Our vacation in Branson continues! Today, Darcy played the mandolin with the band for the first time. She played "Shady Grove". The weather was nicer today...not chilly like yesterday and it didn't rain until the very last set that the band was scheduled to play. Even then, it was only a very fine, misty rain. (We are due for some heavy duty thunderstorms tonight, though.)
After Darcy finished up on stage, I took Darcy, Doug, Rayna and the guitar players two children (Trent and Alayna) off to conquer the rides. Doug's favorite ride is "Fire in the Hole" (a mild indoor roller coaster which relies heavily on utter darkness to make it more terrifying). Rayna's favorite is Thunderation (the roller coaster that terrifies Doug). Darcy loves them all. Alayna hadn't been on the "Balloon Ride" since it caused her to throw up when she was about three years old. Yesterday, we convinced her to give it another try and she discovered she LOVED the ride. Now she wants to go on it over and over and over again. We took her twice yesterday and two or three times today. Doug talked us into letting him go on "Fire in the Hole" multiple times, too. There are no children around (hardly) through the day (school is in session), so there are no lines at all to get onto the rides and once the kids are on, they can stay on as long as they like.
After the band finished for the day, we all took Brian (our mandolin player) out to eat at Rib Crib to celebrate his eighteenth birthday. He has been with the band a year now. Sometimes it seems odd to have one member who is so young...but, then, I think back and remember that Grant was seventeen when he joined the band (all the other guys were quite a lot older than him back then).
(Here, Uncle Bill is having a friendly interchange with the cow that the kids watched being milked yesterday morning. Which reminds me of something that amused me at the time...Darcy hadn't noticed that the cow had relieved herself while attached to the milking apparatus. As the fellow was taking the milking apparatus off her, part of it trailed through her waste. Darcy, noticing something brown coating part of the recently removed apparatus commented, "What is that brown stuff?" Always eager to step into the role of teacher, Rayna turned to her and announced in her unfortunately LOUD voice, "That is called POOP, Darcy!" Thank you, Rayna, for enlightening not just your sister, but everyone else within a half mile radius!)
Oh, and I also finished reading "China Run" this morning. (The book I purchased a few days ago.) I love to read...unfortunately, I am a slow, meticulous reader who doesn't like to be interrupted once I began a book. If I had my drothers, I would read cover to cover in a single sitting. But, as already noted I am a slow reader--frequently backing up to re-read a paragraph that I just then read, but didn't fully absorb...or thumbing back to previous pages to glean details that I missed when I first read through without the knowledge that I have a few chapters down the road. And, I don't like to have anything else nibbling at my attention when I am trying to read a book...so, I pretty much wind up being deaf and blind to the rest of the world when absorbed in reading. THAT is the part about my reading that Grant dreads. To me, vacation is the perfect time to enjoy a good book. (I seldom have time to read in my normal life.) But, my dear husband DREADS seeing my nose disappear into the pages of a book, knowing that I won't willingly come up for air until I have digested every word. So, Grant was relieved yesterday morning when I finished the last page of my book. It was a very engrossing book. So many of the places described in the story were places that Grant and I have been during our adoption travels. Even Darcy's small, rural hometown was mentioned several times! It definitely is NOT a book that I would recommend to anyone currently adopting from China or planning on one day adopting from China, to read though. It is too intense and too disturbing. It is a book you should wait, until after you are finished with all your adoptions, to pick up.
Those of us who were born and raised in this country tend to travel blindly. By that, I mean that wherever we go, we tend to carry with us the assumption that our rights and freedoms as American citizens travel with us. They don't. It is difficult for us to perceive what it is to live without basic human rights...even when in the midst of places where those rights are not granted, we are blind to it...and even more blind to our own vulnerability. Lifting that blindness is something that book does very well as it traces a fictious adoption gone terribly awry. The back cover says that the book was inspired by a true event...however, I think surely, it was inspired by the way things actually ARE in China rather than any one single event. The happenings in the story take place around the exact time that we were going through the almost two year process of adopting Rayna...during the slow down when the Ministry of Civil Affairs was taking over all adoptions--a reform to correct some of the abuses that were taking place through some of the provincial governments. Both of our adoptions in China went through very above board, legal channels using a long established, extremely careful, meticulously honest agency in this country working with honest people in China who really did care deeply about the children they were responsible for. But, I know firsthand of families in my own city who adopted at the same time we did under very shady circumstances--with deception in their paperwork in this country (lying about age, and stating they had no children, when in fact they did have children already...the two parameters that once determined whether you could adopt a healthy infant or needed to apply for a special needs child instead) and blatant illegal activity by the local Chinese officials that handled the adoptions. (Those officials wound up in prison and the American agency that was facilitating the adoptions was forced to close down.) One of those families adopted from the same orphanage that Darcy came from (just a few months before we were there adopting Darcy)...their adoption experience was totally different than ours. They were instructed by their American agency to lie on their paperwork, which was then notarized, certified, authenticated, translated, and sent off to China. Once they arrived in China, they had to bring large quantities of cash (thousands of dollars in small denominations)to bribe the local officials with. Their "guide" took the officials out on the town and got them rip-roaring drunk before bringing them to the hotel where they staggered from one individual family's hotel room to the next to sign off the final paperwork for each adoption and collect the required monetary "gifts for the orphanage" (as the biological, older children of each family were shuttled from room to room to keep them out of sight).
We arrived on the scene a few months after those particular officials had been relieved of their positions by people placed higher up in the government. Our documents were CLOSELY scrutinized and re-scrutinized and everything took place at the government office during normal business hours (not late at night with drunken officials). The other family had been allowed to go to the orphanage their child came from and took video tape of it. Just a few months later, we were not allowed anywhere near the orphanage...not even into the town that the orphanage was located in. But, then, Darcy's adoption occurred just after a Human Rights group from Britain had smuggled footage taped in numerous different orphanages of the "dying rooms" where sick babies (and sometimes even healthy babies just deemed by the staff as too unpleasnt to take care of) were placed to die...left in the dark, unattended...ignored as they slowly died of dehydration and starvation. Not all orphanages had dying rooms...but some did. Even those that did not purposely allow certain babies to die, none-the-less had alarming death rates among the babies and children in their care. In Darcy's referral photo, her hair is red. I was baffled by this. But, then a friend of mine (a physician who had recently immigrated from China to the United States) explained to me that she had red hair in that early photo because of malnutrition. In the photo, her cheeks were so round that she looked quite plump...when we had her in our arms for the first time, though, and peeled her out of her many layers of clothing, she was quite tiny--in spite of her plump cheeks. She had had a loving foster mother who took very good care of her...but it is a poor country and (at that time) there weren't things like baby formula or disposable diapers or the antibiotics that we take for granted available in that area. It is a hard life there.
During our second adoption (Rayna's) the central government in Beijing took over all adoption processes throughout the vast country. (Before that, the local government officials in each town had been the ones that handled which children were assigned to who and handled the paperwork and finances involved with the process.) The book I just finished reading is set in the moment in China's history just before the authority to handle adoption cases was taken out of the hands of the local officials. The book brings out some of the worst abuses that precipitated this reform. There are things I read in that book that I might have passed off as over-imaginative, had I not heard those very same things quietly voiced from the lips of various different friends over the years who immigrated from China within the last five to twenty years.
The book is fictious, but the type things described in it really have happened...really do happen.
