Eric's Beijing Diary

This morning, we took a dozen children from the orphanage and boarded a bus for the city of Taiyuan. We went to a very nice park with a lake. Most of the children were able to walk by themselves. A couple of them were in wheelchairs. There were lots of caretakers along, so I wasn't too worried--in fact, the children themselves stayed pretty close to their caretakers. I tried to take on of them to the bathroom, but he refused to leave the group. I did manage to get three of them to come with me on the Ferris Wheel.

This afternoon, I walked through the orphanage to see some of the children who were immobilized and couldn't go with us this morning. Although most of the children in this orphanage have some kind of handicap, the majority of them are ambulatory--very few are bedridden. The most troubling are the children with Cerebral Palsy and the ones with Spina Bifida. The ones with Spina Bifida have an horrific protrusion at the base of the spine. Some of the Cerebral Palsy kids can kinda get around, but some of them spend all their time in bed. Their legs are permanently frozen in a crossed position. I saw one of them lying flat on her back in a crib. She looked to be somewhere between 5-8 years old. I couldn't tell for sure. I touched her quiet face. She looked up at me. I will never forget her face. Lying on her back every minute of every day. Forgive me for sounding obvious, but that would be really boring.

In spite of all I have seen at this orphanage, the children seem to be well taken care of. The ones who were up and around were friendly and cheerful. I think the people here are kind to children. All of the children here were abandoned by their parents. Their parents are not dead. They are village people who just could not afford to deal with the overwhelming challenge of a handicapped child. The children are usually left at night. One of them, an autistic girl in her teens, had apparently resisted being left quite violently. They found her tied to a tree in the courtyard. It's easy to pontificate loosely about what is clearly a monumental problem. But from what I have seen, I believe that what is needed is to get involved with villages, so that people who are faced with these challenges can be given options. Many years ago, most of the children in this orphanage were girls who were abandoned because they were girls. When they grew up, they married and left. But today, most of the children are handicapped--some of them quite severely. Some of them are abandoned as infants, but for some of them, it is clear that their families have really tried to keep them as long as they could. It is hard for me to grasp what would make parents abandon their own flesh and blood, especially when their children are crying and saying they don't want to be left. I don't know...perhaps it is wishful thinking on my part, but I just have to believe that many of these children would not have been left if there parents could be told there was help for them.

The people in the villages are not starving. They work hard, but they do have a good life in many ways. But their agrarian lifestyle simply does not allow for a child who is completely unproductive, and shows no potential for becoming productive. To be sure, that is probably an oversimplification--in a sense, I am wasting my time talking about it, because nobody knows for sure. But I believe that if there are non-governmental organizations working at the village level, folks who find themselves in this kind of position would have resources available to them that would spare them from such a horrible decision.