Thursday, July 27, 2006

Thank you for praying for our Gracie! We can tell that so many of you are because she is doing much, much better. I think that the visit to the SWI did her good. We took our sweet Grace yesterday down to breakfast and were surprised at how much she calmed down while she ate. Her updates had told us that she did get very excited when she saw food, and it is proving to be accurate! After breakfast, we met David our guide in the lobby and he told us that the Civil Affairs Officials had said in order for us to visit the orphanage, we would need to go with an official to Yizhou. They had sent the head of the Guangxi civil affairs to talk with us, and then introduced the official who would accompany us, who turned out to be the very woman who had done all of our adoption interviews. That was a tiny bit stressful, as I wondered if the entire time she would be watching to see if we were good parents and if Gracie was happy with us. Also, David told us that we were not only the first Americans to visit the orphanage, but the first FAMILY ever to be granted permission by Civil Affairs to visit in the orphanage’s 48 year history! Upon hearing that, we REALLY felt pressure to not let future families down! I worried that if the visit went poorly or Gracie reacted very poorly, that they might never again allow families to visit. Ugh.

The drive via minivan was beautiful, and Gracie was very peaceful. She loves to be on the go, in the car, the bus, on a walk. She slept a bit, and snacked a bit, and was a very good little girl. The drive only turned out to be 4 hours long, which was a blessing. We went through the most beautiful countryside, with incredible mountain vistas and lush greenery all around. John and I both agreed that just to see that part of China was worth the drive. Upon entering the city gates, we saw the orphanage director and three of his assistants waiting outside their van for us. We couldn’t believe that they had waited in the hot, hot sun all morning just to welcome us at the gates. We followed them through Yizhou to the orphanage and saw as we entered two of Gracie’s nannies holding a long red banner that said, “Welcome back to the Yizhou orphanage, Fu Qing Rong and her family!” Incredible! They had only 24 hours notice for our trip and had gone to so much effort to welcome us! It was overwhelming. All the staff was there to greet us with a touching reception under their courtyard pagoda with fruit (yes, we ate the fruit!) and bottled water. All the nannies came out in matching outfits to welcome Gracie and meet us and take a picture with us. Grace surprised us by only crying a little at this point, and when one of the nannies asked her to come into her arms, she shook her head, no!, and stayed with me.

After the reception, we went with the head staff and director to a local restaurant on the river that flows through Yizhou, for a banquet lunch in a special room they had prepared. There were so many dishes! John’s favorite was the chicken they started out with to welcome us, as they said it is a Yizhou custom to give the honored guests this special dish….a boiled chicken, with head and feet included! If you could have only seen John’s face as he dug into his chicken while everyone looked on. It was priceless! :) That was followed by about 12 dishes. At this point, Gracie started full on screaming. Both John and I were sweating buckets, and I could not get her to stop screaming. I stood up, while everyone was eating, and danced her around the room, and tried bottles, chips, candy, nothing worked. Finally, one of her former nannies asked, “Can I please take her?” and Grace went right into her arms and stopped crying. She took her out of the party room, and in a few minutes came back in to say she was eating with another nanny and had told them that she was so sad because she had seen her nannies and friends. She also said she was hungry. :) After lunch, she came back to me, a little reluctantly, but she came nonetheless and let me hold her.

We then went to see Gracie’s finding spot with the staff, who had all been at the orphanage when she had arrived. They said they all remembered her coming and that the director had given her her name. WE drove to a quarry, way out of town, down a lonely road, and when we arrived, we heard a huge boom, where they had just blown up some dynamite on the mountain. It was such a desolate place. There was a flat little patch of ground at the entrance to the quarry, where she had been found. They said that that was a popular place to leave babies, because there is little risk in being discovered, and also because trucks go in and out of the quarry all day, allowing the babies to be found quickly. I can only imagine what her dear birth mother must have gone through to leave her sweet baby in this place.

After that, we went to an air-conditioner store for us to buy an air-conditioner to give to the orphanage. The entire staff went and it was hilarious to hear all seven of them bargaining over the price with the store owner. He finally came down enough that we could purchase two air-conditioning units for the children’s area. They were so grateful, and kept saying, “Thank you for your love!” They took us to a beautiful place in Yizhou where we took pictures in front of a famous statue and climbed up to a temple that overlooked the city. Here they presented us with yet ANOTHER thank you gift, a small statue of the famous statue. I felt like it was so backwards, as we were the ones feeling so thankful for all they had done to raise our beautiful little girl. They kept saying, Thank you, thank you, and then we would say, no, thank YOU, thank YOU! :)