March 16: Trip to Guiping Social Welfare Institute

Today we took a long road trip to Norah’s orphanage. The landscape was gorgeous on the way there. Didn’t get many good pictures though because we were going pretty quickly on the bus. It was a crazy bus ride – 11 newly adopted babies and their families on a bus traveling in southern China with 1.5 lanes. The rule of the road was the biggest vehicle gets to go first-that was usually us. The driver honks and the other car gets out of the way, regardless of which direction it is going in.

It was a very emotional day for all of us. This is something that we will share with Norah when she is older. There is not much that I want to say that is appropriate for a blog. The orphanage is in a very poor region. We had to walk up the road to get to it. The good news is that our children were in a new building, which was clean and bright. We got to see where our babies had slept and played. We also met the nannies and the orphanage director. It is obvious from the behaviour of the nannies that the babies were well cared for. Our group put together money and bought the orphanage a water heater, which the director proudly showed us. We were also greeted with a bounty of fruits, tea, and cookies and the director organized a lunch with us and the nannies. We finished the day in Guiping City by going to the finding spot for each baby, where each family could spend a moment.

We spoke with a nanny who cared for Norah and found out that Norah had been fostered for about half the time before we received her. It turned out to be a twelve hour day which ended with a chorus of screaming babies on the way back to Nanning—Norah led the pack and on a few occasions had a solo.