SHIC

3. Kid's Kamps 2006

The container of wheel chairs has now been released from port! They are being delivered to the relevant orphanages and eight of them are sitting in our office to be shipped to Guizhou. We are truly rejoicing that after these three or four years the project is nearly finished. We will send our staff to follow up on these chairs, seeing the children to whom they are given and getting their individual stories.

One little boy whom we sent to the hospital for cleft lip surgery was refused surgery after four days in the hospital due to the fact that he had a cough. That is normal procedure. He will be returned to our hospital for in-patient care until he is more prepared for surgery. It was kind of the Shenyang Dental Hospital to waive the in-hospital charges for those four days. They have been a good partner for many years. We hope that Shen Zhi Zhong will recover quickly. He had hernia surgery last month. So this will be his second surgery this year. So often our children come to us with multiple challenges.

Last week, in cooperation with our Friendship Hospital, we once again were able to provide cataract surgeries for five children: two boys and three girls, with surgery done on one eye each and next week they will all have surgery on the other eye. All of the surgeries were successful. When we finish this batch of surgeries we will have done five children but nine eyes. And an expert from The Number Two China Medical University Affiliated Hospital was invited to do the surgeries.

One of the children, a 14-year-old girl could only see if she was in the house. Outside she could not see. After the surgery her father wrote a beautiful letter of thanks.

Li Shuang, our 13 year old for whom we did surgery on both of her feet. Now she is walking. She was so excited to walk for me when I visited her last Saturday. She still has to hang on to the wheel chair for a while until she is strong enough, pushing it. But how wonderful she doesn’t have to sit in it! What a happy girl!

Although we did not have the right size of intraocular lenses (made by Alcon), we found a dealer here in Shenyang. The dealer was willing to trade with us for the diopler sizes that we needed. However they did not know if they would be able to continue to do this.

We have contacted the Alcon Company in Beijing. Before they can trade lenses for the sizes that we need, they need to have proof of the lenses that we have being donated by the Alcon Company. We will contact our partner in the USA for that information. Then we can be ready for the next batch of surgeries.

Kim Alexander from Tulsa came to do the Kid’s Camps. Kim was able to get us a whole new set of beautiful puppets from Willie George Children’s Group in Tulsa. And we put these puppets right to work. We had three sets of kids in three different Kid’s Camps: our Foster Care kids, who each are handicapped in some way; a group of more than 20 kids from the orphanage and a group of about the same numbers of kids from the Red Cross Foster Care program. The kids all seemed to enjoy the puppet skits and they ate lunch at KFC, which of course was a big hit.

We received a beautiful Brazilian team for two weeks of soccer games, a full schedule, and wonderful cultural exchange in performance programs. This group had many wonderful chances to express their love for the Chinese people.

MPH