A broken heart

This morning, we made it early, over to one of the houses that the children live in, to take pictures of the morning rituals. At 10:00 p.m. tonight, the day is already a blur, so the next details may be out of order. We hung out for worship with our group, had lunch and then met up with a physical therapist and shadowed her to The Clinic where the children with the biggest need for medical attention stay. The interns name was Iris, she is doing her schooling and having on the job training. She did a marvelous job doing play therapy with the kids. One cultural difference between Chinese parenting and American is that many Chinese tend not to "play" with their kids. The nannies resist getting out toys for the kids, and do not get on the floor and interactively play. So, watching the PT's engage these kids and seeing how they loved to learn was great. Many of the younger kids had gone outside to have playtime, so Brian and I went over to take pictures and hang out with the kids. There is a huge playstructure (probably around a $40,000 US) but they do not use it. We loured a few kids over to it, and gradually, more and more became intrigued and joined in the fun. They had obviously not been even, down the slide because most of them were scared. The nannies did not seem pleased, but the kids were the happiest I'd ever seen. It was some of the greatest moments, watching these kids have such great joy.
The other blog worthy event came about when we were in Samartan's House, AKA The Clinic. We had met Mei Mei/Tiffany, a four year old girl who has a heart issue and due to that, her fingers and lips are blue and her legs and arms are stick like. It was explained that due to the work that her heart is doing, it becomes difficult for patients with heart issues to get enough caloric intake to gain weight. Mei Mei cannot walk, but walks on her knees, but mostly rides around on a little car so she can go from room to room. I later asked someone what her prognosis was and I was informed that she had an inoperable heart condition. It absolutely caught me off guard. The many needs that these children have, most are fixable. To hear that this beautiful little girl had no hope for a better life, just knocked me to the ground. It broke my heart and consumed my thoughts today.
We finished the day with our final dinner as a team. The Valley Fourth team is leaving tomorrow. It was great Chinese food and we got to have several dishes we'd never had before. Tomorrow we will be shadowing the Doctor (Dr. Moody), then work on setting up our "studio" and begin doing portrait shots of many of the kids for our book.
Good Night from China....Gretchen & Brian