Orphans.

Orphans.

It’s that word that conjures up images of sad, big-eyed, hollow-cheeked children sitting on dirty floors with torn clothes hanging from their thin bodies. The word alone lends itself to a heavy heart and teary eyes as we imagine the pictures of those sad, helpless children.

Because that’s all they are, right? Sad, helpless children somewhere far away.

I've had a three different encounters with this particular group of people in the last month. 

The first was in Thailand, where I visited an orphanage started by a friend and got to play piano with one of the girls living there. 

 

But I was only there for a few shorts hours, barely able to glance at the lives of those children. The orphanage was a lovely place and the children were well cared-for.

The second was at Taiyuan Teens winter camp. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, a group of children from the local orphanage came to join us there. As soon as I heard they were coming, those sad images were conjured up in my mind and my Mother Theresa instincts kicked into gear. I would make these children feel loved and wanted because NOBODY else in their lives did that. (a little on the dramatic side, yes, but can’t we all admit to those sorts of attitudes every once in a while?)

But it didn’t take long to realize that being Mother Theresa wasn’t my job. These children were loved on by everyone at camp. I was just a cool foreign teacher who couldn’t speak their language, but could teach them the cup game and laugh at them. 

The weekend after camp ended, we got to go visit those kids at the orphanage where they live. We went with Chinese volunteers who go visit them every week, some of whom had been counselors at the camp. The kids were excited to see us, but they were most excited to see the volunteers who visit them on a regular basis. And they didn’t live in dirt or squalor (though I’ve heard some different stories about the special needs kids who live in a building we didn’t visit).

I asked one of the volunteers about the kids’ stories, and she said that some had been abandoned at the orphanage because they were sick and their parents didn’t think they would grow up to be functional adults, some had been “stolen and rescued” (human trafficking, maybe? I'm not entirely sure about that), and one had been left a few months ago because his extended family members didn’t have the means to take care of him anymore. Some of them have been at the orphanage since they were babies, but are not allowed to be adopted because they still have family out there somewhere.

Even if they are perfectly normal kids who would blossom in a family.

I won’t be here forever. I won’t be able to establish relationships with these kids like the Chinese volunteers do. But my heart knows more now than it once did.

 

 

Last week, though, I found out that orphans are not always the kids in the orphanage.

My third encounter was--is--with a child in my own classroom.

One of my students lives with his grandparents because his parents are dead.

He’s a different kind of orphan.

He doesn’t like to talk in class, he wiggles all the time, and looks like he carries all sorts of mysterious secrets in his head. But he’s not one I would’ve pinned as an orphan. He’s a child that I loved simply because he was one of my students, not because he had a special orphan tag.

I'm called to love on everybody, no matter what I think their needs may be. 

I'm not Mother Theresa. 

I'm just Miss Love. 

That's enough.