For an inside look at life in a Chinese orphanage, this book by Kay Bratt, Silent Tears; A Journey of Hope in a Chinese Orphanage, is a real eye-opener. You can read an excerpt on the author's website. I have been reading about adoption for many years, but I wanted to know more about what life in an orphanage is like. None of our adoptions up to this point have involved at child who has been in an institution. During our Guatemalan adoption process, we paid for our boys to live with foster families, and we brought Catherine home from the hospital where she was born. Now that we are in process to adopt a child who has lived her entire life in an orphanage, it was important for me to understand where she is coming from. This book is one woman's experience with one orphanage, but it gave me a good idea of what Therese's daily life could be like. I'm glad that the other moms who have adopted children from Therese's orphanage have said that while their children were quite malnourished, they felt that people there had cared about them, and they have attached well to their new parents. Children from poor orphanages who had loving caregivers do better than children from well-funded ones that didn't have it.
Silent Tears shows what it is like to be a small child who was discarded by their family, living in an institution where there are too few nannies, sometimes not enough food to go around, and where some children just lie in their cribs, only to be taken out for baths. I have heard that the death rate for infants in many orphanages has been up to 80 percent. For a child with a disability like a cleft lip/cleft palate that made feeding difficult, simple starvation was more likely than possible. Many children are abandoned because they need medical care, and orphanages often lacked the funds to provide surgeries, or were forced to choose only a few to send to the hospital. After reading about the babies in the book who had heart problems, many of whom died because they did not get surgery, I am thankful that Therese's orphanage sent her to the hospital for repair of her spina bifida. Lack of heating and hygiene issues caused illnesses to spread rapidly among the babies, especially in the winter. Of the many sad things in the book, the most tragic lack for the babies was lack of love. Some of the children just gave up their will to live, with no one ever touching them or showing them love. In many orphanages, conditions have continually improved, partly because of the required orphanage donation that all adoptive parents pay. Only about half of orphanages in China are involved in international adoption, so information about conditions in the others is probably inaccessible. Since we just finished orphan awareness month in November, it is important to make people aware. I recommend this book--not all of it is easy to read, but it shows how a group of expatriates living in China were able to make a difference for many of the children. Not everyone is called to adopt, but we are all called to do something.
