At The Orphanage

Here we are in front of the Yangdong Social Welfare Institute. This is a very dismal place. We were four families that bonded together to get through this. Two other families wanted to go, but were unable to due to health issues. Here is MaMa holding Kelly and the bag of gifts we brought the orphanage. They requested blankets. The sign reads "Welcome to Our Institute".

We were only there for a few minutes, dropping off the gifts before reboarding the bus to go across town for lunch with some people from the orphanage. It was a fancy lunch at a fancy hotel. Then we went back for a partial tour of the orphanage.

This is the courtyard. We were told only photos in the courtyard, no pictures upstairs where the children were.

Here is DaDa and Kelly standing in the tiny piece of courtyard where we were told that the children play. Notice how lush the grass looks.

The entire building was covered with iron guard bars. This is the walkway directly in front of the children's wards. We were only allowed on one floor and no further. The bars curved up and over to attatch to the wall. The entire building had bars. If you looked down you see the courtyard. There were five floors in all.

As we looked into the first window of the ward we saw one baby leaning into the next crib and the baby of that crib leaning in and putting her harm around the other baby to comfort her. It was so sad we were all holding back tears.

I asked TB (a young teenager in our group), how many babies were in that one ward. He counted about 13 little ones in the first ward. I asked him how many caregivers he saw and he said one.

This is the corridor that links the outside world to the orphanage. It leads you straight into the courtyard.

The orphanage director gave out bottles to all the babies in our group. It was past Kelly's normal eating time, so we had fed her in the bus before we got there. Consequently, Kelly was in no particular hurry to finish her bottle, much to the chagrin of every orphanage employee who passed. They all stopped and tilted the bottle up to make it drain faster. We tried to tell them that she had already eaten, but the language gap prevented us getting our point across. So Kelly took a really long time to finally finish it...you can see her still taking her time with it in the "finding spot" photos.

This was directly across the street from the front door.

This is the top of the wall that surrounds the courtyard. Yes those are embedded glass shards. Security looks tight there. DaDa noticed two surveillence cameras pointing towards the front door.

This is the donation box that was in the conference room that we were initially brought into. I felt the need to show this.

Before we left, we took a group photo in front of the building.