Catching Up

Hello Everyone, With all the whirlwind of activity going on we thought we were blogging via our email only to find out we were using the wrong address to send the posts. Here are a few of the posts that I made earlier and I'll try to catch you up as we go. I am going to start up a Flicker account to load all the pics so everyone can access them. I'll post later what it is. It's almost time for lunch, then we'll go to the market next door and then back to the orphanage around 3.

2011/06/08

Everyone is doing terrific. Pics arriving soon, we have to send this all through email since our blogs, facebook, etc. are shut down.

Well, it's 8:30 p.m. here in Changsha, we're all so incredibly tired, but really absorbing our surroundings. After leaving Vancouver, we had an incredibly long flight of 11 hours to Beijing. It actually went extremely fast while watching countless movies stretching, jogging in the bathroom (to get the blood back circulating), surprisingly it wasn't that bad. It's the after effects that catch up with you. The plan ride was smooth, and sitting next to a different person for each plane ride is wonderful because you get to know each person a little better.

Our team is really diverse with backgrounds and where they're from. Everyone from our hometown church team we know, but we also have Shawn who is an extremely experienced NICU nurse and who has fostered numerous children (most special needs), adopted 3 of her own and has 5 natural children. Her daughter Katie is married and she and her husband are college students. Shawn and Katie are from a small town of 1300 near Sacramento, CA. Lori is an amazing career mom CEO who has 5, going on 6 children (she has adopted one 4 yr. old daughter from China, another 4 yr. old daughter from Kazakstan, and is in the process of adopint another little girl from China). Lori lives in Ohio. We have 2 extremely nice, beautiful young women, Elyssa (15 next week) & Megan (16), who are the veteran China travelers, they both were here last year in July to work with Visiting Orphans at the Chen Zhou orphanage we will be working at in a couple of days. Megan is from Tennessee and Elyssa from Florida.

After the plane ride into Beijing, we went through customs pretty smoothly, just very slowly. It seems the norm for us right now is "baggage blunders", it took us quite a while, but managed to get our 40 bags with one extra, even after counting several times, so we just went with it to the hotel only to find out the "extra" bag was not ours. After Lori and Shannon stayed up until midnight sorting the donations, all the bags were in order to be taken with us to the correct orphanage.....so we thought. The plan was to have the hotel pick up the bags we would be flying from Beijing to Changsha, then taking the bullet train to Chen Zhou tomorrow. While we left several of our donations in our luggage back at the Beijing hotel to go to the Shepherd's Field orphanage when we got back into Beijing. Well, somehow, none of the donations bags made it onto the plane, even after verifying they were there. So after several phone calls from Shannon and our guide, they will be delivered tomorrow to us at the first orphanage, Butterfly  House (which is the hospice orphanage) by noon. So all is well, except Shannon had checked her & Makenna's and Christy's clothing also, so they are without until it arrives also.

After arriving to our new hotel amid the crazy traffic, no one stops everyone just sort of pushes where they need to go. We took a small nap then went walking to a local restaurant to try their fair. It was really hard to get used to the air climate here because there is so much smog, it's humid, etc. but we'll be good to go tomorrow after a good nights sleep. It's funny being the center of speculation, so many stares, points, etc. at our group because there isn't another American close to be seen, just us.

God has a plan for all of the events taking place, and we don't know His plan, but everyone is being so terrific about rolling with things.

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11/06/10 (Chinese way of writing the date)

We've spent the last 2 days at the ChenZhou Orphanage, it is about a 15 minute walk through the streets of ChenZhou where we are admidst so many cultural differences that ours. There are cobble sidewalks, brick sidewalks, dirt walkways, open air restaurants, metal crafting, lingerie shops, bakery, key making, and on & on. The things that stands out the most....US! We have so many stares, not rude, curious, some people greet us with smiles, some walk along with us just staring. Carmen & Makenna break the ice with many families by offering suckers to the children, some agree with smiles other wave them off. Everyone is as helpful as can be and when the language barrier is too much, if our guide isn't around, everyone is full of smiles and laughter.

After we arrived off the Bullet Train from Chansha to ChenZhou, we took a bus ride through the mountains to our hotel. The driving is crazy here, you have to push through or be pushed, so you learn to be part of the forward motion, but it's not aggressive, just the culture and accepted, no one gets angry, just goes with the flow. The one thing that you hear ALL the time are horns though, with everyone driving, walking, riding scooters, you can imagine the calamity that can happen, so everyone is just horn happy.