Life's Most Important Lesson

Ten wheelchairs, two more with built-in commode seats, seven ambulatory shower chairs, three shower benches, two hearing aids, 18 children's size XL winter coats, 18 children's size L winter coats, 17 children's size M winter coats, and 20 pairs of insulated winter pants. That's what Love Without Boundaries was able to deliver to the Pingliang Social Welfare Institute using funds that some of you contributed. (See previous post.)

Henry won't be defined by his humble start in life or his surgeries. We know that eventually he will carve out his own special place in the world, just as his sisters have busily begun to do. But at least today his history seems important by example because the other children still at the Pingliang orphanage are important too, as are all abandoned children with special medical needs throughout China and the rest of the developing world. That such a child who so needed one now has the safe future most of us take for granted is a clear reminder of life's most important lesson: that hope, love, and help are chiefly among all other things verbs.

That almost anyone can so easily help to provide a disabled child in an orphanage with a wheelchair, or supply a shivering child there with a winter coat, is simple proof of exactly the same thing.

We worry about the children at the Pingliang orphanage and how more than 120 of them have special needs from birth defects, like Henry. Families in China rarely adopt special needs children for the same reasons so many are abandoned there. And from all of Gansu Province, a very large place, there were only about 50 foreign adoptions last year. China will do more for its people but rural Chinese, nearly a billion people, get by on wages averaging only about $690 per year and migration of rural workers struggling to join the new economy has made it more difficult to track and control disease. Increasingly, living environments there can be contaminated by pollution. All of which increases the likelihood of birth anomalies among newborns and, in turn, of more abandoned children with special needs winding up in orphanages or worse. None of which decreases what each of us can do even in small ways to make a big difference for these children, discarded save for in this case the care of an overstretched orphanage staff. From Pingliang: tè bié gǎn xiè (grateful thanks).

A Gift of Remembering

Henry had a birthday this month and we had a party with many of our friends. But because he is uncommonly easy to please he didn't need more toys or stuffed animals, and he had plenty of picture books.

Really, the best gift we can all give is to find a quiet moment to remember where he came from.

Three years ago in rural western China, Henry entered the world with the absence of an upper lip and a gaping hole between his mouth and nasal cavities that undoubtedly frightened his birth parents. Faced with a swirling storm of questions ranging from what could account for this misfortune to how would they raise this child, a dreadful choice was made. Within a day or two Henry was found next to a roadside dumpster. He had been thrown away.

It would be better if this were not so common. Today there are 52 children with cleft anomalies of varying severity housed at the same regional orphanage where police brought Henry. The number of children there has nearly doubled in the past year to 152 children overall and 121 have significant medical special needs related to cleft issues, cerebral palsy, heart disease, blindness, hearing impairments, or any of a range of developmental disorders. This modest facility is called the Pingliang Social Welfare Institute (SWI) and is located in Pingliang, Gansu Province, about an hour's drive north of where Henry was found.

Fifty two children a lot like Henry, a terrific little guy, as good as any child we know. But we also know that cleft children, especially during infancy, can be difficult to feed and this is a challenge in a crowded orphanage. One hundred and fifty two soft little hearts that need people to care, veiled at the far edge of a far away place. We would like to help; right now the orphanage most needs ambulatory medical equipment (wheelchairs and bath chairs) and hearing aids, in addition to general children's supplies.

So we asked friends who came to Henry's birthday party to forgo bringing a present and instead make a small donation through Love Without Boundaries toward this act of remembering. They did and then, this being New Orleans, we all had a wonderful time together.

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The music with this post is a piece titled Cherry Blossoms performed by Jia Peng Fang.

Those Bright, Shiny Moments

In our home we celebrate Gotcha Days, anniversaries of those bright, shiny moments in China when we first held our children. Each anniversary features a cake, balloons, and a few presents, but unlike birthdays we keep them within the family since they could as accurately be called Family Days or just about anything with similar meaning. We’ll continue the tradition as long as it doesn’t seem obligatory and it has been interesting to watch how our girls have embraced their Gotcha Days as they have gotten older. Each celebration has unfailingly turned out to a big day all around and at least somewhat unique to their complicated stories; that you had to be there at the beginning to completely understand is part of its special charm.

Today was Henry's first Gotcha Day and the completion of a wondrous year. Not long ago at a series of exams with our medical team, our surgeons pronounced the results of Henry's first cleft surgeries last fall to be "spectacular" and "much better than we could have hoped." There will be more surgeries, all with challenges, but Henry's new palate has not developed the holes common in cleft procedures closing much smaller gaps. Today his new upper lip looks tighter than it really is and, important for later, its center is exactly in line with the center of his face.

His receptive language, or understanding of our speech, is age-appropriate and then some. For his part, Henry can now make most vowel sounds along with the consonant sounds for b, h, m, n, and w. He can even form some words; first the ever useful uh oh and now Ma, Da (for Dad), hat, ball, hi, bye, my, up, 'nana (for banana), and wa wa (for water). Eventually his ability to form difficult hard consonant sounds like those for k and q will determine whether he will need p-flap surgery to assist his speech by lengthening his soft palate before he enters kindergarten when we already plan more reconstruction of his nose and lip.

Henry can occasionally be as fussy and sleepless as would any two and a half year old with late teeth sometimes pushing out in odd places, malformed from the same genetic material from which the front of his hard palate was built. But he could not be a sweeter little boy; happy in his world of little toy trains, soft stuffed animals, and his family who loves him.

… So there we were, then just the four of us, one full year ago, having determinedly sped from Beijing west toward China's earthquake zone to scoop up our little Henry from the Pingliang Social Welfare Institute, as if that was the most natural thing in the world and, in every way that matters, it actually was.

Forever

forever adv.
continually; persistently; for all time.
(- The Oxford American Dictionary of Current English)

“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.”
(- Jorge Luis Borges)

The fundamental equations of physics all have no directionality in time. In other words, all theoretic interactions can proceed in the reverse direction without violating any physical laws. For example, bounce a basketball, capture it on video, and run the video backwards. Nothing will appear unusual. But in life, while we can reflect on past events and learn from them we cannot influence them. Therein lays one of life’s central quandaries: that, however irrationally, in our minds we can choose to dwell in either side of forever.

Or we may choose to see the whole—past and future—as a shimmering gift.

This is the gift we gave to Henry and to his sisters before him. We are their bridge from one side of forever to the other, and their safe and solid ground. And this is what we really celebrate on these Mothers' Days in April. On Fathers' Days too.

The life our three children have here is as much theirs as ours. And here the five of us are fortunate to live in what is perhaps America’s least homogeneous place, an authentic cultural mixing bowl and one with a soul that has touched so many people around the world. Far from perfection, there are wounded elements of the human condition in this city, unhidden and obviously still waiting to be healed. But there is also a genuine expectation that everyone is different and that our differences make us special. Moreover, because of what those who have lived here awhile have been through, there is perhaps more of a common understanding in this place that we are who are but often become much more than we may outwardly seem.

But China will always belong to each of our children also, and in a way that is not ours. It might be easy to see in this the lost side of forever. We hope not. That is because in China, also far from perfect, one finds a graceful chaos but also an enviable measure of shared reverence for aesthetic beauty in austerity and for sacrifice, and that is missing on this side of the planet. Its ever present images of blossoms and simple fronds on scrolls or cloth are emblems of an understanding; minor decoratives only if considered superficially. Harmony and centeredness. Honor to oneself and family. These are some of the ancient but enduring ideas into which our children were born, then in their ways separated in modern non sequitur. So we try to give them tools they will need to keep China in their hearts, for when they piece their puzzles together from the past we will help them look for, however much they each decide to.

China is a distance so far away that the stars Henry and his sisters see at night are in a sense last night’s stars there. But time, forever, is the substance we are made of.

There are no fixed limits.
Time does not stand still.
Nothing endures,
Nothing is final.
You cannot lay hold
Of the end or the beginning.
He who is wise sees near and far
As the same.
(- Chuang Tzu)

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The music with this post is a piece titled Forever performed by Jia Peng Fang. Born in 1958 in Heilongjiang Province north of Beijing, Jia began to play the two-string Erhu when he was seven years old in 1965—the year that marked the start of the Cultural Revolution, during which he needed to hone his unusual talent on this traditional Chinese instrument in secret and generally struggled for a long time to get by. He left China in 1988 and today lives and composes in Japan.