Thinking and wondering...

I stumbled upon this captivating photo by Karen Su/ Getty Images while reading an interesting article on the decline of male to female ratios during the Chinese Great Leap Forward famine. 

A close friend of ours who just the other day got to see a photo of Madeline for the first time, asked me if we would be getting any information on Madi's biological family. She apparently didn't quite understand the Chinese International adoption process.

No, I told her....unfortunately not a single thing, as child abandonment and relinquishment are both illegal in China. All children who end up in Chinese orphanages are mostly all abandoned, not necessarily true orphans. 

So tonight I find myself thinking about Madeline's biological family. I'm wondering who her birth parents are, where they live, what they do for a living....whether little Madi was their first child, or second. I'll never know, I'll just know that they had her for two months....most likely concealing her until they no longer could keep her ( hoping that it was because they loved her too much to want to let her go ). As far as we know, there are fines in China for those having more than one child, if they can afford to pay for it, they will keep the child, but if not, then parents are literally forced into desperate measures. For our daughter, that meant leaving her outside the gates of an orphanage. 

Thank God she survived, was found, and is now waiting for us to come get her, unbeknownst  to her. 

We may never know exactly what town or village she originally came from. But from what we've learned, the town of Ningdu is a very small town even by Chinese standards. There is both a town of Ningdu with about 100,000 people, and there is the County of Ningdu which has about 700,000 people, and apparently there are lots of small poor villages throughout the county. 

We're hoping that when it's time for us to travel, we will be able to visit her orphanage ( although we've been told it might be unlikely ) or at the very least we would like to be able to visit some of the surrounding villages outside Nanchang ( Capital of Jiangxi, which is the place that our daughter will be handed over to us ). Nanchang is about a 5-6 hour drive to Ningdu County, where our daughter's orphanage is. 

It's important for us to visit these surrounding areas primarily because we would want to capture as much as we can, for our daughter. One day when she is older, she may want to know more about her culture, about the people from the villages, about where she originally may have come from.  

Adoption Process Update:

We received our I800A approval this past Friday!

Next up is mailing off our I800 form first thing Monday, & then wait about 2 weeks for our Provisional Travel Approval.

We're moving along.....hoping that in a couple a weeks we can at least have a better idea of when we're traveling!