A Trip into the Country

Before I start my wanderings it has come to our attention that some of you might be having some difficulty in posting comments to the blog! We have only received comments from Curt, Brenda and Michelle since we have been to China. We have heard from a few others that they have tried but failed. Executive decision: I am electing Curt the Comment Master and he will be able to help anyone who would like get up and running in the proper manner. His email is curtp@sisulengineering.com. Thank you brother.



We felt very fortunate today to be able to travel out and visit the orphanage that Leah had spent the last year. It is located about an hour into the countryside in the city of Fengxin. The trip out reminded me of driving through Iowa and watching miles and miles of corn fields along the roads only here replace those with rice paddies. The paddies are amazing. Each area that grows rice has to be perfectly level so that when the irrigate the water flows evenly across the paddy. If there are any changes in slope across the field the farmers have to create a series of retaining walls as the move up to the next paddy. So, over say 100 yards of ground you might have 7 or 8 different levels... very pretty. But the most amazing thing is that they do all the leveling with Ox and by hand !! No machinery to be seen.




The Fengxin orphanage is actually pretty small with only about 40 children in residence at any one time and is basically set in the middle of rice fields. Jan and the kids went in to tour and Leah and I sat out in the bus and played "eat my foot." We were a little concerned about letting Leah return and see her nannies, that it might be confusing for her. We took lots of pictures and I have put some out with the other albums but we aren't allowed to post pictures from inside the orphanage....I wasn't keen on going in anyway... makes me so sad. Jan and the kids were much stronger. There are two big rooms full of cribs that are joined together by a narrow kitchenette where they prepared the bottles. There are 3 daytime nannies and one night time nanny in each room of 20 babies. The Nannies all were very enthusiastic and seemed to love the babies very much and did the best they could with the limited resources at hand. We also had a surprise on the way back in that our guides had arranged to stop at the "finding" place for each of the families daughters!! I think we are going to keep most of those memories and pictures for Leah and let her tell that story should she choose.

Some of you have asked about our travel group and we have purposely not talked a lot about them or shared pictures. This has been on purpose as we try to respect the privacy as much as we can. But I will share a little now and put a few pictures up on Flickr tonight. There are 7 families from all over the US with 5 of the families coming back to China for their second child. Some of the babies have been struggling a little as you might expect and we are all trying to pitch in and help where we can. They are all extremely nice and we are getting along quite well with a few of them in particular.



Tomorrow is site seeing and Evelyn is taking us to the "One place in Nanchang worth visiting." ( her words) Oh, and one last tidbit to pass along..... We are seeing less and less of Alex these days as he has become addicted to Chinese soap operas on the TV. Go figure !