Tao Hua (left) and fellow volunteer Mei Lina with toddlers at the Jiaozuo Children’s Welfare Institute in Henan Province. Photo: Courtesy of Tao Hua
“Wait, you have a mom?” Qing Qing asked me one day. She was fascinated by the fact that I had my own cell phone and asked me who I called, to which I nonchalantly replied my mom. It never occurred to me that she might think I was an orphan as well, and I found her question tough to answer.
Qing Qing is just one of over 200 children who live at the Jiaozuo Children’s Welfare Institute in Henan Province. This summer, through Harvard China Care, I was offered an amazing opportunity to volunteer at this orphanage.
Official records often do not account for the total number of orphaned and abandoned children in China, but estimates say that there are anywhere from 20,000 to 50,000 children today living in Chinese orphanages. With the most recent figure of over 100,000 orphaned children, it would seem that very few are actually in any type of institutional care.
For three weeks at the beginning of the summer, I, along with two other interns, traveled to Jiaozuo not knowing what kind of an experience to expect.
Upon my arrival on May 17, many aspects of the orphanage itself impressed me. Over the past few years, Jiaozuo’s orphanage was completely renovated and opened its new doors on Children’s Day last summer. It has since become a model orphanage with 10 floors, hardworking ayi, who watch the children day and night, a physical therapy room and even a school for the elder children.
The children at the orphanage range from newborns who had just arrived to 13-year-olds who had lived there for almost their entire lives.
“Although this place is termed ‘orphanage,’ we suspect that most of the children here are not orphans, but rather children abandoned by their parents because of the burden the children potentially posed due to their disabilities,” said Mei Lina, one of my fellow volunteers.
Disappointing aspects
The third floor was dedicated to 25 children, all around 5 to 6 years old and suffering from some type of mental or physical disability. While some spent their days in physical therapy learning how to walk, most never left their cribs. Some of the children on this floor had Down Syndrome while others were incapable of sitting up because of extremely weak muscles.
While I was happy that they were personally fed each day and had their clothes changed every two days, there were aspects that disappointed me. Individual attention for these children was hard to come by, with only two ayi to watch over all of them, so the majority of them did not know how to talk. At their age, it seemed too late to learn and I only wish that they had been given the chance to learn when they were younger.
One of my favorite aspects of the entire experience was interacting with the older kids who went to school on the fifth floor and lived on the 10th floor of the orphanage. They were between 6 and 13 years old and most had been in the orphanage since they were toddlers.
In their classrooms, they learned simple math, Chinese, English, music and even went down to the computer room once a week for typing class. I was happy to see that they were learning, but I desperately wished that they had the chance to attend a real school with other kids their age.
A place to call home
The children treated each other like brothers and sisters and were always there for each other, whether to push somebody’s wheelchair or help out with the day’s art activity. Having lived in an orphanage setting for so long, the kids were often curious about the simplest things relating to the “outside” world.
I realized that there were many things that I personally took for granted that these children had never even been exposed to. The day that we taught them fruit words in English, for example, we realized that while they knew what most of the fruits looked like, many of them had never tasted any of them.
As time passed, it was clear to us that the orphanage was a well-funded, resourceful and very clean place. But according to Mei, “It is, also, unfortunately, innately flawed: It is a school, a playground, a dormitory, but it is not a place that the children can call ‘home.’”
It saddens me to think that most of these kids may never know the true feeling of a family or a place to call home. As the children grow elder, they reach the age when they are rarely adopted. For children with more severe mental disabilities, it is expected that they might not even live to the age of 20.
There is a part of me that will always remember my experiences at the orphanage. My main goal was to make them happy during my stay, and I can only hope that I have helped make a difference in their lives.
Tao Hua, 19, is a freshman at Harvard University