And from a family traveling in May 1998: We have just returned from China with our
healthy, happy little girl!! We spent time in Nanchang where our daughter was
brought to us. We met the orphanage director from Pingxiang and she seemed to care
about our daughter. And our daughter really liked her, she cried when the director
left. She had been well taken care of and is right on target developmentally
(cooing, picking up objects, and standing with assistance). We are trying to settle
into a routine (especially a sleep routine!). We are glad to finally be home with
our daughter. (SO, 6/98)
And another: We traveled with a group of five families. Our daughter,
age 12 1/2 months, and another girl, two years old, came from Pingxiang. The girls
were both well nourished, well-cared for, sociable and right on target with developmental
milestones. We met the orphanage director who was a charming lady who seemed
genuinely fond of her charges. She gave us her address and requested pictures and
progress reports. Our daughter had been in foster care and had recently come back to
the orphanage. She is very bright, very social, adaptable and loving. She is
walking, feeding herself and babbles incessantly. So I give the Pingxiang Welfare
Institution top grades. (SK, 5/98)
We traveled to Nanchang with friends adopting through the same agency and they
adopted their new daughter at the same time. Our daughter was ten months old and
theirs was 6 months at the time of adoption. I should mention that since both of us
already have children, we both were in the "special needs" category. Although
our daughter had a diagnosis of rickets, a checkup at a pediatrician's office in Hong Kong
showed no sign of rickets. She was generally in very good health, and right on
target for her age with respect to development. (She did have a common form of
intestinal worms, however, which we were assured was very common in children from rural
China and harmless, and disappears with 3 doses of medicine.) Our friends' daughter
is cross-eyed but otherwise is also very healthy. The babies were delivered to our Hotel,
the LakeView, on our first night in the city by two wonderful aunties from the Pingxiang
orphanage, who had brought them up on the train that day and then stayed the entire week
in Nanchang as we underwent the adoption procedures there. We learned from them that both
babies had been in foster care from an early age, accounting for their excellent physical
and developmental conditions. A single friend of the other couple's had also adopted a
baby girl from the same orphanage earlier that month. It is our understanding that these
may be the first adoptions from that orphanage, and, based on some educated guesses by our
agency, it is possible that the healthiest of the "special needs" children were
chosen for us in order to maximize the orphanage's future participation in the adoption
program. We really don't know whether this statement is true or not; we are just very,
very happy that things worked out so well for both of us. We'd be happy to speak to
any families who are matched with children from that orphanage, or who are otherwise
planning on traveling to Nanchang. Dreams really do come true! (DB/JB, a. 5/98)
In October 1998 an adoptive mom writes: The name of the orphanage director is Huang Wenlan. Our daughter, Huang An (Lisette), was picked up in Shiban Village, Anyuan town, Pingxiang City and was brought to the Social Welfare House of Anyuan District of Pingxiang City. She had her own mother for her first 6 months and was abandoned, then went to the orphanage and was put into foster care for a year. We were told that her foster mother brought her back to the orphanage after the Spring Festival (Feb) and she stayed there until we got her on May 25, 1998. She was only at the orphanage for about four months where we were told they are taught "lessons and good manners" before they are adopted. I have to say that this child is one of the most outstanding children we have ever met! She is very outgoing, loves to sing and dance (and is actually quite good ! ) She has picked up most of the English language in 5 months and can verbalize a lot back to us. She is now 2 1/2 (adopted at 25 months), and is very loving and very beautiful. We were only given a picture of her when she was about 6-8 months old. She was obviously given a lot of care and is very healthy and has had a lot of investment by someone who really loved her. She knows how to be loving and has made strong attachments because she cried for the first 4 days we had her and did not talk at all for 4 days. She was obviously grieving. The Chinese entertainers who sang in our hotel lobby really interested her and she began to sing and dance and that was really all it took and she blossomed. She had no developmental delays and was in the 97 percentile for American Children her age. She weighed almost 30 pounds. The orphanage director and helper (Lisette called her "Auntie" in Chinese), traveled 4 hours that morning we got her . They brought her to the Lake View Hotel in Nanchang where we were staying. When we entered the room they picked her up and handed her to us telling her," this is your new mama and baba." (She screamed ). During our brief interview with the orphanage director , we learned very little about our daughter. It was apparent that they were very loving with her yet she didn't want to go to them. We also gave them a suitcase of new baby clothes and bags of snickers bars for the children in the orphanage which they seemed to really like. They stayed overnight and the next morning our guide told us they were looking for us to say goodbye and were very disappointed they couldn't find us . They said they hoped she would someday come back to China and visit them. We have recently sent them about 30 pictures of her new life here along with a list of questions written in Chinese. Then in Dec '98 she sends this update: What a shock when I went to the mail today and found a letter from the orphanage director from Pingxiang City. She wrote the cover page in English and said she had received our letter along with the pictures of our daughter that we sent about six weeks ago. She asked us to have the rest translated as she wrote two pages of answers to our questions about our daughter. She also sent us six pictures of her from her life there and they are priceless. Some are of her as a real little baby among her friends. It does seem like there were few children in the orphanage which was very clean. I also see in the pictures the woman who traveled with the director when they delivered her to us in Nanchang. She is holding and hugging our daughter as a little one year old. And after the letter was translated: I did have it translated and the director said she received my letter and pictures of our daughter. She said the whole staff of the orphanage delighted in seeing her so happy and were glad she now had a family. She told me the dates she was in foster care and when she came back to the orphanage. She told me that our daughter loved music and dancing (which is very true) and that she was very smart. She said she was shy at first with strangers and then very outgoing once she got to know them which took her a little while. It seemed like she knew our daughter very well. She was so pleased to get the pictures. (HL, a. 5/98)
Please e-mail me at webmaster@gurrad.com if you have any additional information or if your child is from here and you would like to post a picture here or other contact information.