Henry: Willow

Friday, April 24, 2015

Willow

Not long after our last post we learned that Love Without Boundaries (LWB) could no longer continue our special medical projects program or its other programs at the Pingliang Children’s Welfare Institute, the orphanage where Henry started out in western China’s Gansu Province. We suspected that the logistics of monitoring them, based in a region that, admittedly, is a little out of the way, were just too difficult. Still, this was a tough pill since there were so many special needs children there.

It sadly felt like we had finally left them behind.

But we agreed to move on and instead sponsor care for a frail little girl, just a few months old, who had recently been admitted to the Anhui Healing Home, the organization's small home-like medical facility that accepts infants in need of medical intensive care from orphanages throughout Anhui Province further to the industrial east. Her name was Willow. She had a cleft palate with no cleft lip that could easily be addressed. She also had a heart defect. After a couple of months she seemed to be gaining. Then in the early winter she contracted pneumonia. After a few weeks the staff thought she had beaten the illness but one day, still very frail, she died.

We never met her but we knew little Willow through what we knew our own three children went through after each had also been abandoned as a infant. Willow too had been a precious gift to the planet, and certainly to the healing home staff in the brief time they were able to care for her. She reminded us to stop and think more often about just how many children there are in the world who desperately need help and how important that help can be.

We offered to sponsor another Anhui child, a little guy with a whopper of a cleft much like Henry's. As a result he has just had a first-stage lip repair. And we remain hopeful that LWB can find enough sponsors to someday return to Pingliang in Gansu Province to establish one of its Believe In Me school programs within the orphanage there.

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The music with this post is a piece titled Summer of Jiamusi and is performed by Jia Peng Fang.

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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.