Henry: The Comforts of Home

Wednesday, September 10, 2014

The Comforts of Home

Henry on his 8th birthday is a model of happy consistency. He'll find a way to have fun just about anywhere and has adjusted well at school. But given the choice, he still prefers the comforts of home. It’s where he can most comfortably test his boundaries and playfully pester his sisters and Ting Ting, our little cat. He is still mostly interested in familiar subjects like Thomas the Tank Engine and Curious George, but uses a computer now to explore them. Henry has mastered his two-wheel bike, can do flips on the trampoline in our backyard, and is a very strong swimmer. This past summer he attended camp at the Audubon Zoo nearby, quickly overcoming his shyness on the first day. Now he has started second grade.

Medically, we are waiting for the bones in Henry's face to grow some more. Sooner or later his doctors will next seek to widen the curvature of his maxilla (which was squeezed together in the early construction of his palate) while also bringing it forward to rest more evenly above his lower jaw. Henry seems perfectly happy for now with things as they are. His speech is remarkable.

Each day starts for Henry like turning on a switch just before the sun comes up. “Can I have my breakfast please … and don’t stop,” he will say first thing, having cheerfully marched down the hallway from his room, usually with a handful of toy trains. Breakfast is a routine that must include a bowl of oatmeal, scrambled eggs, and sausage. He is more flexible about lunch, especially at school, but dinner mostly involves noodles. Not long after dinner he asks on his own for a warm bath, gets himself into his PJs, and asks to be tucked into bed at just a little before 9 pm each night, always with his soft baby jaguar safely close by.

It says a lot that at the top of the list of Henry’s favorite activities is still playing hide and seek with his dad. It’s his own special version of the classic game and played inside the house with only the barest attempts at hiding.

The main point of the game and its best part is simply to be found.

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At the Pingliang Children’s Welfare Institute, the orphanage where Henry started out in western China’s Gansu Province, the number of children there has increased to 178. As has been the case for some time, nearly all the children have special needs but there are now more boys at the orphanage than girls. Some have mild or moderate issues but many have serious developmental disorders or other conditions that require special care. With so many special needs children the orphanage has traditionally had a difficult time placing children in adoptions. An international adoption agency called WACAP has been able to match a number of Pingliang children in foreign adoptions during the past year or so. In February 2013 it established an adoption partnership with the orphanage by agreeing to provide it with some modest but more regular financial support. An agency representative reports that WACAP has renewed this partnership for 2014 and will soon be receiving files for more Pingliang children eligible for adoption. Meanwhile, Love Without Boundaries (LWB) is exploring the possibility of establishing one of its Believe In Me school programs in the orphanage. LWB would likely be able to cover the set-up costs for the school but would be looking for monthly sponsors.

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How This All Began

It was a typically dusty afternoon on September 11, 2006 in a dry, hardscrabble, terraced plateau region of Gansu Province in northwest China. There in Jingchuan County south of the city of Pingliang, a driver named Tian Wu Ping had just dropped off a fare at a roadside hotel called the Tian Yuan Guest House when something caught his eye on the east side of the crossroad and next to a refuse bin.

It looked at first like a bundle of rags but turned out to be an infant wrapped in an old cotton quilt, a small baby boy who appeared to be newborn. Tian picked up the child and called the local police. The baby had been abandoned. He was missing part of his face below his nose. Born with a serious cleft anomaly, he had no bone structure between the upper bridge of his nose and his lower jaw, and no separation between his oral and nasal/sinus cavities.

Moreover, the child had been left by the roadside without the usual effects. No red cloth note indicating a birth date. No bottle, cup, or packet of formula. No infant clothes. The police drove him north to Pingliang and turned him over to the prefecture Civil Affairs Bureau, which placed him with the Pingliang City Social Welfare Institute. The staff at this orphanage named him Liang Xiao (Small) Wei (Big).

On admittance, a doctor noted that Xiao Wei was indeed just a day or two old and underweight at 5 lbs. Then this frail little child took his place among about 80 other children then at the orphanage. Another exam at five months showed that despite the issues that can accompany his condition, Xiao Wei was small but growing. So the orphanage staff posed him for a few photos and prepared a dossier of paperwork to send off to Beijing, to the China Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA), for his case to be accepted into the CCAA’s waiting child program.

China's waiting child program seeks to find homes internationally for orphaned or abandoned children with special needs that might otherwise make finding a family highly unlikely. These can include treatable medical issues such as congenital heart disease, Hepatitis B, cleft issues, or spina bifuda. Some waiting children have more severe issues.

Not all abandoned children with special needs become waiting children. Not all waiting children find homes.