Henry: A More Gentle Summer

Thursday, June 23, 2016

A More Gentle Summer

Henry has successfully finished 3rd grade and is having a good summer this year. He has already gone to a soccer camp and then a couple of weeks at good ol' Zoo Camp at nearby Audubon Zoo. Meanwhile he has been swimming pretty much every day and otherwise has kept himself happily entertained.

Medically he is also enjoying a much less stressful period. True, he is currently undergoing a gradual widening of his palate, having been fitted with an expander device that spans and slowly stretches the roof of his mouth, and our medical team thinks he is just about ready for bone to be grafted into the gaps around the center of his maxilla. But at least no one is rushing us to schedule the surgery within the next month or so and, amazingly, Henry seems more comfortable with his palate expander than his sisters are with their common orthodontic braces.

Mostly he is gleefully looking forward to our annual summer trip to the beach, although he sure wishes we could bring our cat.

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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.