The ZKO team has arrived to China safe and sound! Our flights were perfect, no delays, and thank goodness our entire luggage made it safely!
We are truly sorry for the delay in getting this first post off to all of you. We know you have been anxiously waiting. We arrived at our hotel very late Wednesday night and were able to get about 4 hours of sleep before we had to be back up and running. We traveled back to the Beijing airport to travel down to a little town called Taiyuan.We were greeted by our translators and then off we went for the ride of our lives. The Taiyuan orphanage is far outside the city limits and so the taxi drivers decided that they wanted to take some short cuts to help make the cab fare a little more profitable for them. I have traveled in many different cities and villages in China, but I have never had the experience of driving down back alleys and going through unpaved roads that looked like dirt bike paths. Needless to say, we could have used a monster truck for the ride and has given new meaning to the word adventure!
Upon our arrival, the RN’s set up to do some training for some of the 300 orphanage foster families. There are very few children in the orphanage itself as most are placed into foster care. We were given a tour of the orphanage and were able to visit with some of the babies and a few of the toddler/sn children. The older non-special needs children were all in school which was encouraging as well. While Taiyuan does not have a lot of money, they have done a very good job with what little they do have. The children, including the special needs children, are sent to foster families so they can have the opportunity of receiving the love of a family. What was even more impressive is that their foster program is not funded by any outside source. They use the money that they receive from the govt. to pay these families, which isn’t much. So the families who sign up to foster these children are doing so simply as a labor of love.
The RN’s trained all morning and then we broke for lunch. The director took us back into the city, taking the paved roads of course, and we had a wonderful lunch with a wide variety of Chinese dishes. It was all very good. We then went back to the orphanage where the RN’s did training for a few more hours. The afternoon proved to be a lot of fun, as the foster moms were introduced to CPR for the very first time. Unlike here in America, the concept of CPR is a foreign concept. Only a few medical professionals in China even know what it is. The expressions on their faces were priceless! They were so excited to try their newly learned skills on the dolls that the RN’s brought. As you can see from the pictures, they had a lot of fun learning. It was very rewarding to know that even though we were far out in a remote little village in China, there are now people there who could save a life if someone were choking or needed CPR. I will never complain about the CPR class that I had to take for our adoption ever again.
Tomorrow we will be traveling to New Day Creations. They are located about 45 minutes outside of Beijing. We will be touring their facility, as well as doing training for their foster mothers. If you are not aware of this organization, I would encourage you to check out their website. They are one of my favorite charities in China. They are a privately run foster care facility. They go out into the various orphanages in China and offer to take in special needs children who require some type of corrective surgery. Their website is http://www.newdaycreations.com/foster/ After they have received their surgeries, they are placed for international adoption. 100% of their children are adopted into forever families.
Thanks again for following along on our journey, please keep the prayers going for our team. The trip has certainly been a smooth one so far and we know that those prayers are what makes the difference.
The ZKO Team
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