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Diane Geng
China
December 2004
Wen Che: an Orphan's Story
The China experience thus far has exceeded my expectations, as I see Fulbright concepts like "building bridges," and "making a difference" leap from promises on paper to experiences in my daily life. I am deepening my understanding of China and the Fulbright has given me the freedom and resources to try and make some positive impact on my environment.
I have gotten involved with a network of Chinese college student volunteers that do rural development work in villages during their school breaks. In October, a group of about 14 of us went to a village in Hebei Province for a weekend to help villagers develop a grassroots agricultural economic cooperative, teach village kids, and do some other fieldwork investigation.
While I was playing games with the village children, I noticed a shy boy with a severe cleft lip and palate hanging around, smiling but not speaking. His clothes were dirty, hanging loosely on his thin frame, and he was followed around by an equally unkempt elderly woman who appeared mentally disturbed and was nearly impossible to communicate with. After asking other villagers about their circumstances, I discovered the little boy was an orphan who had been abandoned shortly after birth and then adopted by the old woman and her husband, a 69-year-old hunchbacked farmer.
The next day, I visited their home, which by all their neighbors' assessments was by far the poorest in the village. The conditions of their dilapidated mud house, still without electricity, were shocking and greatly moving. The Chinese college students I was with, many of whom were themselves from rural backgrounds, said they had never seen such difficult circumstances. This year, the little boy, named Wen Che, entered the first grade. Though his cleft palate made it impossible for Wen Che to speak normally, the family had no money to pay for corrective surgery. The surgery fees, around 6,000 RMB (about USD $726), were an astronomical sum for their destitute family.
When we returned to Beijing, I researched and emailed a number of NGOs that do free cleft palate surgery, and to my amazement, all of them were touched by the little boy's circumstances and emailed back immediately with offers of help! We decided to work with Operation Blessing in Beijing and on Monday, four Renmin University students and I went back to the village to get Wen Che. We got the permission of his adoptive father, the village authorities, his school teacher and principal, and the strong approval of the villagers. Even though it was his first time riding in a bus and leaving his village, little Wen Che has been utterly brave and well-behaved. The Renmin University students mobilized their rural volunteer club members to take shifts in helping us care for him 24-hours a day in the hospital.
It has been an inspiring experience to work together with these committed, responsible, good-hearted students to carry out this project. I am full of fascination and admiration for these students because they are the next generation of civil society in China. They are a tiny socially-conscious minority among their peers in an education system that gives no incentive for social work, so their purity of heart in skipping classes and sacrificing study time (finals are coming up) is very genuine and very touching. These are exactly the kinds of people I wanted to meet and build relationships with on the Fulbright.
Wen Che's surgery at the Peking University Stomalogy Hospital (one of the best) was very successful. Wen Che's stitches were taken out on December 13, and he looks like a new person! He couldn't stop grinning at himself in the mirror as we left the hospital and I heard him laugh for the first time in many days. As many have told us, without surgery, Wen Che's chances of someday marrying and starting a family would have been very small. The volunteers and I all believe Wen Che is a very intelligent boy with a proven spirit for survival, and we are blessed to have this opportunity to make a difference in his life.
For more on the topic of the college student rural volunteers, please see www.ruralchina.org. It is the website for an international support group for rural education in China that a friend and I co-founded this year. We are cooperating with the Chinese college student volunteer group to recruit international volunteers to join them on their trip and teach village kids English and about the outside world. We're also trying to find funding to subsidize the Chinese volunteers costs (not the foreigners) because almost all the students have to pay the trip fees (transportation, room and board) on their own. This cuts down on the number of students who would otherwise love to participate and is a big burden on the volunteers that do go because many come from poor, rural backgrounds themselves. We hope this organization will serve as a bridge to increase Americans' awareness of China's development as well as to improve US-China relations on a person-to-person basis.
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