Inside Hubei Orphanagesby Amy KlatzkinWe're barreling down a four-lane limited-access toll road in a van with two China-born daughters counting water buffalo at the rate of about 50 an hour. It's September 21, it's hot, and we're deep in the Hubei countryside on our way from the provincial capital of Wuhan due west about 200 kilometers to the town of Jingzhou, an ancient Yangzi River stronghold that houses a newly rebuilt orphanage in a breezy setting of bamboo grove and bright white tile. After the orphanage we're back in the van on an unexpected sightseeing trip to a museum with a mummy in the gift shop, a luncheon banquet in a nearby hotel, and then several more hours of highway driving through the Hubei countryside, counting water buffalo all the way. The water buffalo game is the brainchild of Shanti Fry, president of the New England chapter of Families with Children from China (FCC) and co-chair of the Foundation for Chinese Orphanages (FCO). The diversion seems to be working, because the two girls--Shanti's daughter, Victoria, age four and a half, and my daughter, Ying Ying, age five--haven't protested their daylong incarceration in a moving vehicle. Perhaps that's because there are no seatbelts and they can climb over the seatbacks at will. The third member of our FCC delegation--Jon Chase, a former Associated Press photographer who now works for Harvard--appears distinctly relieved that his four-year-old is safe at home in Massachusetts. Shanti, Jon, the girls, and I are all here as guests of the Hubei Province Bureau of Civil Affairs on a privately funded tour of six orphanages. Riding in the officials' car is Weihang Chen, a former Wuhan University faculty member and now China program director of Alliance for Children who, in his capacity as volunteer advisor to the Foundation, made the arrangements for our visit. Four of the orphanages we'll see, plus six more that we won't visit, received industrial-sized washers or dryers thanks to FCC parents' 1997 donations to the Foundation for Chinese Orphanages. Last night in Wuhan Shanti delivered a check with the second installment of 1998 FCO donations, making a total of $30,000 from FCC parents and friends to be used for foster care and other services to individual children (such as physical therapy for children with disabilities and school fees for older children). Later, back in Wuhan, we'll hammer out an agreement on how that money will be spent and accounted for. But now we're just trying to keep our heads from hammering against the roof of the van as we leave the toll road and ford the potholes into the western Hubei city of Yichang. Yichang sits just downstream from the famed Three Gorges of the Yangzi River, near where the monolithic (some would say monstrous) Three Gorges Dam is under construction. Through these long narrow passageways between sheer cliffs a raging Yangzi, swollen with torrential rainfall from the upper reaches in Sichuan and Qinghai, roared into Hubei in July and August and flooded vast tracts of countryside in five provinces from here to the sea. The provinces along the Yangzi River that sustained the greatest flood damage this summer--Sichuan, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi, Anhui, and Jiangsu--are the birthplaces of most of the children adopted from China internationally. Thousands of years of recorded history describe the devastation the Yangzi can wreak. This summer brought the twentieth century's worst flooding to Hubei, and provincial authorities are exhausted from two months of flood relief work. Yet our hosts remain unfailingly polite and generous, and on this reach of the Yangzi, in western Hubei, we see no evidence of flooding. We've come in the wake of disaster, but we won't really get the picture until later, when we're out on a dike in the middle of the eerily tranquil deluge just outside Wuhan.
Foundation for Chinese Orphanages |