USM L-A China Team Spends 18 Days Learning About China's Orphanages

Only two percent of the millions of children in Chinese orphanages will find an adoptive home. The deaf, the disabled, and the disfigured are by far the least likely. But people and organizations are making a difference. In June, a team of 23 Mainers from USM L-A College spent 18 days in China doing just that. This is their story.

By Rex Rhoades
Executive Editor
China's Orphans Sunjournal Website

She arrived in a cardboard box, as Chinese orphans often do. A one-week-old baby girl brought to this orphanage in central China by several blue-suited police officers.


The college students from Maine had spent weeks reading about the abandoned babies that result from China’s population-control policies. But nothing could prepare them for the moment they would peer into the eyes of an abandoned child.

‘I wanted the emotional pain to stop just long enough for me to catch my breath.’
— Deborah Marstaller

‘They are just so needy. Those are the kids that are like lost souls.’
— Deb Como-Kepler

‘It was hard to see suffering and not really know what to do.’
— Melissa Kopka

Deborah Marstaller of New Gloucester had a pained, faraway look in her eyes as she held the tiny bundle, the mid-morning sunlight pouring through a nearby window. She pressed a bottle of formula to the child’s lips.

Cribs lined the plain concrete walls of the infant room. Nearby, two babies with cerebral palsy shared a bamboo mat in one crib, their tiny, thin bodies rigid and contorted. One was thought to be near death.

“This work was like experiencing labor,” Marstaller would later write in her journal. “I wanted the emotional pain to stop just long enough for me to catch my breath.”

For many of the students, this was perhaps the lowest point of their 18-day service-learning project in China. The group included about a dozen University of Southern Maine students, three Lewiston-Auburn College faculty members, several local residents and one reporter.

Some of the students were studying occupational therapy, others early childhood development or psychology. For many, this would be a chance to see severe developmental problems that are rarely found in the U.S., and each hoped to make some difference — even a small one — in a child’s life.

But, emotionally, it was never easy: “The first orphanage we went to, walking in and seeing the disabilities was hard,” said Melissa Kopka, a 22-year-old communications major from USM. “It was hard to see suffering and not really know what to do.”

Travel along

Over the next nine days, the Sun Journal will share their journey, both in the newspaper and at sunjournal.com.
The students and faculty members will talk about their experiences in Web “podcasts” at sunjournal.com, and you are invited to follow Marstaller, a mother and USM student from New Gloucester, in her daily Web Journal.

There also will be stories in the newspaper, plus a daily reporter’s notebook item about China.

The team traveled to three orphanages, each of which presented a different picture of the orphanage system in China. While staffing and training in all three orphanages seemed inadequate, all children were receiving the basics of food, clothing and shelter.

In two of the orphanages, impressive programs had been launched to improve the lives of the disabled and orphaned children. But in another, one faculty member said conditions there had actually worsened since she adopted a child several years before: “They are just so needy,” said Deb Como-Kepler. “Those are the kids that are like lost souls.”

The USM students met people trying heroically to change Chinese attitudes toward orphans and disabled students, they met dozens of loving but often overwhelmed Chinese child-care workers, and they saw how one U.S. charitable organization is making a difference in China.

They saw a system that by all accounts has steadily improved in recent decades, and the students tried to put what they saw in the context of a rapidly developing society where several hundred million people still live in poverty.
And, of course, they couldn’t help but fall in love with the children, some of them disabled, some of them hearing impaired, still others just ordinary children, but all without the support of a family or loving parents, so essential to healthy emotional and physical well-being.

Two Ph.D. L-A College faculty members, Como-Kepler and Rose Cleary, devised the class, titled China’s Orphans. Both have adopted children from China, and they fashioned the service-learning project to help the children who are not yet adopted or never will be.

They recruited a third faculty member, Roxie Black, Ph.D., director of the Masters in Occupational Therapy Program at Lewiston-Auburn College, to lend her expertise.

This is the second year the faculty members have taught this class and led students to China.

Over the past 15 years, the number of Chinese children adopted by U.S. parents has grown from a trickle of 206 children in 1992 to nearly 8,000 in 2005. But many of the children the USM students worked with in China are either too disabled or too old for adoption.

Experiencing China

But it wasn’t all work for the USM L-A College team. The students saw some of the wonders of China, from the Great Wall to Mount Huangshan, the magical mountains featured in Chinese art. They explored the Forbidden City in Beijing, as well as the streets of an ancient Chinese village.

Along the way, they met young people eager to speak English, and sampled a bit of the night life in towns large and small. Everywhere they went, they found Chinese people eager to express a few words of English or to shout “Hullo!” from a passing bus.

And the students experienced some of the contradictions of modern China: businessmen arriving at four-star hotels in $70,000 BMWs, cell phones to ear, while elderly rural residents planted rice by hand in flooded paddies or collected plastic bottles from tour buses.

The students saw a country under construction: New airports, highways, elevated rail lines, tunnels, bridges and apartment buildings were being built as China tries to accommodate the largest migration in human history, millions of Chinese moving from rural villages to ever-expanding cities.

And the students were impressed with the scale of everything, from Tian’anmen Square, the largest public square in the world, to the Great Wall, which runs more than 3,000 miles over some of the most rugged terrain imaginable, to the Yangtze River, the third-longest river in the world.

They tried exotic foods, they visited some horrific public restrooms and traveled some long miles in a bus labeled the “Golden Dragon.”

As they did, they learned not only about China and children, but they came away with new perspectives on their own culture and country.

We hope you will join us over the next nine days, in the newspaper and on the Web, as a group of students from Maine travels to China.

rrhoades@sunjournal.com