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keep bees and / grow asparagus, / watch the tides / and listen to the / wind instead of / the politicians / make up your own / stories and believe / them if you want to / live the good life
- Miriam Waddington
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Our Family's Journey to China (cont'd) |
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| Advice to the Young 1 keep bees and / grow asparagus, / watch the tides / and listen to the / wind instead of / the politicians / make up your own / stories and believe / them if you want to / live the good life - Miriam Waddington |
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| In China (cont'd) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| October 7: We had dinner at the hotel restaurant shortly after we arrived. We knew we would be getting the babies that evening and we were too excited to go anywhere else to eat. Corinne, Rob and I got the buffet, but I was still too queasy to eat much of anything. Corinne, always the adventurer, sampled the frog legs and other stuff that would have made me nauseous at the best of times. (Still, for the bulk of our trip, she ate without a care and was only sick towards the end, when almost everyone in our travel group had caught something!) After dinner, we hastened back up to our rooms. We were told that the babies would be arriving by bus with their foster mothers and that we should wait in our rooms until we were called. Of course, we all hung out at our doors, chatting and abruptly breaking off what we were saying each time we heard the elevator doors down the hall open. Eventually, we did see people from our travel group walking down the hall to the elevators to get their babies and we could hear crying. We all walked over and the hallway by the elevators was filled with foster mothers holding our children. I recognized Faith and her foster mother immediately, because Yulin's brother had visited the Lin Chuan and Le Ping orphanages in September and had taken pictures of all the foster mothers and babies in our group. (I had used the picture of Faith's foster mother to decide what special gift to give her. I noticed that she was wearing a silver bracelet and silver ring, so I bought a sterling silver maple leaf broach for her.) Corinne and I approached Faith's foster mother and she pointed to me and said: "Ma Ma?" I nodded yes and just kept my eyes glued to Faith. She looked bewildered and terribly hot. She was wearing four layers of clothing, all split pants and no diaper, the topmost layer being yellow. The foster mother looked at my sister, pointed to me, then to Corinne and said again: "Ma Ma?" I shook my head, but didn't know how to tell her Corinne was my sister. Rob came up and I pointed to him and said: "Ba Ba." She smiled and spoke to Faith in Chinese, and made Faith smile. She handed Faith to me, but Faith immediately tried to go back to her foster mother. Most of the babies were crying at this point, as were many of the foster mothers and I gave Faith back to her. It all felt totally surreal to me. I had waited for this moment for so long, and now it felt like I was being given a child to babysit. The translator-- Shirley-- told us to go back to our room and that she would come with the foster mother and Faith to translate for us both. We did and they came very quickly. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Faith and Her Foster Mother: These pictures were taken behind the Fuzhou Orphanage, in the parking lot. Intuitively, Rob and I thought Faith's foster mother looked like a good person. Note Faith's bare bottom in the picture on the right-hand side. You've got to love those split pants! | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The foster mother gave us three bags of powdered, sweetened milk (NOT formula), and three bags of ground rice powder. Through Shirley, she told us that Faith did not drink from a bottle: she took the mixture from a cup with a spoon. This just about floored me. I was prepared for her not liking the nipples I'd brought, for her needing the nipple hole to be enlarged, for her needing to stay on what she was taking in China; but I had NEVER heard of a ten and half month old baby being fed liquids with a spoon. We were supposed to give Faith a "cup" every four hours, and twice through the night! Her mixture was about two tablespoons of milk powder, two tablespoons of rice powder and a tablespoon of sugar in about ten - twelve ounces of water. Faith had also eaten a little rice congee, but had not been introduced to any other solid food. When I heard that, I immediately thought: "No wonder she's so thin and barely even on the Chinese girl growth charts for weight!" The foster mother told us Faith slept with her (as we had expected) and that she rocked her to sleep in her arms before she put her to bed. She said Faith was a very reserved baby, who would even bite sometimes. Then, she said she had taken care of her since Faith had been brought to the orphanage when she was two days old. She wiped tears from her eyes as she was telling us this and I felt very sorry for both of them. For all intents and purposes, Faith was this woman's daughter and here she was, handing her over to "foreign devil" strangers, to be taken thousands of miles away. Yes, we could offer Faith things she could never have in China, but still, the magnitude of the upcoming change was mind-boggling. The foster mother got a little upset when I tried to peel all the layers of clothing off Faith to put a diaper on her. She put Faith's shoes and socks back on and told me: "She gets cold very easily. Please keep her covered." I understood this was the Chinese way of parenting infants, so I nodded and decided I'd wait until the foster mother left. Poor Faith was crying her eyes out and trying desperately to go back to her foster mother's arms. She was sweating unbelievably and I was itching to peel those clothes off. I'd counted at least three layers during our earlier struggle, and I was hot myself in one layer. The foster mother asked if we'd like to keep Faith's clothes and of course, we would! I offered her other clothes in return and she said she'd be grateful for anything I could give her, because she fostered a lot of babies and was always in need of clothes for them. She told me Faith liked baths, but that she didn't need one that evening, because she had already had a bath that day. She gave me laminated pictures of herself and Faith in her house and it was really nice-- by any standards. There were white cabinets with shelves, upon which were family pictures, a very nice sofa with a picture on the wall over it-- basically a much more affluent home than I had expected. Faith had a pink dot on her forehead in all of the the pictures and in person as well. Someone told me later it means that the child is special, lucky and well-loved. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||