Po Leung Kuk

Today I started volunteering at an orphanage called Po Leung Kuk. It was very, very tiring! It will be a worthwhile thing to do though...the kids there are starved for affection! Kelly and I were with the one to two year olds. Usually kids are sort of hesitant with new people, but when we walked it they all ran over and stretched their arms up to be lifted. The competition among them is fierce! If you are holding one kid, other's will reach up and grab their legs and try to pull them down. If a group of kids are all reaching up to you, the more aggressive kids will push the others out of the way. If you are carrying a kid and you try to put them down, they turn into a "limp noodle" so that you can't let go of them. I sat down with one girl and we were playing and then 3 kids bum rushed us and hit the girl! It was crazy! It's a matter of survival of the fittest, I suppose. It is draining because no matter how long you are there, or how many kids you hold, feed, play with, talk to, it is never enough! And there are like 30 kids per room. Luckily, this morning there were several of us in the room at the same time, so ore kids got attention at once, and there was less competition.

The interesting thing about the orphanage is that it seems like all of the kids are boys. There were only two that I could definitively classify as girls. This is interesting to me because I was under the impression that most kids given up for adoption among Chinese are girls? Or maybe that is just China?