The orphanage

We met some guys who help out at an orphanage on the edge of town and joined them on a visit a couple of days back.  When they first started going (a couple of decades back) they said they started to twig that babies were dying between their visits.  At that stage, they had 600 hundred or so babies and a steady stream coming in.  In reality, it seems that it is not an orphanage (in the sense that the children have no parents), but rather that the parents have abandoned the children (perhaps because it is a girl and, given the one child policy, they'd prefer it to be a boy or because the baby had some form of disability).  We saw one little baby who was blind and another who had an extra finger on each hand.

Conditions have improved markedly over the years, but babies are still being abandoned (the other option appears to be abortion, which we are told is used as a very frequent form of contraception).  The good news is that adopting and fostering is much more prevalent.  Apparently, there is a village a few hours from the city which is predominantly Christian and the people in the church decided to adopt a lot of the kids - there are 200 or so adopted kids there.

As nice as the orphanage now is (made better by the fact that the city has grown, so rather than being out in the middle of nowhere, it is now much more part of the local urban area), it was just so sad to see rooms with cots lined up end to end and each cot having a photo and an info card so they know where each kid belongs.  It's just such a contrast to the nicely painted nurseries people have in their houses at home.  We saw one set of twins and I just hoped they would get to stay together - although it is a bit tricky to see how when the one child policy is so rigorously enforced e.g. a couple who have a child are not permitted to adopt another.