Back to: Picking up Sarah
The Gaoyou Orphanage
By: Mark Russell Miller
Last Updated: December 18, 2003[ Mark Miller a lawyer who lives in Canada. My connection with him is that he's the brother-in-law of John Aleksa, George Olliver's bass player in the early 70's. Mark emailed me Dec 16 to let me know that his new daughter came from the same orphanage in Gaoyou (China) as Sarah! He said, "My wife and I travelled to China in July to complete an adoption from the same orphanage. Our daughter, Emma, is now 19 months old. We actually went to the orphanage for our "Gotcha Day". It was an experience we will never forget." Small world. I asked him for more information about the orphanage, because he actually got to visit it. ]
Gaoyou itself is a city of about 600,000 located at a spot on the Grand Canal where it widens into Gaoyou Lake. It takes about 2.5 hours to drive from downtown Nanjing to Gaoyou. The city itself is growing like crazy, and has many new manufacturing plants (esp. car and automotive parts plants), and chemical facilities.
The Gaoyou SWI is on a short residential street in the older part of the city, nestled in amongst several large apartment blocks. It is about 4 storeys tall, with a concrete wall surrounding the front (the street in front of it is barely 2 lanes wide). There is no sign or other indication of it being an orphanage.
Just prior to pulling up to the orphanage, we were advised by our guide that our trip to the orphanage was "semi-official", meaning that it did not have CCAA approval, but that Mr. Ni Yongling wanted to have us there as we were the first group to come through since the SARS crisis. At first we were told no pictures whatsoever at the orphanage, inside or out. After some negotiation, it was agreed we could take video and pictures of the reception ceremony only. The result is that we don't have any pictures of the outside, but will try to send you what we have in the playroom where we welcomed Emma.
The building is painted white with blue trim both inside and out. Once inside the concrete wall, the steps at the front of the building are small, and lead right into a stair well.
The first floor of the building contains rooms for the 3 and 4 year olds, with 4 beds to a room usually. The walls of the first floor are filled with paintings from an 8 year old disabled girl. They were beautiful paintings, and really brightened the place.
The upper floors are for the younger children and babies. All of the rooms in the orphanage have large windows and the place is clean and bright, but rather sparse and Spartan in terms of furniture, toys, etc. There is no heating or air conditioning in the building, making it very hot and stuffy in July.
I won't ever be able to forget the room on the upper floors containing little "sleeper slots" for the babies. These things are wood, shaped in an arc for comfort, and set at about a 45 degree angle on a joined spring system (there were about 10 of these on each side of the small room). About 20 babies there, and a nanny using a foot pedal system to rock all of the girls at once. I couldn't really tell, but would guess that these babies are just a small percentage of the total number of babies there (although our guide told us the Gaoyou SWI is one of the smaller orphanages in the country). Almost all of them were sleeping quite well.