Visit to Wuchuan City Orphanage

We finally arrived home after a very long day of driving and an emotional visit (esp for Jill and Chun Le) to her orphanage. Our driver and guide met us in the hotel lobby at 7:30am for the 4.5 hour drive to Wuchuan City. Chun Le did amazingly well for the long ride. There are no car seats for children in China so whenever we get in the van with the driver that takes us to all the spots we have to go, Chun Le sits on our laps. Sounds crazy and the traffic around here is pretty crazy, but the drivers are soooo skillful it never feels unsafe. She was a pretty quiet girl just checking out the scenery as it passed by for most of the trip. She did fall asleep for about 1 hour of the drive and we gave her some snacks, played with a few toys and fed her a bottle along the way. The long drive gave us a chance to see the landscape of Guangdong province from big city Guangzhou to rural Wuchuan. The scenery along the way went from city buildings to rolling hills, to pointy steep hills, to mountainous, to flat farmland, to crazy busy local city streets to rural poor sections. What a neat opportunity it was to see so much of the province that Chun Le is from. We stopped for lunch in a city outside of Wuchuan and then headed to her orphanage and arrived about 1pm. This part of China is very poor our guide told us and it is obvious as we looked around. When it was time to pull off the main road, the orphanage director waited in his car at the entrance to the dirt "road" that we had to turn onto. It was more like a very bumpy dirt path with a few houses and businesses of sorts along it in a very impoverished looking area. There was a gate at the orphanage entrance...the spot where Chun Le was found on Jan 13, 2010. At this point I was teary eyed just thinking about that moment and had to greet the orphanage director with tears welled up in my eyes...hopefully I was not the first weepy adoptive mom to ever visit there. :) He brought us into a large meeting room with tables and chairs for us to sit and bowls of bananas and clementines and bottled water for us. We were joined by a few other officials at the orphanage: assistant director in charge of forms, assistant director who was the doctor, an office worker (she had been one of the ladies who brought Chun Le on gotcha day). They were all very happy to see Chun Le and she definitely recoginzed all of them. We were holding her during this time and whenever one of them came over to say hi to her or reached out their arms to hold her, she would either turn her head away from them or hang onto us more tightly. A good sign that she is forming a strong attachment to us...praise God! They gave us time to ask whatever questions we had for them and our guide Lee was the translator for this question and answer time. We found out there are about 70 kids currently in the orphanage and that this year they have had 11 or 12 adoptions so far and about half of those were American families. So they are one of the smaller orphanages Lee later told us. We got to ask other things in particular about Chun Le as well. The director's description of Chun Le was really funny: "She is one of the more active ones in her group of kids but also a little naughty." :) We found out that she is the child who runs to toys when they are set out so that she can get them all first...that naughty little girl of ours. :) Actually it was great to hear that she is an active, fun loving little girl; so far, we have seen more of a stoic/quiet personality as she tries to process her new life with us. Then we took a tour of some other parts around the orphanage. We saw the room that had all the toys and play equipment that Chun Le was on in the various photos that we have received of her. In the front half of that room were the older school age girls sitting in desks practicing writing Chinese characters. There were probably 8 girls in there. We asked Lee later why they were not in the public school and she thought they probably had special needs and so they did not go to the public school but were taught at the orphanage. Then we went upstairs to the room Chun Le and the toddlers are in. When they opened the door she got a big smile when she saw her friends and nanny. There were 8 other toddler kids in there with one nanny. The room was about 30 square feet and toward one side there were the 9 cribs all lined up together and side by side; the other part of the room there was a platform about 4 inches off the ground where most of the toddlers were sitting or standing on or nearby. There were a few balls around but we really did not see too many other toys than that. We were not sure if they had the kids put away the toys because we were coming or if there is another place they go to play with toys. All the kids were wearing the same warm brown outdoor winter type coat over their clothes as they sat or played. It seemed kind of funny to us Chicagoans since the temp was about 65oF but that is cold for that part of China. They looked at us and Chun Le as she entered. She had kind of a twinkle in her eye as she got to go see her nanny and friends. Her nanny picked her up and was thrilled to see her and Chun Le did not mind a bit being held by her. She put her in the crib she used to be in and we got a pic of it. It was obvious that this was a familiar place to her where she felt comfortable and that made us happy. That room was likely where she spent much of her day and night the past several months...prior to that she would have been in the infant room next door which was a repeat of the toddler room but with a few more cribs. The nanny in the infant room saw us walk by and opened the window to say hi to her and Chun Le gave her a big smile as well. That was pretty much the end of our tour--as we went down the stairs and Chun Le kept hearing people say good bye to her she was becoming a bit uneasy. I was holding her at the time and she kept looking back and getting teary eyed. We took a few pics of us with the orphanage officials in front of the building and then it was time to go. When she saw the van pull up and we got in we heard her cry--really cry--for the first time. At this point I was losing it too (I am again as I think about it typing this blog). Imagining the loss and grief that she must be going through in leaving this familiar place again must be very hard and confusing. It is also obvious that she is bonding well to us, but I cannot imagine what it must have felt like for her at that moment to know that she is leaving so much of her life behind but yet looking forward to her life ahead with the Stowers family after getting a small glimpse of what it was like with us the past 4 days. What torn emotions her little mind must have had to try to process and I am sure that she did not entirely understand all that has happened to her in the past few days. The hard crying continued for about 10 minutes of our trip and she wanted to sit on my lap facing to look out the window. Then Lee suggested offering her some snacks to distract her. That did the trick to calm her down but the rest of the trip back to our hotel she was very quiet. She fell asleep on Phil's lap for awhile and when she was awake she did not want to interact much with either us or her toys. We just let her sit quietly on our laps and soak in the sights and get a chance to process all that had happened today. She seemed very happy to be back at the hotel and had smiles on again as we got her ready for bed and cuddled on the chair while she twirled her ribbons on her blankie from Rachel and Isaac. This was the first night in the last two nights that there was no moaning as she was rocking/cuddling before bedtime so that was an encouraging sign. Overall we were pleasantly surprised at how well she handled the orphanage visit and goodbyes and we are soooo glad we went. We have gained a ton of insight into several of her behaviors as a result of being there and seeing what life was like for her prior to gotcha day. The best way to describe what her orphanage was like is small and simple but obviously very caring nannies. IT makes so much sense to us now that she is such a quiet girl who mostly observes and soaks in EVERYTHING. Her life prior to this was so simple that she must be in sensory overload with all that she has seen, heard, felt, ate, smelled, experienced in the past 4 days with us. It is definitely going to take time for her to get used to this new way of life, but we are thrilled that she is doing so well considering the HUGE changes her life has been through. It is hard for me to describe what it was like to have had the chance to get this glimpse into her life history--so, so, so emotional on so many levels. I am still having a hard time processing all that we saw and learned in our short visit there. We are just so thankful for the opportunity to have seen this glimpse into our daughter's life and can't wait to share with her someday all that we learned and enjoyed. Here are a few pics of our day. At the orphanage we had to be sure no children were in the photos so that is why you only see Chun Le and the staff in them.