KCWI revisited

It is harder for me to blog now that we are home.  I work full-time outside the home and evenings are spent playing with the kids, getting school stuff ready for the next day, or helping the boys with something they need.  As a result, I don't have easy access to the pictures we take until the weekends or until I upload them to Shutterfly.  So, I am taking this time to document more of our time in China.  Today, we will revisit KCWI.  Because of KCWI rules, there are no pictures to accompany today's post.

We left our hotel and headed over fairly early.  We stopped on our way there to buy candy for the kids.  We got a few things not far from the hotel, but not as much as I thought we would need.  GW told our guide about a store just outside of KCWI, so we stopped there and bought more candy. 

When we arrived, CP mentioned how nice everything looked - it was not at all what he expected.  This was our first visit to a CWI of any kind.  We did not have the opportunity when we adopted HJ to visit her CWI.   We were met outside by the assistant director and escorted into a meeting/conference room in one of the buildings.  As usual for southern China, the room was COLD.  The director came in shortly after that and talked with all of us for about 15 min.  She then excused herself as she had another official of some sort visiting the CWI that day.  The assistant director answered the list of questions we had.  As we had come to expect from conversations with KCWI parents, there was absolutely no additional information provided other than what was in GWs referral.  Given the fact that GW spent SO MUCH TIME there, it was dissapointing to know that they are unwilling to share any of that information. 

After we had our questions "answered", we walked from that building to another building.  This building is the one you usually see in photos of KCWI.  It looks absolutely gorgeous.  CP was absolutely in awe of the facility.  I just kept telling him to pay attention to what he wasn't seeing.   It was a beautiful sunny warm day with no school (for CNY) and this building was eerily quiet.  We passed a playground that was as up-to-date as the park near our home, but not a soul was on it.  Also, we quickly realized that many parts of the building were open to the outside.  They appeared enclosed, but were actually open to the wind/rain and other elements.  In this other building, we were shown GWs room.  He shared a room with three other kids.  We have no idea who these three other children are.  We also noticed that there was a small shelf on the wall with a few books and an RC car.  These were GW's.  There was also a closet in the corner where he kept his clothes.  We didn't get to see inside of it. 

Next we went to the Baby Room.  This part of the CWI is sponsored by a foreign organization - though not from the US.  In the baby room, there were four ayi's (nannies) who were busy feeding some of the babies.  One baby was sitting in a bouncy chair away from the ayi's and the remaining babies were laying in their cribs.  We did hear a cry or two and one ayi went over to that little one.  The rest of the babies were quiet.  I walked by each one and gave them each a smile and a gentle touch.  Most of them gave me a smile in return.  I would guess that most of the children in this room were under 1 yr old. 

We left from there and met a number of GWs "teachers" in the halls.  We have determined since coming home that the children are told they are "students" and that the caretakers are "teachers".  It caused us some confusion at first but after hearing GW refer to himself and the adults in this manner, this is our conclusion.  GW ended up giving all of the candy we had bought to his teachers.  At first, we thought he had just left them on a table to come back to later, but he told us later that he wanted his teachers to have the candy. 

Next we headed to GW's classroom.  On our way to the classroom, we were joined by about 10 of GW's buddies (all boys).  I asked about the adoption status of all of them.  Four were over the age of 14.  They were indicated to me by a quick slap to the back.  Two were being adopted soon - they looked to be about 8 or so years old. 

We then went to the classroom in the CWI.  It was a brightly lit classroom with only 16 desks (for a CWI with supposedly 100 kids).  We were shown GWs desk and quickly found some books/papers that he had left there.  We asked if we could have them and were told yes.  We put them in our backpack and they are now GW's forever. 

We walked from the classroom out to a courtyard.  As we did, we passed another room that was empty with the exception of a child sitting in a wheelchair.  About 20 min after we stopped in the courtyard, I saw a worker pushing that child from one building to another.  While we were in the courtyard, another of GW's teachers (a male) came to say good-bye.  We asked GW about the candy for his friends and that was when he explained that he wanted his "teachers" to have it.  So, we pulled out the lollipops we had and gave them to GW to hand out.  CP noticed that one of GW's friends was blind and that he seemed to pay special attention to this boy and make sure he didn't get left out.  The boys all then left and went inside a building that we did not visit.  It was about lunch time, so my assumption was that they were headed to the lunch room. 

We headed back to the van and prepared to leave.  I asked GW before we left if he wanted our escort to write in his journal that we had brought for him.  He did NOT want her writing in his book.  He pantomimed some things to us to emphasize that fact, so we did not push it.  One other interesting item of note.  We asked about GW's broken front tooth.  He explained that when the Sichuan earthquake happened, all of the children were moved from one building to another building.  While running to the other building, he fell and broke his tooth on the steps to the second building.  I had never considered the fact that he would have been close enough to the earthquake area to have experienced it.  Fortunately, he won't have to worry about those here in FL.

Other than the babies and GW's friends and the one other child, we saw no other children.  I was dissapointed as I would have liked to have met some of the other kids as well.  I do know that most of the kids in KCWI care are in foster homes in the foster village.  But supposedly there are approximately 100 kids at the CWI itself.  As I said to CP earlier, it was what we weren't seeing (and hearing) that I thought was most interesting.  It was also interesting to compare this visit with our visit to our other Chinese son's CWI the next week.  They were two very different visits.  This visit was more like a business meeting where TJ's visit was more like a homecoming.