Report of the Field Visit to Jiujiang Orphanage

April 7-8, 2002 by Dr. Peggy Gurrad
We visited Jiujiang on the afternoon and evening of Sunday, April 7th and the next morning.

After arriving in Jiujiang we first drove to the outskirts to visit a new child we’re sponsoring in school who is at a private boarding school for the deaf.

This is a four-year-old boy, CB (left), who was recently abandoned.
   
  Initially he was felt to be retarded.  He could not speak and doesn’t seem to have any detectable hearing.  Amity knew of this private deaf school because they have been involved with it already. They contributed to the schoolmaster deciding to establish the school and they have provided about 1000 books for their library.  The deaf schoolmaster, Mr. He (right), read a book on deaf education.  I think it was written by another deaf man and had been published by Amity.  He then met this man at a conference on deaf education and was very excited about his idea and decided to start a deaf school of his own.
   
  Public deaf schools, and most private ones, don’t teach or allow the children to sign.  This schoolmaster feels that deaf children should be taught sign language - and Amity and I agree.  They need a language that they can use to express themselves and understand well, so that it can be used to teach them other subjects.  So this deaf school is a bilingual school - sign and oral speech.  Already CB knows many signs and is able to say several words out loud.  He looks neat and well groomed.  And most importantly, he is alert, active and obviously happy.  He loves it at this school.
   
  And the school is quite impressive.  The children and staff are happily signing to each other and full of life.  The library shows that the books are well cared for but obviously well read since they were received in January.  They have a computer room with some used computers (most are not very good according to them but one works well), the deaf children really like working with the computer.  The schoolmaster follows the same curriculum as the hearing public schools and the students are doing well.  They take the same exams as hearing students in public schools.
   
  The public deaf schools use a more simplified curriculum.  One deaf boy had been performing well in the 4th grade of a public deaf school and when he changed to Mr. He’s school he had to drop down to the 2nd grade because the of the increase in difficulty.  Mr. He keeps in contact with some professors at the Gallaudet college in the U.S. and some from Gallaudet even traveled to China to visit his deaf school and plan to return again in the future.  We have another deaf school child at Jiujiang and Amity’s plan is to have him change to this school in the fall.
   
  We then visited the foster homes that were near the orphanage before dinner and on our way back to the hotel after dinner we visited a few of the foster homes that are in the city.

Several of these children have physical or mental handicaps.  They appear happy in their homes and the parents are very caring.
   
  We had dinner at the orphanage.  Right after dinner they had a few of our sponsored school children come to the dining room to meet us.

This included CYN, a deaf boy we sponsor in deaf school and in foster care, KQX who is in fifth grade and orphaned just a year or two ago along with her sister, and CHH (right) who had polio in the past and whose leg surgeries and braces we sponsored.  

They all appeared to be doing well.
   
  The next morning we visited the orphanage.  As before the infant rooms are downstairs and several of the babies were in the cribs.  There are still the potty chairs in the hallway although not many children were in them.

When we visited our Hugging Grannies were all upstairs in the rehab room but they do also spend time with the infants.  They were working with the infants when Amity visited a few weeks prior.

   
  Upstairs was the room with the rehab equipment we had purchased for the orphanage.  Several of the handicapped children were there to do their exercises with the Grannies.  We have six working at Jiujiang.

Their foster mothers had brought the children in.  There were also a few non-special needs school aged children running around as well as some young adults.

   
  There were two young men who grew up in the orphanage.  We paid for one to go to vocational school as a hairdresser and funded another (right) who received training in accounting.

We also met a young woman, HJY, who is an orphan who grew up in foster care in Jingdezhen.  Now she lives at Jiujiang Social Welfare Institute and wants to study at health vocational school.

   
  We then drove out of town to the more rural area where several of our sponsored children now live with their foster families.  They had called ahead and had all the foster mothers bring their children to meet us at one of the homes.  Dr. Qiu had visited all of these homes in December so we didn’t feel that we needed to see each home individually.  But from this brief visit you could tell that the foster mothers loved their foster children and the children seemed quite attached.  One child is to be adopted soon and the foster mom told us how sad she would be.
   
  At the end of our visit we went to a department store to buy items for the children with the cash some sponsors had sent with me.  The vice director really wanted a couple of wringer machines to get the clothes drier before they go in the dryer.  They were pretty inexpensive so we bought two.  She also felt the children would need some fans in their rooms as the hot weather approaches so we bought six - a few for the children in the rehab/exercise room and the rest for the bedrooms of the older schoolchildren.  We also bought T-shirts for the older school kids and handicapped children as well as socks & tights for various ages and some shirts for the older boys.
   

Top