China Trip, we made it!!

It's been an adventure filled few days since we landed in China Friday night. We all planned to meet at the terminal after collecting luggage. Aimee and Lesley arrived together several hours after Krista. Moya arrived soon after. Unbeknownst to us ( note to self: check this detail in the future) Moya landed at a whole different terminal. So she got a cab to the hotel alone. The driver got lost, pulled over and tried to figure out where to go. Eventually she safely joined the others at the hotel...although for a few minutes, she was worried.   Friday morning after a coffee at the nearby Starbucks, we spent time negotiating how to get 400 lbs of donations shipped to the orphanage. We made a new friend in the concierge and eventually all was settled by calling another company. The duffel bags were taped to the top of a vehicle! Here is Krista with said luggage transporter!

The Doubletree was then unable to get us a cab to take us to the train station and told us it would be easier to take the subway. What??!!. So we walked a block to subway and negotiated that. Leslie had her bag lifted and pushed onto the train by an employee at the door was going. We made it to the train station and found our way to our gate. "Quickly, quickly", said the man who checked our ticket. We thought we had almost 15 minutes to our train but the uniformed employee who let us through the gate and ran with us to the train indicated otherwise. We barely made it on the train-car 6 and had to make our way through 5 cars to get to our seats!

A few hours later at 300 km/ph we arrived in Zhengzhou. We got subway tickets and emerged above ground just minutes from our hotel. Whew! We had a lovely dinner at a noodle joint, met a new friend who offered us free translation any time ( she works in sales and manufacturing) and then made a short trip to Wal-Mart. The next morning, we set out to buy some things our OT and PT (Leslie and Aimee!!) need to help our kiddos. QiRui, our room manager, and Yang Yang, the assistant director met us at the hotel to give us a ride to XuChang. There was not enough room in the car so Yang Yang. QiRui and Krista took the fast train. We checked into the hotel with some issue as they wanted twice our week room charge as a deposit and our credit cards were not working. Sigh. Finally my debit card worked and Leslie went with QiRui to 8 banks to get a debit machine to take her card and spit out money.

 
Finally we went to dinner down the street for some delicious hot pot. We were surprised to see a robot delivering food! Tomorrow we are very excited to head to the orphanage and meet "our" kids.

Growing Gracie's Room

Gracie’s Room is Growing and we need your help!

Due to delays in government funding and construction, XinXiang is not due to move into the new orphanage until October 2012. 

Until then we would like to make the current room as bright, colourful and warm as possible - just as you would want your own child’s nursery to be. We want Gracie’s Room to be a room that stimulates the children’s senses for proper development, a room where they can lie on their bellies on a soft, clean mat, exercising and developing their muscles, a room where they are discovering sights and sounds with nursery rhymes and colourful walls, all the while having a figure encouraging, loving them and helping them to grow!

The current Gracie’s Room is in desperate need of upgrades. No improvements were put into this existing room as we were expecting to be in the new facility by October 2011. We instead focused on staffing and immediate needs of the children.

As the transition is now delayed by a full year, we need to double our fund-raising efforts to maintain the childcare and to make improvements to the existing room.

To accomplish this Dianjiang Kids International is launching our biggest fund-raising event ever:

Growing Gracie’s Room

Gracie’s Room now has a wish list on Amazon.com
Vitamins, cleft lip/cleft palate bottles, sippy cups, toys and wall decals are just some of the items listed.

Donations of baby quilts, hats, socks and mittens have already been offered!
Monetary donations will be used to replace the existing foam matts, repair broken windows and winterize the room.

Investments in growing the existing Gracie’s Room will be able to be moved over to the new building in 2012.

Please visit our link, do a little shopping and remember the children.
www.amazon.com/
Click on wishes and then type in Gracie’s Room.

Or click on:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/registry.html?ie=UTF8&type=wishlist&id=1KWZVU5KMYKQK

Monetary donations may be made through our website at
http://www.dianjiangkids.org/#!__donations

All items will be hand delivered to Gracie’s Room in March, 2012 by members of Dianjiang Kids board.

Isabella Update

Last week, I posted about helping Isabella transition to the Bethel Orphanage for the blind and I am so happy to report that we have already seen some very generous donations coming in to support Isabella!

In one weeks' time, we have had $760 donated towards our goal of $5,472!! A great BIG THANK YOU to all who have contributed to our cause thus far. We hope we can continue this awesome support and meet our goals of helping Isabella.

Keep checking back for our progress and watch the ticker at the bottom of the blog!

Happenings in DJ

Isabella is a sweet little four year old girl who has been in our Gracie’s Room Program since August 2008. Isabella will be moving in April to Bethel Orphanage, for the blind, but we need your help to make this move as smooth as possible. Bethel is the first and only dedicated organization targeting the Chinese blind and orphan population.

When Isabella first entered Gracie’s Room at 1.5 years old, she couldn’t sit up on her own, but she was able to crawl and also roll over.

5 months after entering Gracie’s Room, Isabella was now able to sit up on her own. She loved to be held in her nannies arms and when she crawled along, she would raised her head up and her nannies nicknamed “little snail”.

Isabella loves to be around people and at almost 3 years old, she started to learn how to walk. She feels safe when she hears her nannies voice, and she loves to hear music and often taps her feet and hands to the beat.

When she turned 3.5 she started to walk on her own while guided. She was now able to balance her body.

She also started making simple conversations.

Isabella is now 4 years old and is very audible, she is able to recognize nannies walking by. The nannies feel she is musically gifted and she sings along to songs.

Bethel Orphanage was founded in 2003 and takes care of only visually impaired orphans. They strive to give them a family atmosphere. It also runs a foster care program (1 caretaker to 3 children) as well as an educational program, where Isabella will not only learn oral English, French and Chinese, but also Braille, daily living skills, mobility, and even piano.

The nannies take care of their daily routines, and the teachers are responsible for their education.

Although Isabella will not be in Gracie’s Room any longer, DJ Kids would like to help Bethel with caring for her. Please help us help her!

In Gracie’s Room we have given Isabella a wonderful start, but she now needs to move on to be able to fulfill her potential! She should be able to feel the grass under her toes and a piano at her fingertips!

We have set up a special fundraiser page for Isabella on our organization's website. You will be able to easily donate to help support Isabella and to also follow along our fund raising efforts. Please take a moment to also share this important information with others you know. Every little bit helps, regardless of the amount.

Thank you once again for your generosity and continued support for the children at DJ Kids! Without you, we would never be able to offer our continued care for these amazing children!