LWB Community Blog

LWB helps provide surgeries to 30 or so babies per month on average. We never like reporting on the “numbers”, however, because every single child is just so important to us and because every single child has their own unique and special story. We just don’t have enough space in our newsletters to report about every one!

Recently we had one sweet little girl named Yan who had a major surgery at Shanghai Children’s. We needed to move her to our Heartbridge Unit at Hope for her post op care, and so Tingting agreed to take her home for the night and then fly with her to Beijing to get her settled in at Heartbridge. When we read Tingting’s email about her day with Yan, it reminded us yet again that when a baby gets healed, it means that a whole community of people have come together to give them that chance. From our donors to our volunteers who set up the surgeries to our facilitators in China to all of the wonderful doctors, nurses, and local people who help out in such great ways….each child certainly is surrounded with good wishes and lots of care.

Enjoy Tingting’s letter, as we loved the “spirit of community” that it showed, all for one precious and very special little girl.

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Everything went well last night. She woke up at 1.30am and had her bottle, then she slept without even changing position untl 5.30am when I had to wake her to prepare to go. I didn’t sleep much and I saw her smiling from time to time while she slept.. it was so cute.. wonder what she was dreaming of then.

She gave me a big smile when I woke her this morning too. I washed her a bit, changed her and fed her.. she was very happy and kept giving me all kinds of happy noise. Our flight was from Pudong airport so it was a long ride to the airport. The taxi driver was so nice. When he heard she was an orphan, he kept looking back at her and I had to keep telling him “focus on the road!!!” He definitely was so in love with her already and kept telling me how cute she is and how smart she looks.. He even got so emotional a couple of times saying how could people rather spend money on fancy dinners instead of adopting such a cutie.. he said if he could afford it. he could love to adopt 5 or 6 kids like baby yan and he was already imaging how much fun his family would be like! What a sweet man!

In the airport.. everyone was amazed by how pretty she is and yet how tiny she is.. they wondered why me as the mom had raised such a tiny baby, but then when I explained that she was an orphan, they wanted to help in every way. They helped me a lot in the airport.. letting me go first in the line and help me with my bag, playing with yan on the flight.. etc. The flight attendants came from time to time to make sure we were ok and they made her formula too..

She didn’t sleep at all the whole way as she was so curious about everything’s going on around her.. once she arrived at Hope she was pretty much sleeping the whole afternoon while I was there.. and she still smiled often while sleeping. What a sweet baby she is.

tingting