Yueyang, Hunan Province - Page 2 -

Soldier Chen and Ms. Chen, the chief caregiver of the Children Department of the City House met me at my hotel and took me to a small restaurant where we chatted over lunch. They told me there were now about 130 children being cared for at the City House and over 30 of them were handicapped. A team of three caregivers was looking after eight young children in one room. Each shift lasted for 12 hours while there was a two-hour overlap between two shifts. This would make each caregiver to stay with the children longer and the transition between three shifts less frequent and more smooth.
 
Soldier Chen and Ms. Chen told me that most of the caregivers were temporary workers with a salary of 450 to 500 yuan a month. The administrative staff were permanently employed without much difference in their monthly salaries from the caregivers, but with medical care benefits. The turnover of caregivers at the City House was not that high as their salaries were not much different from permanent employees.
 
We said "see you later" to each other after lunch. Soldier Chen and Ms. Chen went home for a nap break and I went along a commercial street to search for a branch of the Bank of Agriculture, where I hoped to withdraw money from my account opened when I was in Shanghail. There was a fairly large cash donation to the orphanage in Yueyang County. I really wanted to hand the donation to the orphanage in person once the people from Yueyang County arrived to meet me. I carried to the orphanages in China not only the children's pictures, their adoptive parents' letters, donations, gratitude and most of all, their hopes to find some treasured information about the children's life in their first homes or where they were found.
 
The banks I went to were all closed during the nap time break. However, I did learn where there was a branch that I might be able to entrust someone with the transaction through a legal endorsement procedure.
 
I got back to the hotel, waiting for Soldier Chen to come to pick me up for my visit to the City House later that afternoon. However, two gentlemen from the Yueyang County Social Welfare House showed up before Soldier Chen arrived -- Mr. Zhu, one of the heads of the County Civil Affairs Office and in charge of the County Welfare House, and Mr. Chen, the new director of the County House. They apologized for being late as the road was under construction.
 
I was pleased to find out that the two gentlemen still remembered all the girls even though they did not make any comments about the girls or their families. Mr. Chen said the young woman with one of the girls in a picture was still working at the County House. I made a decision to go visit the County House instead of the City House in the city due to the county's proximity to the city. I called Mr. Chang and asked him not to send Soldier Chen for me in the afternoon but tomorrow morning.
 
However, I was very surprised to learn from the two gentlemen that I could not visit the County House. It was the first time a visitation request of mine was declined. It had been my understanding that since the Shanghai Children Welfare Institution, such a politically sensitive place, had opened its doors to the public, so should the other institutes. Chief Zhu politely explained that the reason for this was that all those institutions were municipal ones, but theirs was a township house that was not open to foreigners.
 
The two gentlemen left without the cash donation. I lamented again that I made a deposit of the donation in Shanghai and was not able to withdraw any cash other than at that branch since the bank did not establish a network system to connect all the branches in the whole nation. I was not able to hand cash to the people from the County House nor invite them to the branch for endorsement procedure since they felt reluctant to issue me a receipt by accepting an endorsement check.
 
The exhortations of the words from families before I left for China were: "Find out if they need something else that we can help out with a little bit", went across my mind again. I needed to get money to the orphanage at any sacrifice. I managed to cash Chinese currency with my visa card in the last minute before THAT bank was closed. The conversion rate was not fair at all, and in addition to that, the service charge was astonishingly high. Yet they had a foreign currency exchange service and did not have that strict limit for cashing money, the bristling toughness I experienced in Nanping.
 

- Continued On Page 3 -

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