bringing home just one more little girl but a family of others have moved into my mind. And there seems like little I can offer the others besides prayer.
Karin Evans wrote the following and I couldn’t say it better: “It is impossible to know how many children there are. I look at the children and know that this cluster of children can be multiplied by thousands, tens of thousands. Each day, more arrive on the doorsteps of institutions, swept there by the forces of random misfortune and contemporary pressures.
When China’s stringent birth control policy went into effect in the 1980’s, limiting most families to a single child, the orphanages began to fill, overwhelmingly, with girls. Though the picture is a complex one, a basic cause was the combination of the strict enforcement of this policy and the age-old Chinese family system with its traditional preference for sons.
There are other explanations; poverty, medical needs a family has no hope of meeting, natural disasters, and individual tragedies. Whether these children were found at a few days old wrapped in a blanket on a busy bridge, or discovered at four or five, wandering alone with a few belongings near a police station, they now live in institutions and await uncertain futures. The local authorities post their pictures, but no one comes forward. They stand before the camera bearing the world’s sorrow, poverty, and hardship on their small shoulders.
As many as ten thousand of the children, usually the younger ones, are adopted each year. But the vast majority remain in orphanages. As they grow older, their chances of finding a family diminish. And so they wait. When they are old enough to leave the institution they will go into the world by themselves, with no one to count on. Their faces haunt me. They are braver then children should have to be. Once you’ve looked into their eyes, it’s hard to turn away.”
When I think about the Chinese parents of our girls I try to understand their lives and what forces caused them to leave their child. I cannot imagine taking a fragile newborn child and putting her at such risk by leaving her somewhere to be found. I know that in my heart whatever penalty a government might impose on me – half my salary, take my home or job, I would never surrender my baby. But I am grateful to these people, unknown and unnamed. I know nothing of their situation.
Every year on the Zoe’s and Sasha’s birthday they must wonder what has become of their child. And they must wonder every time they see a western parent wondering the streets of their hometown, asian girl in tow, could this child be mine? Possibly as we wondered the streets of Yangchun and drove the hilly crumbling slums of Baotou, we were staring into the sad eyes of a parent of one of our girls. We will never know.
In my Bible reading this morning this special verse seemed perfect to share:
“Those of us who are strong and able in the faith need to step in and lend a hand to those who falter, and not just do what is most convenient for us. Strength is for service, not status. Each one of us needs to look after the good of the people around us, asking ourselves, “How can I help? That’s exactly what Jesus did. He didn’t make it easy for himself by avoiding people’s troubles, but waded right in and helped out. “I took on the troubles of the troubled,” is the way Scripture puts it. Even if it was written in the Scriptures long ago, you can be sure it’s written for us. God wants the combination of his steady, constant calling and warm, personal counsel in Scripture to come to characterize us, keeping us alert for whatever he will do next.” Romans 15:1-4 The message
The sign for Sasha's turtle Room
Street market on the road by House of Grace
Streets of Yangchun
Street market Yangchun
Fun while shopping in Yangchun
