Yibin Girls

I have recently joined a yahoo group for families who have adopted or will be adopting from the Yibin Child Welfare Institute, where Gwen is currently living. I was so pleased to find that there are several sets of pictures on the site of the Yibin CWI, that other families have taken when they were in China getting their daughters. I was amazed at the photo of the beautiful countryside in the surrounding area... lovely green, green, green terraced hills. The orphanage itself is quite large... looks like a five or six story building, and the estimates are that it houses 300-400 children. Inside, I saw the exact wall that Gwen is standing against in her referral photos! There were several photos of large rooms with double rows of light blue metal cribs down the center of the room, some with little girls standing up in them holding on to the side rails. A couple of pictures showed nannies (what they call the caregivers) interacting with a group of toddlers, and one showed a long row of maybe a dozen highchairs lined up against a wall, a couple with children in them. There were two pictures of a nanny standing at a counter level bathtub, seemingly sunken into a counter, kind of like a large sink, bathing a little girl. There was a stack of folded clothes on a ledge in the background. I imagined that after the little girl is bathed the nanny just takes the outfit on the top of the pile to dress her in. Maybe not.. maybe she looks through the stack and picks out a certain special thing just for that day and that child, like I loved to do for my kids when they were little.

I'm so glad to see these pictures... I don't know if we will get to visit this place in Yibin or not. Our agency tries to arrange orphange tours for everyone, but in isn't always possible. Another option I've recently learned about is that some people send disposable cameras to the orphanage asking that pictures be taken of their daughter, her playmates, and her surroundings, and then returned to them on the day they get her. Amazingly, this process seems to have worked for some families! I guess it can't hurt to try, although our agency discourages sending things ahead of time because they feel it is adding an undue burden on the orphanage workers to try to manage and keep track of extra "stuff", which I can understand.

A kind of funny thing that has been noted in this yahoo group is that the Yibin girls, as they call them, all seem to have their posed referral photo taken in the same white wicker chair! You can see the chair in the second picture we sent of Gwen, with the red background. That red background seems to be standard as well. I even noticed in one of the other recent referral pictures from Yibin, that this other little girl was holding the exact same toy as Gwen is holding in her wicker chair picture. I wish I knew more of how the whole process works... how many little girls have their pictures taken in that chair? Which ones do? And are all the ones who have it taken eventually referred to families?

One thing I do know for sure, though. Before she was born, God knew her. He formed her in the secret place of her mother's womb. And I believe it has been in His plan all along that she would be chosen, not just by the Chinese Center for Adoption Affairs, but by His own hand, to be a Liptak.