The Orphanage, The Magic Thing, and Others

There is ash on my mousepad and it's roughly ninety eight degrees in here, but at the end of the day, what's not to love about going to the internet cafe?

On Friday, we went to visit an orphanage called the Philip Hayden Foundation, near Tianjin. It was quite different from what I had expected - I had thought it would be miserable, but it was actually rather pleasant. This is probably because it is not affiliated with the Chinese government - it's run by Westerners and operates through donations, also mainly from Westerners. The children, almost all of whom had some form of special needs, ranged from infants to about seven years old. The place is called the "Children's Village" and it's designed to be as nurturing as possible - we were told there's about a 2-1 ratio of children to staff. They live in houses and the staff - mostly young women from the neighboring villages - call the kids "little brother" and "little sister" and the children call the staff "auntie" or occasionally "mama." There is a nursery school that they go to, and they even have English lessons, which is handy, since for the most part adoptive families are from the States.

We hung out a little bit with the toddlers and babies - nice because they can't yet talk and neither can we. The most common disability among the children is cleft lips and palates, which the organization arranges to have fixed. Virtually all the children are eventually adopted. Although I am aware that this particular orphanage is far from typical, I found it encouraging. It was one of the best experiences I have had in China to date.

Although I've made a lot of progress since January, my Chinese is still extremely cha and I do a lot of circumlocution. I have no problem calling the remote control "the magic thing" and I flinch only slightly when I have to describe Moby Dick as "a big white fish," but yesterday I ran out of deoderant and did not think to bring a dictionary to the grocery store. To ask one of the staff to direct me to "the thing you put under your arms to avoid smelliness" was unthinkable, so I simply wandered vaguely, sweating anxiously over the possibility of spending the whole summer without any deoderant. I finally came to the conclusion that they didn't have any, which as a matter of fact ACC warned us about before we came. I don't know how I neglected to bring sufficient deoderant - I brought literally every other imaginable toiletry in abundance. The clerk at CVS was shocked and horrified. Fortunately Lili, who is going home on Sunday, offered to give me her spare deoderant, so a disaster has been averted.

I need to stop buying clothing in Beijing. I just need to give up. I feel like Alice when she ate the mushroom or whatever it was that made her really big - I tower over my teachers, and I always expect to leave footprints in the sidewalk. Yesterday on a whim I bought a shirt that turned out to be much too small (they haven't really caught onto that whole "trying things on" concept here and it's tempting to just strip - NAKED LAOWAI CAUSES DEPARTMENT STORE CHAOS - and introduce the practice myself but perhaps not). I tried to take it back, but the fuwuyuan wouldn't let me, insisting that it was not too small - "People even fatter than you can still wear it! Even fatter!" She said "even fatter" at least three times. Finally I managed to exchange it, but the whole encounter left me rather discouraged.

Since everyone else is going home in less than a week's time, it is natural that subconsiously I keep thinking I am, too. I am so very, VERY excited about my flight - I am flying British Airways, and yes, it's expensive, and yes, I have an eight hour layover in London and the whole thing will take about three days and makes no sense, but last time they gave me a Flake bar and let me watch A Bit of Fry and Laurie, so it is all okay. But in point of fact my excitement is all for naught because I am NOT going home. My adventure has only just begun! (God help me.)