Don't Panic

Last week, I found out that all visits to the orphanage at which I volunteer at have been "suspended until further notice" by the Suzhou government, due to H1N1 panic. For the past six months, I have visited the infant room at the orphanage once a month. I don't do much, but the little that I do seems to bear some significance. What I do is hold babies who don't receive much affection, and from time to time I go play with and feed some toddlers. The first time I visited I went home and just felt miserable. In fact, I have a draft in my blog account about that day because I was simply unable to finish writing about it. That visit was tough for me because I saw babies and toddlers with Down's Syndrome, birth defects and diseases, who had been abandoned, likely for those reasons. They were all beautiful to me, and I couldn't fathom the thought of parents that gave them up. When I hold the babies, they stop crying, some smile and many grab on to me. It sometimes hurts to put them back down and go back to my very fortunate life. I realized that I do very little but the babies get a great deal out of it. On one visit, I was able to translate some things for the women who work at the orphanage, so I felt a bit more helpful then.    

It seems that everyone in the world has gotten into a bit of a tizzy over the H1N1 strain of the flu (the disease formerly known as swine flu) I don't mean to discount the fact that there have been deaths involved here, but there is definitely a bit of over-reacting here. At my school, for one week, everyone was subjected to mandatory temperature checks upon entering the building. A few people who had been the United States over our May holiday were asked to stay home for a full week before returning to work. Well, I can be a bit more understanding about the babies, since things like this usually affect the old and the young.

I am little saddened that I can't see the babies until "further notice." It's strange because I have limited contact with those children, infrequent at that, but I feel close to them. I feel happy when I get to see them again and will miss them. I probably won't see them again until I return to Suzhou after the summer, and they might be in the toddler room by then. I hope they will be happy and healthy until then.