volunteering: day one

Journal entry: 5 January 2007

Our first full day in our new home and it went pretty well. I was fairly nervous about it, but it was all okay in the end. We had breakfast (yea for fruit and yoghurt!) then took off to visit the baby orphanage.

The name is a bit of a misnomer as there are many more little kids than babies. But they take babies and keep them until age 18 or until adopted. Right now, two of the babies are getting ready to be adopted by foreigners. I have mixed feelings about that because it seems a bit colonialist to come in and take the babies, but no one here adopts babies, so they are stuck there forever if the foreigners don't take them. Well, until they are 18, but that seems like forever. Their chances for a good (prosperous, educated, comfortable) life are much better if adopted by foreigners, but... still there's something about it that bothers me.

We also found out that if the father dies, the government will often take the child(ren) away from the mother and put them in the orphanage. I feel so bad for the poor mother. First she loses her husband, then her child(ren). How depressing.

The orphanage wasn't too terrible. Very different from what you'd see in the States (do we even have orphanages there?). All the buildings are concrete with barred windows (this is the main style of building for everything). They form a rectangle around the playground which is about 40 ft by 25 ft. There are some metal swings, bench-style, and a TV, a teeter-totter and a small play structure with a slide and a couple of swings. Very minimal. Most of it is on cement, but the play set is on a softer rubber material. They also brought out some toys (volunteers hold the key to the cupboard) and the kids flipped out, they were so excited.

There were about 10 kids little kids there, from 3-12 years old. Most were 4-6 years old, it seemed. Then there were six babies if I remember correctly.

We'd ridden bikes out there (Leah, me and Claire) and got there 5 minutes before Jo, my kids and Yen, the organizer. When Stuart and Audrey first arrived it was a bit shocking for them. The orphan kids just gathered around and stared. It took about five minutes or so before they loosened up and everyone started playing together. Stuart was great with the kids--just as I'd expected. He played chase and catch and gave them airplane rides. It was awesome to watch them all play. Audrey latched onto Trinh, a small girl in a yellow hat, and a set of twins [Thao and Trang]. She seemed very happy and that was great to see.

It was a hard decision to do this and was especially hard to do at the end, but we managed somehow and it seems to be working.