A Visit to a Village

November 9, 2004

Today was a free day which meant there was no offical adoption business to take care of. Our agency arranged a bus to take us to a village. In China there are villages, counties and cities, so depending upon how many people live in an area will determine whether it is a village, county or city. My daughter came from Nanfeng which is a county. A city is the biggest and a village is the smallest.

Our adoption agency wanted us to see what village life is like for people in China. Seeing their everyday life will help us to understand the living conditions and see whay people cannot keep their babies. Most abandoned children come from families that live in villages.

To say that the village we visited was poor would be an understatement of epidemic proportions. People do not have heat or indoor plumbing. The homes do not have doors and the windows do not have glass. They are just open holes in the homes. Children were playing and there were chickens clucking around. Everything is over run with weeds. It looked like a ghost town except that people still lived here.

When we arrived, the children came running over to see us. I felt self conscious about walking around. I was essentially a voyeur and I did not want to gawk and yet I did. The people were gracious and invited us into their homes. They were very proud of how clean they kept the dirt floors and their cooking utensils.

One of the families we traveled with had a huge bag of candy and tossed it to the children in the village. The kids were so excited to get the candy. They smiled from ear to ear. When we left the children followed after us and waved. They were just kids being kids, but it struck me that they really did not know that they were poor. That was their life and all they knew, so I suppose it was just business as usual for them. The kids did not seem unhappy and yet when I saw where and how they lived, I just wanted to cry.

They lived in such squalor...You know that people are poor, but to see it so up close and personal...As difficult as it was to see and smell, I am glad that I experienced it. Now I have a better understanding of perhaps the circumstnaces that brought my daughter to be abandoned as she was. I imagine that my daughter may have come from such abject poverty as I witnessed. I am glad that she will not have to live like that, but I am saddened to know that there are countless people who live this existence every day.