Family Tales

Sunday, we got Betsy Ye and more or less holed up in our room to get acquainted. The next morning we were to go back to the orphanage agency to begin the round of notarizations and oath takings. So, we left the hotel Monday morning at 7:40 with 14 slightly delirious families and cranky babies to get on a bus for yet another adventure with Guangzhou traffic jams and jaywalkers. It took about 3 hours or so to cycle everyone through to see the notary public as well as to formalize the adoption registration. It was during this time that we became acquainted with the group of French Canadians who had the very rude tour guide. More on that another time, but it definitely soured the morning.

Now, I’m skipping a good bit obviously, but I want you to place yourself in the shoes of the little girls who had just the day before been severed from the only loved ones they had ever known to be given to a couple of complete strangers. They had their schedules shot all to hell and back, been subjected to a hotel for the first time, been given new food, smells and sounds again, ad nauseum. In short, for some it had definitly been a no good, very bad day. The reason I write this paragraph is to point out that we then took them back to the very same building, in fact the same conference room, where all of this trauma had been thrust upon them less than 18 hours earlier. Then we made them wait for about 3 hours in that room. Did I mention that it wasn’t air conditioned?

Okay, digression over.

From there, we hustled back on the bus to go across town to the security ministry where the children all had their pictures taken for the remaining paperwork and we were given our official adoption registrations (a nicely done little red velvet booklet). Once again, we lost our place in line to the pushy, French Canadian group. In fairness, the French Canadians themselves were as nice as could be and we did enjoy talking to them. Their guide, on the other hand, was an absolute ass. He did, however, get them through all of the mess before us each time, so on my next trip, I’m hiring him. We finally made it back to the hotel around 1:30 or so, or 6 hours after leaving for those interested in that sort of thing.

We should have been free at that point to relax, recuperate, feed the baby, etc. However, there were several babies that were sick with upper respiratory infections, so the group voted to move the clinic visit up a day. That meant meeting back up again at 2:30 for the walk (thankfully no bus this time) over to the clinic, which was just about 4 blocks away on the other side of the island. This actually was a pleasant thing because the park in the middle of the island is so peaceful. I wish that I could say the same for the clinic itself.

There were 14 families that each needed to see 3 separate doctors and get their paperwork stamped by each. so, they piled us all into a central waiting room, pointed to the three doctors arranged at each corner and blew the starting whistle. Much confusion followed accompanied by a little shoving and lining up.

The first was vital signs; height (75 cm), weight (21.5 pounds), temperature (normal), etc. Not too much trouble here as the little girl runnign it really appeared to like children and vice versa.

The second was like something from an old black and white film. An ancient, one-eyed woman with the round flip dealie on her head to squint through checked Betsy’s hearing (good), throat (loud), and ears (not so good). She was absolutely manhandling our poor daughter in order to mine for gold in her ears with one of those little lighted microscope on a stick things. While looking into her left ear, she slammed the scope down and sprinted out of the room for Shiyan, our guide, screeching in cantonese. The two of them proceeded to hold a lengthy and loud conversation complete with finger jabs and grunts in Betsy’s direction after which Shiyan interpreted to us thusly: “she needs to see other doctor”.

Oooookay.

So, the crone lady then dragged us into another little cubicle to where an acient, two-eyed man was tenderly feeling the lymph nodes of another child. He calmly looked into her ears with his little thingy and also ran out for our interpreter. This time, we all left the room to go back to the waiting room and had a nice little sit down followed by more extened conversation, finger pokes, elbow jabs and grunts. At the end, we were told “she need to see other doctor … wait here until everyone leave”.

Riiiiight. Kemosabbee.

With nothing better to occupy our time, we queued up for the final station. In this one was a delightful, elderly woman who listened to Betsy’s chest, knocked her knees, and did the normal doctorly kind of things. She was great and even managed to extract a couple of smiles and laughs during the process (Betsy had begun to laugh a little by this time, as attested by these shots. )

Once that was done, we were able to meet with the final doctor about her ear. It turns out that the crone and grandfather said that she had some boils in her outer ear canal similar to what she had on her head, and they just needed the other doctor to prescribe the medicine for them. Shiyan took care of having the prescription filled for us and that was that.

From there it was back to the hotel, get a bite to eat (take out up to the room), bathe Betsy, and off to bed. She went down really easy and slept the entire night (wonder why, poor thing). The bath really helped her calm down along with Mom and Dad. On the bus over from Maoming city, she had gotten car sick 3 times, which made for a little bit of a ripe smell. Nothing soap and water couldn’t handle though.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 29th, 2005 at 11:19 pm and is filed under betsy ye. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.