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Parenting the Parentless

Author:	David Strickland	Created:	4/4/2007 11:25 PM
Ok well parenting your own kids can be tricky enough but parenting someone elses can be a pain even if they are only on loan. Why would anyone in thier right mind want to parent 100 screaming orphans that you can't return. Much less why would you do it half way around the world. This is our Adventures or misadventures in starting and running an orphanage in India.

Reasons Why India is better then Iowa

By David Strickland on 7/23/2007 7:45 PM

Ever since field of dreams came out every Iwegian knows the the answer to the question "Is this Heaven?". Well not every thing in Iowa is a field of dreams I haven't ever taken the time to wrte up a full list of why India is better then Iowa maybe I will someday. However I'm sure somewhere around number 6 would be the lack of Lightning storms that make your hair stand on end and light your DSL modem on fire.

About a week or more ago I must have gotten hit by lightning because that night my DSL modem had a large melted hole in the top of it. In India a lot of things can take you offline for days at a time but at least none of those result in a large melted hole in the top of your DSL modem. Anyway I'm finally back online. Sorry to those who have been waiting for me to update thier orphanages or get back to you on other issues hopefully I'll get caught up soon. Packing week this week though so not sure how much time I'll have. We ship it all in 7 days and have to have it loaded onto the trailers in 5 so we'll...

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Took some Time Out

By David Strickland on 7/7/2007 11:44 AM

My current contract ended Friday before last so the family and I took a Timeout and went to camp.

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10 points on culture shock.

By David Strickland on 6/26/2007 1:28 PM

42 Days left. We were packing last night and as we packed my wife and I began to laugh about all the things that would be different in India. Things like turning on a water heater 15 minutes before you wanted to take a shower. Remembering to turn it off when your done. Boiling milk before you drink it. Boiling the water before you drink it. The list goes on. No matter what country your going to culture shock is a possibility and if your not ready for it, it can knock you off your feet. I wanted to take some time today and look at some of the things I did before or during our last trip. Perhaps the most important part of Culture Shock is knowing that it exists and being prepared for it. Culture Shock to me stems from the your expectations and prejudice. You get into a situation in another culture and for some reason expect that things in that culture will be like they are in your own culture. Based on the presupposition of similarity you began to act and react similar to how you would in your own culture....

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Orphanages and College

By David Strickland on 6/19/2007 11:38 AM

I was recently asked about colleges and orphanages. I wish I could go back and take all the classes I think could help in the work set out before me. The first class on the list would be Psychology 101 and then if possible Child Psychology. The majority of parentless children are psychologically scarred. Many have been physically or sexually abused if they haven’t been abused then they’ve likely been scarred in other ways by drugs or alcohol or other ills. Without parents or other guardians they often ran wild for at least some time and the results can be devastating to their Psychology.

In the first orphanage my wife opened a set of twins was placed in our care. Their father was dead and their mother was dying of HIV. Instead of waiting till she was dead and not knowing what would happen to her children she put them in our care. These two little twins were the wildest two children we had ever encountered. They bit, they scratched they would through fits. The vile stream of curses and profanity...

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Financing it all

By David Strickland on 6/13/2007 11:54 AM

Obviously as the time draws closer to our departure finances get tighter and tighter. I recently had someone ask if they could help. I spent the better part of the day yesterday scouring through India's legal system and in the end the answer appears to be a little confusing. So far our airfare and shipping costs have been covered. At the moment we are working on the $4,000 we are going to need for a deposit on the home we will have to rent. We are hoping to rent a two story building with 3 bedrooms on each floor. Initially the first floor will contain the living area for our family as well as a guest bedroom. The second floor will be for the orphanage. I am then hoping to get a job with a local company that will pay enough to support my family and between 8 to 12 orphans.

So why don't we just raise the funds we need from friends, family and interested parties here in America?

India has a law called the Foreign Contributions Act of 1976. This law states:

"Whereas no association having...

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Being there and taking an interest

By David Strickland on 6/5/2007 10:38 AM

For those of you reading along you'll remember that we have been fighting with Jaundice in one of the first two girls that we intend to bring into the orphanage upon arrival. We got word a couple days ago that the eldest of the two sisters has been released from the hospital. Originally when we found out that the girl was sick we also learned that they were trying to cure it with homeopathic herbs and spices. We sent some money over and told them to get her to the hospital.

It seems over the last couple weeks we've several unexpected drains on our finances. We ended up delaying our departure by almost a month because of several obligations and now we find that none of those obligations are required any more. It seems the old adage is true trouble come not single spy. My current employment contract will end two to three weeks earlier then I had hoped. A 2 week short term contract I was going to do has become a one week or less contract. Several medical bills have come in that we weren't anticipating....

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$2,300 for 2 adults and 1 child to India

By David Strickland on 5/25/2007 3:17 PM

A couple posts back I referenced that I was planning on booking our airfare. Things got delayed for a variety of reasons but today I finally got it done. We leave the second week of August. I spent about 5 hours bouncing around the web trying to find the best deal. We talked to a travel agent out of Chicago that quoted us $900 per ticket.

If you do much research on travel to India one of the first companies you'll find is Air Indian. FLEE!! Run like the wind. Avoid Air India at all cost. We have had a variety of problems with Air India but we never seemed to learn our lesson. Most recently when my wife went to fly to India her flight was scheduled to leave at 1:00 pm. We checked in and everything said it was on time. So I left and started driving the 6 hours to get back home. Shortly before 2:00 my wife called and said they had been delayed. At 3 they were delayed again. Then again, then again finally about 10:00 pm they canceled the flight entirely and said that it wouldn't leave till the next day. 4 hours later around 2:00 a.m. I finally got a call that my wife had gotten to her accommodations for the evening. She had to fly out in about 6 hours. The next day as my wife was eating breakfast she got a chance to talk with one of the crew. The crew member acted surprised that the passengers hadn't been informed till 10:00 pm that the flight was canceled considering the crew knew the moment they touched down into Chicago. It seems an instrument had failed during the flight and a new one had to be ordered. They knew it wouldn't arrive until someone could bring one in and that wouldn’t be till the next day. The crew knew the flight was canceled 9 hours before they told the passengers. Needless to say we decided to NEVER fly Air India again.

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Jaundice relapsed

By David Strickland on 5/24/2007 10:36 AM

Don't have a lot of details as yet but one of the girls jaundice has relapsed. Lack of rest and lack of proper nutrition has relapsed her jaundice. She is headed for the hospital today. I'll update with more details as they become available.

From Wikipedia:

Jaundice, also known as icterus (attributive adjective: "icteric"), is a yellowing of the skin, conjunctiva (a clear covering over the sclera, or whites of the eyes) and mucous membranes caused by increased levels of bilirubin in red blooded animals. Usually the concentration of bilirubin in the blood must exceed 2–3 mg/dL for the colouration to be easily visible. Jaundice comes from the French word jaune, meaning yellow. Jaundice typically appears in a 'top to bottom' progression (starting with the face, progressing toward the feet), and resolves in a 'bottom to top' manner.

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LOTR and Orphan Care

By David Strickland on 5/23/2007 2:44 PM

Not long after the last blog post the world started to spin on me. I spent 4 years in the US Navy and I can remember that sick feeling you'd get after a night of drinking when the world would start to spin just before the ground would suddenly get ripped out from underneath you and you'd find yourself face down in the dirt. Well thats about how I felt come Monday evening. There is a lot going on at the moment with airfare and final plans, figuring out how well meet our budget since I haven't nailed down any work thier yet. Throw on top of that the fact that we are now expecting a new addition to the family in Dec and the world begins to spin.

Starting an orphange isn't always skipping through flowers on sunny days hand in hand with gratful children full of love. Sometimes it's just plain scary. Scary is what it was when I finally decided to sit down and relax a little Monday night. I popped in the final installment of the LOTR movie. Watching Frodo struggle with his own inner evils as he climbs to mount doom seemed like a good distraction to take my mind off my own concerns. As I watched I remembered something from a book I once read by John Eldrige. John was talking about these Epics and why they are so popular. He pointed out that down deep inside we all want to be part of something larger then ourselves that there is a desire to take on a giant evil and overcome it.

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72 - Days let the packing begin.

By David Strickland on 5/21/2007 10:33 AM

Well this last week we got our boxes. 4 Large Gaylord boxes along with 8 international export pallets. Also got a quote for shipping the whole thing. As it sits at the moment the quote I got to ship from U.S. to India was $350 for the first Cubic Meter $150 for each additional meter. This is actually a lot less then we originally thought it would be. We have 3 pallets of items already packaged that we know we have to ship. Training materials books etc. We didn't think we'd be able to ship much else because we figured it would be cost prohibitive. In the end we found that we couldn't replace things as cheaply as we could ship them. We aren't exactly sure what customs is going to run us on all this. It's all used stuff that is going into the house or orphanage but we'll have to see.

It's going to take about a month to get our stuff to India so we'll have to ship it out in the begining of July. Another lesson I stumbled across in this process was wood. Originally I planned on building some boxes out...

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