Weirdness Not Covered in the Manual

Sunday evening, Nov. 27th, I was on my yahoo group that is for us folks that either have adopted or are adopting from the Qianjiang SWI orphanage. There was a new post by a woman who had just returned from China that week. She had adopted a child in 2005 and went back to find her "finding spot" and to visit our orphanage to take pictures and perhaps talk with care takers that may have known her daughter. What she discovered is that our orphanage is now closed and all the children that had been there were moved in mid-September! Where they were moved to...we aren't totally sure. However, we think it is the new huge facility called Chongqing Love Manor over in Chongqing. It is the largest orphanage...well, anywhere, I believe. UNICEF partnered with China to build it and are hoping it will stand as a new model for orphan care. What they are doing is hiring married couples without children to come in and live at the orphanage and form family groups. Each couple is given 2-3 children in their family groups. It is an amazing venture for China. Not all children are being put in family groups and we have no way of knowing if our little Hope is in a family group...or even in that orphanage. It is highly likely she is there though. And if she is, we'd like to believe that it is a good move for her. It's weird to think that the place I thought she was residing at when China offered her to us, she was NOT in fact residing there. I had her in my mind moving about in a multi-story pink building in Qianjiang and it had already been shut down and abandoned at the time of Hope's referral. It feels like she was moved the day I found out, when in reality she has been in the new orphanage for a little over 2 months now. It's hard to explain.

It's the not knowing that grates my nerves. I mean, I know she is being cared for somewhere. But it was nice to wrap my head around a building and location...an address if you will. As a Momma, you just want to know where your kids are. I called my social worker to give her the news. She wasn't "shocked" per se, after all we are talking about China here, but it was new news to her. She is going to check will our liaison Lily in China to see if we can get an update on Hope. She also mentioned that this transition is likely why we have yet to receive an update. Of course now, it may be even harder to get an update since they just moved 500 children to this new orphanage. Who knows if Hope was among those children. Plus with all the newness of this model and such I'm thinking updating waiting American's is not high on their list of things to do. So again...more waiting and not knowing. It wasn't like we weren't warned of weirdness in international adoption...we were warned. However, I never read in any manual or training resource that my child might be moved from the only orphanage they have ever known to some undisclosed location; mayhaps even to a location recently built by UNICEF that will serve as a new orphan care model for all of China. :0)

Having said all of this, the move and her care is not what upsets me the most. What actually upset me was the dashing of all my expectations on the rocks and the possibility losing a huge chunk of Hope's history. Well, in fact, we did lose a lot of her history now that we can never visit the functioning orphanage. Not to say that they would have let us go to the orphanage when we went to go get her. We may not have been allowed to visit and would have to make a subsequent trip to China to be able to tour it and meet the staff. Who knows if the staff would still be there if we returned years later. All these things I know. The real bummer for me is the questions book that I had made for Hope that would help give us some insight into the time she spent there. If none of her care workers followed her to the new orphanage (wherever that is) then we don't have access to anyone that previously cared for her. Hence, sending the book for the care workers to fill out for us is sorta pointless if they never knew Hope until September 2011. So my prayer is that one person, just one person is still with her that has known her from the beginning; and that we will somehow have access to that person. I wait expectantly for the miracle of knowledge to Hope's past and I realize that miracle may never come this side of heaven...but it will come.

So now I am waiting for the questions book to arrive and I have to go buy a soft sided picture book to place family pictures in, as well as some disposable cameras. Then I will box it up, send it to Lily, and then pray she gets it to Hope soon. I know this post sounds really "down" but in actuality I'm not "down" at all. I am quite settled in my spirit and I know that if God's eye is on the sparrow then he surely is looking out for our baby girl. I don't fear for her, in fact, I know that God is preparing her heart and her soul for the move to her forever family. God is faithful and good and we could not be in a better place than in his embrace. Praise be to God who was NOT surprised by this move and who likely orchestrated it anyway!