Inside Hubei Orphanages

Wuhan

Wuhan itself, unscathed and bustling with 7 million people (nearly as populous as New York), is our base for the week. The contingent from FCC/New England arrives early in the day, and after a warm welcome from provincial Civil Affairs officials, guests and hosts tour the Wuhan Foundling Home. This is the Harvard of orphanages--huge, well funded, and well run by a dedicated team led by Director Li.

Like many adoptive parents in the early years of international adoption from China, Shanti and her husband, Jeffrey Zinsmeyer, adopted their daughter here. Victoria was a baby back in 1994, but at four and a half she recognizes Director Li from pictures in her album and dashes into her arms. Director Li lifts her up high and hugs her tight like an aunt greeting a favorite niece at a family reunion.

Shanti, Jon, Victoria, and Victoria's nanny, Nikki, spend most of the day at the Wuhan orphanage with Director Li and the Hubei officials. The orphanage children entertain them, performing songs, dances, even acrobatics. The Americans visit a classroom full of computers with busy young children clicking away. ("Is this college?" Victoria asks.) They watch a roomful of girls play the guzheng, the Chinese zither, and listen as a blind girl plays Chopin on an upright piano. A group of children sing a mournful ballad: "Mother, Father, why have you forgotten me?...The teacher is my Mother and Father now."

There's an educational motive for these performances that goes beyond pleasing foreign guests. The staff of Wuhan orphanage believe that the performing arts help disabled children build confidence and express their grief, Director Li explains. Clearly this is not your typical orphanage, in China or anywhere else.

Wuhan was one of the first orphanages in China to do international adoptions under the national adoption law passed at the end of 1991. On her trip to adopt Victoria, Shanti saw a completely different facility, one built under the auspices of an American Catholic bishop in 1928. The new five- to seven-story building, clad in shining white tile with splashes of color above doorways and windows, now dwarfs the old structure. A 20 million RMB donation (equal to about $2.5 million) from a Buddhist charity group in Taiwan funded construction, and the municipal government of Wuhan relocated 100 families to give the facility three acres of land.

The new orphanage has just about everything. There is heating for Wuhan's chilly winters and air conditioning to tame its brutal summers (with temperatures so high that babies can perish from the heat). There's a library with 10,000 books. The classrooms and dormitories are spotless and well equipped, and the programs for disabled children are so good that non-orphaned children come here for treatment and special education. Children without special needs also attend school in the orphanage up to age nine and begin studying English in the fourth grade. (From age ten those who are able attend regular school outside the orphanage.) The orphanage staff includes 8 nurses, 7 doctors, and 23 teachers. Altogether there are more than 100 caregivers for Wuhan orphanage's 500 children.

The only unfortunate side effect of this terrific new complex is that Wuhan orphanage no longer puts babies in foster care. After the expense of the new facility, it would be hard to justify sending children out. Nevertheless, most Western experts believe that even an excellent institution like the Wuhan Foundling Home is not an ideal environment for babies and toddlers. Very young children do best with individual, dedicated, predictable loving care in a family setting, which is why FCO started its Foster Care Project in 1998.

Still, Wuhan shows what an orphanage can be with good management and sufficient resources. The Hubei officials are rightly proud of it. They and FCO agree that adoptive parents' donations are best spent helping other orphanages, the ones most in need of assistance--those in rural, out-of-the-way areas like the ones they take us to next, after Ying Ying and I arrive from Hong Kong to a generous welcome banquet and a good night's sleep.

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