Students come face to face with harsh realities, and see that care in the Chinese orphan system is uneven at best.

The bus rumbled down a dusty road outside a Chinese city. Dirty stone shacks lined the road, and sediment from the nearby limestone quarries and cement factories had deposited a thick layer of gritty powder on everything.

Our bus wheeled into a white-tiled compound that had the feel of a colonial military outpost. There was a gate and guardhouse and two courtyards formed by walls of rooms facing inward.

While it had a spartan look, it’s an orphanage for children, and our team of 23 Mainers would spend three sobering days here.

The children gathered excitedly in their matching red T-shirts, advertising a Japanese sports team, to sing us a song of greeting.

Our team of students and faculty members from the University of Southern Maine came bearing gifts – buckets of sidewalk chalk for drawing, small containers of bubble-blowing liquid, large bottles of vitamins and medical supplies.

Breaking into the chalk, the USM students and faculty members were quickly mobbed by black-haired children, all grabbing for a few of the large, colorful sticks.

Some of the children ran with their chalk, older kids took chalk from younger kids, and chaos seemed to prevail for at least the first few minutes.

The children were eager to get their hands on any object, whether it was a bottle of water, chalk or a dangling camera. Much of the chalk seemed to quickly disappear as children ran and hid pieces they hoped to keep.

“They are just trying to survive,” said L-A College occupational therapy professor Roxie Black, who was on her second year of visits to Chinese orphanages. This was the worst she had seen.

“The older ones are grabbing from the younger ones, and then the younger ones are scurrying to find somebody that they can grab their chalk from,” she said.

But, soon, the USM students and the orphans were drawing on a hot cement pad that served as a playground in the center of the compound. The youngsters tried to copy the smiley faces drawn by the students or the word “Hi.”

Short on staff

Peering inside various orphanage rooms, it became apparent that the staff at this orphanage was much more shorthanded than the orphanage we had left behind a day earlier. On the ground floor, cribs lined the walls of small concrete rooms.

We arrived at lunchtime on the first day and the youngest children, sometimes three to a crib, were standing and clutching the top metal rails. A caretaker was going from child to child, up and down the line, putting a spoonful of food in each mouth from the same bowl of soft food.

In other rooms, two infants with cerebral palsy were sleeping on dirty looking bamboo mats in cribs unadorned with toys or the hanging mobiles often used to distract and stimulate youngsters.

In some of the rooms, there were ceiling fans; in others there were none. The walls were unadorned concrete, and looked as if they had not been painted in many years. There were no toys, balls or sports equipment for the older children.

“I was just aware of how inhospitable this environment was for the children,” Black later said. “The rooms were barren, and there was nothing apparent for play.”

Many of the children were bright-eyed and engaged with the students, but others stood warily to the side.

“The other thing I noticed was the vacuous look on the faces of the little ones,” said Black, “even when they were clinging to one of our students, there was not any appearance of interaction skills or awareness.”

Three boys sat on a nearby bench, rocking back and forth, a symptom Black called “self-stimulation.” Children do this when they are not sufficiently stimulated by toys, their caregivers or their environment.

In the center of the compound stood one new piece of durable plastic play equipment, recently donated by a charitable group. Next to it stood a rusted metal play set, complete with broken metal pipes with sharp, jagged ends.

Trip into town

The children were eventually loaded aboard our tour bus and deposited at a small amusement park in the city. Each team member was assigned one child, and it was about all each could do to keep track of their child.

The children scurried from ride to ride in the sweltering heat, dragging their volunteers behind them. There was noise, and music and laughter. While the kids seemed to love it all, their adult caretakers seemed overwhelmed.

Lunch was at the local Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, and the children ate ravenously, wolfing down chicken nuggets, French fries and ice cream cones.

When several of the younger children were led to a restroom, they promptly squatted and urinated on the floor, completely unfamiliar with Western-style plumbing fixtures. One young girl squatted on her chair in the restaurant and, before anyone could stop her, urinated.

Before we left, a young man working for the orphanage gathered up any uneaten scraps of food or drink, and packed it all in a plastic bag to return to the orphanage.

Later that night, the team members met in small groups in their hotel rooms to share their feelings about the day. Most said they were stunned and saddened by what they had seen.

Melissa Kopka, a fourth-year communications major from Amherst, N.H., said it had been a difficult day. “I didn’t expect this,” she said. “It’s a lot poorer. … To be so plain, to have more than one baby per crib and to have babies crying and being spoon-fed … that seemed more like something you’d see on TV or a movie.”

That evening, the team members, despite being drained by their day at the orphanage, came up with a plan. In the morning, they would go shopping for the posters, toys and electric fans they knew would make a difference.

Still, everyone was feeling depressed and sorry for these children.

“It just felt hopeless,” Black said, knowing that three days of visits was unlikely to change the operation of this orphanage. “It’s going to take such an influx of staff and people to educate the staff, to make a difference for those children.”

Editor’s note

The name and location of the orphanage described in this story were left out due to fears that negative media reports could harm efforts to help these children.

‘The other thing I noticed was the vacuous look on the faces of the little ones, even when they were clinging to one of our students, there was not any appearance of interaction skills or awareness.’
Roxie Black, Ph.D.
‘I didn’t expect this… to have more than one baby per crib and to have babies crying and being spoon-fed. That seemed more like something you’d see on TV…’
Melissa Kopka

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