The Jiamusi Children's Welfare Institute

   In our previous post, we mentioned that our new daughter-to-be, Jiang Zhen, was living at the Children's Welfare Institute in Jiamusi, Heilongjiang Province, China. And we mentioned that we were sure that the pictures we had of her were taken at the Jiamusi CWI. The story of how we came to know this is yet another piece of proof that you can find out anything about anything with a little bit of Internet sleuthing.

     Like all parents adopting a child internationally, once we knew we were going ahead with the process, we wanted to know as much about the child and where she was growing up as we possibly could. We were told she was in the CWI in "Kiamusee", Heilongjiang Province. Plugging "Kiamusee CWI" into a Google search bar showed us that the preferred spelling was "Jiamusi",  AND even more importantly, provided us with a link specifically about the orphanage. Lauren Kelley, a student at Duke University, had traveled to Jiamusi to volunteer at the CWI in May and June of 2009 and (lucky for us), she had posted a web journal about her visit. Lauren's journal gave us a little insight into how the children were cared for and had a few pictures of the grounds of the Jiamusi CWI. A few Email conversations later and we had our own copies of a lot of pics that Lauren had taken while she had been in Jiamusi.

     This is Lauren's picture showing an overview of the CWI. (It seems to be an amazingly nice environment for what it is!)

 
Here are a few more closeups of several areas of the grounds.

Notice the elephants in that last picture. One of the first pictures of Jiang Zhen that we received shows her sitting on those same elephants.


     And here is Lauren's picture of the interior of the CWI.

The other pic we initially received of Jiang Zhen shows her standing next to the "gazebo" seen above. (You can see the pics of Jiang Zhen in our previous post.)

    Another picture on Lauren's website showed 2 kids playing together on a playground. The picture was small, but one of the kids really looked like the young girl we are in the process of adopting.

 

 We asked Lauren and she told us that it was indeed Jiang Zhen, and there was even a better picture from that trip to the playgeound.

 

Not being able to go to China NOW and get her is extremely frustrating, but we realize that's not how the whole process works. (Paperwork first, you know!!) But seeing all the pictures and being able to correspond with someone who has actually been to Jiamusi and has met the young girl who will become our daughter sometime later this year is "priceless" , as they say. We were very lucky to so easily find a helpful person like Lauren. And it once again shows just how useful and powerful the Internet really can be.