This wasn’t the life we had planned. When Jacob and I got married in August 2005, we had our own little version of an American dream to chase, and it didn’t involve living in a small Chinese village. I know it sounds crazy when we tell people that we quit perfectly good jobs in the USA, gave away or stored all of our belongings, and moved half-way across the world to become full-time volunteers. It isn’t what we had planned at all, but sometimes what we end up with is far better than what we plan.

When people ask me how we came to live in China, working at a foster home for special needs orphans, I try to explain the whole story. I’m excited to share a little glimpse of our life with you, but I want you to know from the outset that this all happened a bit unexpectedly.  Words can’t really capture the real reason we came; all I know is that our first experience in China left us so raw and vulnerable that we could never go back to the way we were before… It all started when we first stepped into an orphanage.

It was the smell that hit me first. It was summer, and it gets hot early in the morning in central China. I never really knew how many children were in the orphanage — well over 150, though — and that many kids have lots of accidents. Combine the searing heat with the plentiful accidents and a short-handed staff, and there’s really nothing that could be done to mitigate the smell.

Already reeling from sensory overload, we followed our tour guide upstairs to the toddler playroom. I was used to shy toddlers… you know, the ones who hide behind their mom’s leg when they meet a new person? These kids weren’t like that. They needed attention, and they needed it now. I confess that at first I wanted them to stay on the other side of the room. I was clean, and they were not; all I saw were their food-smeared faces and split-pants. And, I’d never been around children with uncorrected birth defects before…

But these children weren’t going to let us observe from afar. As we were swarmed by children, Jacob and I were separated by a few feet. After a moment I looked up and found his eyes. His face might as well have been a mirror of my own. A look of terror and an intense desire to leave; to get away from it all and go back to our comfortable life back home. We had leaped before we looked, and it was turning out to be terribly uncomfortable.

I spent a lot of time that day thinking, “You can make it, Carrie. It is only two weeks, and then you can go home.” Our first and second days were mostly lived on autopilot, simply soaking in the overwhelming new reality that one can’t imagine until one has lived, breathed, heard, and felt it.

The babies’ room with the infants who don’t cry.

Ever.

The little infant who just arrived and hasn’t yet learned that no one is going to come… his lonely cry piercing the silence in an eerie reminder of what this place should sound like.

The way that his cry immediately stops with the slightest touch, the gentlest rocking, but when another task beckons and you must move on, his cry starts again as if you’ve lifted your finger off the pause button.

The children stuffing their pockets with animal crackers; at first it seems a bit greedy until it dawns on us that they are saving them for later. For the time when they don’t have enough to eat.

The little CP boy who sits in the corner of the room, tied to a wooden potty chair where he sits for 8-10 hours a day. Incontinence in a place where no one has the time to pay close attention to you means that you simply must never leave the potty.

I tried to somehow make this new reality fit with the one we knew from back home… you know, the one where a 6-month-old is bought a new toy because mom feels bad about taking him for his immunization shots. Or the one where the “necessities” of child rearing include a dizzying array of gadgets and gizmos such as a diaper wipe warmer.

Where the dogs get more attention than these children do.

One thought kept running through my head… This is where the forgotten are.

I can remember seeing things that horrified me, and I wanted to wake up from the bad dream. I really did. I wanted to shake my head so vigorously that these images would flee and never return. I didn’t want this to be my reality.

We were faced with a choice. Stay and open our hearts to this suffering or build a wall around our hearts, shutting out what we were seeing and feeling so that we could more easily turn and run when our week was over, retreating to our comfortable life and settled plans. And though it may sound callous and selfish, I wanted to join the masses and forget. Knowledge brings responsibility, and this weight was far too heavy. At the time, I didn’t think I could survive the sorrow.

But something happened in the following days. We made one simple choice – to provide the children with all the love we had to give for the few days that we were there – and that choice changed us more than the children. My eyes changed. I saw past the dirty faces and only saw sparkling eyes. I saw past the birth defects and just saw children. Both of us fell head over heels in love with the toddlers swarming at our ankles, and leaving was the single hardest thing we’ve ever done. In the course of 2 weeks we went from desperately wanting to leave to desperately wanting to stay.

And that’s how the story begins… It was never our plan to move to China and work full-time with orphans. But I’m so thankful that some of our plans don’t work out.

—————–

Carrie and her husband Jacob serve at a foster home for special needs orphans outside of Beijing. You can read the long version of the story of how they came to be in China on Carrie’s blog, Signs of Hope.