The five young women sway rhythmically to the music emerging from a small, electronic keyboard in the front of the room. Some are hearing impaired, all disabled in some way, but you wouldn’t know it from watching.

Our group of 23 Mainers line the walls of the room, touched by this musical greeting to the Dream Home, a separate orphanage run by two dedicated volunteers on a single floor of the larger, government-operated Shenyang Social Welfare Institute.

The team of students and faculty members from the University of Southern Maine and L-A College will spend three days here in Shenyang, a city of 7.2 million in China’s industrial north. The team will work with the children and take them where they rarely venture – outside the walls of the institution.

There are 41 children on the Dream Home floor in this new and immaculate building, which looks, at least from the outside, like it was inspired by Disney’s Magic Kingdom.

There are pointed towers, bright red and white brickwork, a circular driveway and large expanses of green glass. The structure and grounds are clearly meant to impress.

The Dream Home, housed on the second floor, is the dream of two women, Migyeong Kang, the Korean-born director, and Elaine Hennessey, an outgoing American from Tulsa, Okla.

Kang has worked with disabled Chinese children at this home for about 10 years, and Hennessey first came here with another organization in 1999, volunteering as a clown and muralist, after retiring from a career with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.

In 2004, they began the Dream Home with 21 mentally and physically handicapped youngsters. Since then, they have received more children, including six babies with cerebral palsy.

Their own place

Kang and Hennessey currently raise private donations in Korea and in the U.S., and receive some money from church groups. From that they provide clothing and medical attention for the children, over and above what the orphanage clinic provides, and pay 15 staff members.

Their ultimate dream is to have 100 children, and to obtain a place of their own, outside of the Chinese orphanage system.

Their dream for these children – that each reaches his or her potential – may not seem ambitious by American standards. But, within the traditional Chinese system, it is. Orphans have not been thought worthy of education or of intensive medical and physical rehabilitation in the past.

The severely disabled have traditionally been isolated from the larger society in orphanages, and too often did not receive the social and practical skills that would allow them to function in society.

Kang and Hennessey would like to change that by finding a place where handicapped orphans can have gardens, raise food, be involved in a neighborhood or even find jobs.

While that goal is ambitious, their expectations are grounded in the reality of China. One crippled boy, Hennessey explains, cannot walk, but he has what we in the U.S. might call a million-dollar smile.

What, she asks, if he had a small, four-wheeled cart that he could use to push himself from place to place? His huge grin and winning personality might make him a successful panhandler, and lead to a more independent life outside the walls of an institution.

But, how would he get from his bed to his wheeled cart? Another, stronger boy, is able to lift and carry him from place to place, and they could work as a team.

“Well, it’s an idea,” she says.

Radiating love

“God has given Migyeong the love of disabled orphans in China. She fully intends to die in China, hopefully living out her life with these orphans.”

And that love, which seems to radiate from Kang and Hennessey, is apparent throughout the Dream Home, from the caregivers to the children themselves.

It is, they stress, a family, and that is apparent in the way the children relate to one another.

The visit by the USM team is important, Hennessey said, because the students get to leave the orphanage, if only for a few hours, and experience the outside world. What’s more, the Chinese public gets to see something they do not often see, the disabled orphans.

With so many helping hands and a large bus, the USM team took the children swimming one day and to an aquarium the next. Visits to a bustling McDonald’s and a Kentucky Fried Chicken, where the Dream Home students tore into their U.S. fast food, were high points of each day.

The students also spent time outdoors with the older children at the orphanage, playing basketball and jumping rope, and spent one morning making traditional Chinese dumplings by hand.

The three occupational therapists, led by L-A College faculty member Roxie Black, Ph.D., worked with the severely disabled younger children who remained at the home.

It’s also important because the Maine team arrives with a $1,200 donation raised by the students from USM who visited the home in 2006. They have since formed a group, Organization for the Betterment of Orphans Worldwide, to educate other students about the orphans’ situation.

They conducted several fundraisers to raise the $1,200, which is enough to hire a teacher for the Dream Home for one year.

Hennessey said she and Kang have tried to buy a piece of property where the Dream Home could be re-established outside the walls of the orphanage, but that has proven difficult.

In numerous cases, while they looked for funding for a potential piece of property, the property was sold. What’s more, the two women do not have permanent Chinese visas, making banks unwilling to lend them money.

Chinese tradition holds that people return to their homes on holidays. Hennessey would like to see at least some of the Dream Home’s children leave for lives in the outside world.

But, she said, they would always know that they could one day return home, to live or just for a holiday.

“We don’t want to ever abandon them again,” Hennessey said.

“God has given Migyeong the love of disabled orphans in China. She fully intends to die in China, hopefully living out her life with these orphans.”
Elaine Hennessey