This delayed our flight about an hour. When we got off the plane we were out in the middle of the runways, so we had to wait for a bus to take us back to the terminal. Once we got in the terminal, we wandered around until we found where we needed to go - to the back of a line two hours long! This was where they checked our passports. Then we found our luggage and tried to find the way out. Baggage claim at the Hong Kong airport seemed to stretch out endlessly in all directions. The best advice I could give to someone traveling there is to pick the point farthest from where you are - that is where you'll need to go. It took us about 15 minutes to find an exit and wait in line to have some money exchanged into Hong Kong dollars. (The exchange rate was about HK$1 = 13 cents US.) Then we had to get a taxi to get to the hotel - the line for taxis was long enough to stretch around a city block! The area was fenced off to form a single-file snaking line, which helped keep things orderly. It reminded us of lines for rides at Six Flags - not an image one necessarily wants to have when waiting for a taxi in a foreign country. When we got to the front of the line, our bags were placed in the first waiting taxi. The taxi driver we got spoke no English, so we showed him the business card for the hotel (which Holt had provided, bless them) and he got us there in one piece.
The hotel we stayed at was
the YMCA, or Hotel Salisbury. Yes, we had worried a little about staying
at the Y, but our fears were unfounded. It was a very nice high-rise hotel
just like you'd find anywhere in the US. The rooms were clean and the service
was nice - they didn't go out of their way to make you feel at home, but
they were always helpful when asked. And after all, what more could you
want for this trip? The view out our window was great, as you can see.
By that time it was about 10 PM. We called our contact with Holt (Les Whittle, a wonderful British gentleman) and found out we were the last arrivals. We then struggled through getting a dinner in the hotel restaurant, where no one seemed to understand us. Luckily, pointing is the universal language and we got what we asked for eventually. Then Susan stayed in the room while I took a short walk.
Even at 11 PM on a Sunday night the streets of Hong Kong are crowded! Shops were still open, and the tailors, especially, stood outside their shops trying to sell you whatever they could. Of course, it was nowhere near as crowded as it was during the day, as we found out when we ventured out the next morning to go and apply for our Chinese visas.
Applying for a visa in a foreign country is not the easiest thing in the world. As a matter of fact, just finding the office can be daunting. We hooked up with another couple, Don and Janice Regier from Dallas, Texas, who were traveling with their teenage daughter, Heidi, and went in search of the office, which was only a few blocks from the hotel. We were expecting an official-looking building, but when we got to the address it was a small office building that housed various businesses. One of the businesses was a travel agency and, as usual, there was a person standing outside pushing flyers about the agency onto all passersby. Contrary to my usual action when accosted on the street, I actually took the flyer. It advertised that the travel agency also handled visas. We crowded into an unsafe elevator to ride to the fourth floor. There we had to pay a small fee and leave our passports until the next day. I sure didn’t want to leave my passport, but it seemed to be standard operating procedure.
That evening we met up with the other couples and went to dinner at a restaurant recommended by Craig Snow, Holt's main representative in the China program. It was called the American restaurant, which sounded pretty safe. When we got there after a twenty-minute ferry ride and a walk of 20 blocks or so, we found that the restaurant was not American in the least - it was a "typical" Chinese restaurant. This meant that we were expected to eat with chopsticks and the meals were served "family style" on a lazy susan in the center of the table for everyone to sample. I think we ended up with the normal experience for "family style" eating - everyone ordered whatever they wanted for themselves, there was a minimum of sharing, and there was a lot of food left over. It would have been difficult enough to get a real family to agree on everything to be shared, much less a bunch of people who had just met one another.
The next day, Tuesday the 24th, we did some shopping, including the beautiful dress Amy is wearing in the first picture of her in The Beginning. We also picked up our visas, and then prepared for the trip to Fuzhou. We were one of eight couples getting daughters from the Nanping orphanage this trip. Two were from Tennessee, one from North Carolina, one from Montana, one from Colorado, one from California and one from Hawaii. There had been one group through Holt to go to Fuzhou before us, but one of that group was local, so we had heard the lowdown. We told everyone in our group that the previous group had arrived at the hotel in Fuzhou and been told that the babies had already arrived and they had twenty minutes to prepare. Therefore all of us were anticipating that the same would happen with us. Naturally, it was not so. We found out from Craig Snow on the bus trip to the airport that most of the babies would not be there and that we would be making a three-hour train ride the following day to the orphanage to pick them up. (The Regier's daughter, Hannah, was from Longyan rather than Nanping, and she would arrive at the hotel shortly after we did.) This meant that we would not be distracted during the plane ride into China by thoughts of the imminent arrival of our daughters. Nothing would distract us from our terror of traveling by China Eastern airlines.
This plane ride, and the others in China, were not as bad as they could have been. I guess that since I’ve only been flying in the past five years, I find thirty or forty year old aircraft intimidating. Although they were cramped (no leg room to speak of), the flight and the landing were as smooth as any I've had. We arrived in Fuzhou about 9 PM and were taken to the Lakeside hotel, a hotel that obviously catered to Westerners. Jan, our facilitator and guide for the time we were in Fuzhou, pointed out several of the sights (in the dark) as we rode.
When we got to the hotel we were told to meet in Jan's room in about a half an hour so that she could describe what the following days would hold for us. When we got to the room, we found the Regiers were there with Hannah. Don, Janice and Heidi were all teary-eyed (Hannah was most definitely not), and everyone else was a little misty in anticipation of receiving their daughters the next day. I was beyond misty - there was definitely some precipitation there.
We got about four or five hours
of sleep, and then the morning of the 25th we packed into a bus and went
to the train station. We had to wait about a half an hour for the train,
and it was great to have the Zebrowski's young daughter, Kristin, there
to distract us. Kristin had been adopted from Nanning the year before,
and was very well-behaved the entire trip, especially considering that
she was approaching the "terrific twos". We got on a very nice, clean train
and rode for three hours to Nanping, which was up in the mountains. You
can imagine how the anticipation was eating at us.
The countryside was beautiful, though. As could be expected, based on the size of the population, there seemed to be no untended land. Every inch was inhabited or farmed. The picture here, taken from the train window, illustrates how well-tended the countryside looked.
When we arrived in Nanping, a "town" of 300,000 we were let out
several tracks over from the station, which looked like a station for a
much smaller American town.
We
were directed to pile into two vans, which took us along a mile or two
of unpaved road along the train tracks. There was construction going on
everywhere. It seemed that every building we saw was either being torn
down or put up - a lot of times the buildings being erected were being
built from the materials of those torn down. The vans stopped by this building
that looked like it had been bombed - piles of rubble were everywhere.
We were afraid that this was the orphanage, but we were then told the orphanage
was across the tracks. Scrambling and picking our way across, we saw a
stone fence which surrounded a large area. Susan and I were the second
and third people through the gate and we saw a concrete walkway through
manicured shrubbery leading to a set of buildings in the distance. I had
the camera and was taking pictures when Susan said, "I think those are
our babies up there." Standing in front of one of the buildings was a line
of eight women holding babies. It was an emotional moment (So emotional
that the picture I took is blurred and doesn't do the moment justice).
Before we could get to the babies, however, they ushered us aside to a conference room. They wanted us to have tea before we saw our babies. Well, that was the furthest thing from any of our minds, but we were polite and drank some. Don't even ask how it tasted or how hot it was. I'm sure I couldn't tell you. After about ten minutes of us milling around, getting our still and video cameras ready, we were told the babies were on their way. They then started to bring the babies in one by one.
Dave and Carol Robertson got their little Robyn first. After that
it got kind of crazy because everyone could start to recognize their daughter
as she was brought through the door.
It
was easy to spot Amy because she had the most hair. That had been about
the only obvious thing that could be discerned from the picture we had
gotten. What we weren’t prepared for was how tiny she was (and is). We
had heard that she weighed about ten pounds at the age of six months -
but here it was three and a half months later and she was still only about
ten pounds! She was so small, yet felt so right in our arms. She didn’t
cry that much. I guess she was mostly stunned by everything that was going
on. Unlike babies placed in foster care, there was no grieving on the babies'
part (although there were tears in the eyes of the caregivers). These children
were emotionally limited due to the circumstances of their institutionalization,
but they bloomed under the constant attention that was now available to
them from their new parents. (By the way, thanks to Richard and Julie Keaton
for getting the pictures of us receiving Amy - I can't believe they had
the presence of mind to shoot these when they were seconds from receiving
their own beautiful daughter, Danielle.)
We got some pictures of her with her primary caregiver. This woman
was responsible for Amy and three other little girls.
After
about ten minutes, they came back through and took the babies away from
us again. They had fixed lunch for us and thought we’d enjoy it more without
the little ones to distract us. That lunch would have had to have been
tremendous to make us forget our babies were somewhere near, and this lunch
was not. Meats I would not care to try to identify, much less eat, were
served on a bed of rice along with a fried egg. (Chicken egg? Who knows?)
We all ate something in order not to insult our hosts. As a matter of fact,
one woman stood in the doorway, grinning all the time as we ate, and we
figured she must have been the proud cook. Dave Robertson, the one adventurous
soul among us, ate nearly everything served to him, and he was sick by
the next evening.
After picking at our food, we got our babies back, stepped outside
and prepared to leave the orphanage. 
As we waited, we saw some of the other
children playing in the courtyard. We were not able to see the place where
Amy slept and spent most of her time, but one couple did sneak into the
building. They found a room that smelled strongly of disinfectant. The
babies slept three to a crib. We
were so glad to be getting Amy out of that environment, but we wish that
it was possible to help all of them.
I think often of the children pictured here and wonder if they
have found homes of their own. At those times I go and give Amy a big hug.
We all piled into the van and rode back to the station. Even though the roads were in horrible conditions and we were bounced all over the place, Amy fell asleep in my arms. As you can imagine, I felt pretty good about that.
The wife of the director of the orphanage, a Mrs. Lin, rode back with us to Fuzhou. Robyn Robertson was obviously her favorite and that did not make it easy for the new parents of the girl. Every time that Robyn cried, Mrs. Lin was there to take her away from Dave and Carol. For about two to two and a half hours of the return trip Dave and Carol did not have their baby. When Robyn finally calmed down enough for Dave and Carol to take her, Mrs. Lin looked for another baby to snatch for awhile. She found Amy.
We had been getting to know our little girl for a couple of hours when we decided that it was time to change her. This was when we really found out how small Amy was. In 80-degree weather, she was wearing a long T-shirt, a thick cardigan sweater, and a quilted sweatsuit with wool socks. Some Chinese people seem to believe that most sickness is directly attributable to exposed skin, so they cover the babies in the hottest of weather until they sweat themselves into little puddles. The pants to the sweatsuit were split through the crotch and rags are stuffed up in the pants for use as a makeshift diaper. These rags are not fastened in any way, so Amy was just not ready for Pampers. She voiced her opinion of them, very loudly.
We then decided that maybe a bottle would calm her down. We tried to feed her but she didn’t recognize the disposable Playtex bottle we had as being something she could get food from. So she examined the bottle top and bottom and could find no way to get the formula inside. This frustrated her terribly and she began to cry again.
We asked Mrs. Lin (through an interpreter) what kind of bottle was used in the nursery, since it was obvious that Amy didn’t know this kind of nipple. She took this as her cue to take Amy away from us and force the bottle into her mouth until she finally drank from it. In hindsight, we're grateful that Amy would now take the bottle with no fuss, but the harsh treatment of Amy was not what we wanted to see from orphanage personnel. We did not appreciate Amy being taken away at all - we wanted to be the ones to feed Amy now. We got Amy back as we were pulling into the station back at Fuzhou and we were very leery of anyone else handling her for a while.
We got Amy back to the hotel and the first thing we did was to give her a bath. She hated it. She screamed and went as rigid as a board. Happily, she likes baths a good bit more now. She slept through the night that night, but that was the last time for several weeks.