Last week I wrote about Cindy’s Champnella’s book The Waiting Child: How the Faith and Love of One Orphan Saved the Life of Another, which tells the incredible story of her four-year-old daughter’s campaign to find a family for a toddler she had been assigned to take care of at her orphanage.
In addition to the central story of trying to bring their daughter’s ill-nourished “baby” to the U.S., the book also deals with many aspects of adoption: the “voluntary donation” fees paid to orphanages, the deprivation some children have experienced in the orphanages, fears and insecurities in older children, the paradox of children who have acted as caregivers for younger children and who seem not to know how to play or be a child, the tough questions children ask, the difficulty minor misunderstandings can cause, the tension between honoring children’s wishes to be “American” just like their adoptive family and helping them retain a culture and/or language they may later wish to strengthen their connection with, and the possibility of keeping siblings, friends or classmates in touch when they go to their respective adoptive families.
Sometimes critics of adoption assert that countries are “exporting their children” for money. It is true that the orphanage donation (which, several years ago, was about three thousand dollars) was not exactly a voluntary donation; it was expected. Champnella reports that she found improved conditions in the Chinese orphanages each of the four times she visited, largely due to the donations solicited from adopting families. She visited the apartment homes of two orphanage directors and found them very simple and plain, not the homes of anyone who is living large by skimming donation money.
Neither Champnella, myself, or possibly any American knows exactly how these donations are used. Champnella puts these donations in perspective: she sees them as a “totally inadequate gesture” of thanks and partial reimbursement for the years of care her daughters received.
Countries which use foster care instead of orphanages probably incorporate into their adoption fees the cost of feeding, sheltering and seeing to the medical care of the children, just as my husband and I paid for my birth son’s medical care and other needs, beginning eight months before his birth.
Sometimes we don’t understand what children have experienced. The Champnellas were baffled by Jaclyn’s fear of the television. They later learned visited her old orphanage and witnessed 20 children left alone in a small room to sit on hard benches and watch a blurry, “snowy” television set.
Champnella’s story (actually Jaclyn’s story) also highlights the insecurity many adopted children feel, especially older children. Jaclyn runs downstairs each morning to find her parents, distressed when her mother is momentarily in the garage, and terrified at meeting someone who works at an adoption agency, knowing only that the worker moves kids around and terrified that it means she is being moved to a new family. My fellow blogger Ed Paul tells a moving story of his son’s fear in his blog, He Still Wonders.