Parentless

   For those of you keeping up with our battles over Jaundice or young friend went home yesterday. Low and behold once we started threating to put her into a different hospital sheget better in just days. Ok call me sinical but... Whatever the reason. She's on her way home. Well make that on her way to the temporary quarters we have arranged for her till we can get there and give her a home.

   Our work here on the website has started to be more then I realized. It takes about 10 minutes per orphanage to setup the pages for reviewing. It won't be much work once we get the bulk of them loaded. But at the moment we have about 60 input and 500 more to go that we already know about. On the brighter side Google finally indexed the site. Of course since google will only add one page per day they should have it all indexed in about 2 years. \

   Things are progressing. We are getting more and more neverous as we get closer to our departure date. One note not sure if I mentioned before. We had to move our...

When we went to move our young friend to a new hospital the head physician of the hospital finally got envolved and said that they had started a 2 week regiment of drugs and that she was only half done. If we left now the new hospital would have to start all over. Not sure what is truth and what isn't but being 10000 miles away really puts us at the mercy of the feet on the ground. It seems that he was convincing enough to convince the lady we sent to move her so we decided to wait.

I did talk with a doctor friend here in the U.S. that tended to make me think it's either something she was born with or it is Hepititus B. I asked if they had done a hepititus test yet and haven't heard anything. Talk about a hard thing to tell a young teen. I would hate to have to tell her she's dying but then again after loosing one parent and watching the other slowly fade with Jaundice she could likely teach me, how to handle emotional distress. Hopefully I won't have to find out.

     Finally we got an update on the girls. One is fine she has recovered. The second girl however is getting worse. Her jaundice is deepening the yellow behind her eyes is getting darker. The social hospital doesn't seem to be doing much good. Our caretaker took a loan to cover some of the expenses about 10,000rs ($200). We told her to go ahead and transfer her to a better hospital. Definetely a down day. Mercy wishes she could be there as it is the doctors aren't paying any attention to her because they know she's an orphan and figure she can't pay her bill. If Mercy was there she could sit with her and as soon as the doctors knew there was going to be someone there until she got better they would take better care.

    The poor rooms in the hospitals are just open halls with 20 or more patients on flat beds. It's almost sureal like a war time movie the cries of those in pain or dying can be heard at all hours of the day and night. It just feels like a place you go to die. The doctors come through on occasion...

   Several months ago we found out about two girls whose father had just died. They were in their early teens and had no one left to turn to. We let them know we wouldn’t really be able to do much till we got there. We were able to line up some temporary accommodations however. We have been subsidizing another family to take care of them until we arrived. It wasn’t the best choice but really the only one we could come up with.

 

   We assumed everything was going alright however this weekend we got word that one of the two girls was checked into the hospital with Jaundice and Typhoid. We don’t know much at this point. We have been told she is doing better. However we don’t have much information about either the cause of the jaundice or the typhoid. Typhoid often comes from food contaminated by human waste. If the food is properly prepared Typhoid is a rarity but it can be picked up at restaurants or roadside food stands so it’s not  necessarily any reflection on those taking care of the girl however...

Read a blog entry a couple days ago about a family that was attempting to addopt some orphans in Africa. They jumped through all the hopes went through all the red tape, gave a big donation to the orphanage and where preparing to recieve the two new additions to thier home. Only to be told that in fact the children's father was still alive and well. The orphanage had taken the children telling the father they would be raised by rich white men and he would see them in a few years. Needless to say the family was hurt. Furtunately they had the courage to go ahead and try again with a different orphanage.

This blog got me to thinking about the complete lack of regulation on many orphanages throughout the world. In fact the very nature of an orphanage makes it something that's needed the most in some of the least regulated conditions. If the government was organized enough to regulate the orphanages then they would like be able to organize a better system to take care of the children. In trying to resolve this...

Really surprised by the number of people out there interested in helping orphans with no idea how to get started.

99 days to take off. Things are progressing well enough. Starting to get a little nervous about the price tag on all this. Looks like it's going to be tough. Came to the realization that though the Indian government won't let me accept any help for the orphanage there's no reason I can't get some help for the website. So I decided I'd add a paypal link so people can help support the website. Then I realized that there is not really enough here to convince anyone to help me pick up the tab on it so.

While bouncing around on the web researching the situation in India and the problems we'll be facing, I came across the Unicef website. On the site it had a note that if you wanted to mirror content, use their news feeds etc. You simply had to ask. Ok so I did. Within 24 hours I got an email telling me what information to provide etc. and giving me permission. Ok I'm stunned. In the same day I sent out several similar requests to several other webmasters and got nothing in reply. But Unicef gets back to me in...

Learn about orphanges by the school of hard knocks. Hard Knock #1 the Budget.

Is it contagious?