First Day at Hope Foster Home

We had a wonderful day.

Last night Katie and MacLean watched High School Musical and then we headed to bed around 9pm. We have a fan and no air conditioning in our room but it was ok. A bit warm but we had a good night's sleep.

Just a wee bit of history about the hope Foster Home. Robin and Joyce Hill founded the Home in order to work alongside chinese Children's welfare Institutes to care for abandoned babies with specific medical needs. These babies are looked after at one of three units around China that they have set up within orphanages. Here in Beijing is the largest home and I believe that they currently have about 45 babies and toddlers here. The foundation finds money to get needed surgeries for these little ones and then hopefully most of them get adopted. They lost a number of toddlers in the last weeks due to adoption so that is wonderful. the children must go back to their "home" orphanage where they were registered in originally as babies. The nannies here are well trained and look after the children well There are a number of very wee babies and I think the olderst is maybe 3-4 years.

Today I met Joyce at 8:30 to find out my duties. MacLean and I are the only volunteers right now so we get to do lots of stuff. We started off by seeing the preschool where we will spend an hour or two each day. I am also doing background pages for the kids scrapbooks. MacLean and I worked on 8 pages for them today. It was loads of fun. We had 6 toddlers at the preschool and we set up some colouring and bingo dabbers, play doh, bubbles and floor toys. It was fun, Only two of the nannies stayed and we entertained the kids. They loved MacLean it was so sweet to see how great she was with the kids.

Before the preschool started we went into one of the playrooms to hang out. The nannies don't speak english and they kept speaking to macLean in chinese. I had to say that she only spoke english. Two of the girls were attached to macLean and they were fighting over her. I went over and spent time with a wee one on a mat. He looks to be 5-6 months old he has a couple of teeth. It was so much fun playing with them and cuddling them. Then at 11am we went to the dining hall for lunch. It was yummy, rice, noodles and some veggie dish with potatoes.

After lunch we went to the Hill's backyard pool for an hour and a half and it was so refreshing. Then back to the playroom to work on scrapbooks, about 3pm we tidied up and I took the girls back over to swim until 5pm. Then we came back to eat noodles, and relax in the lounge on the 2nd floor.

Great first day and enjoy the pictures of the beautiful place and countryside.
Shauna and MacLean