A Blog Tour of Beijing Children's Home

Beijing Children's Home is located within a huge apartment complex called YuXiang Garden in the ShunYi Province of Beijing. (The name always reminded me of the chinese dish YuXiang Eggplant. But the tones are definitely NOT not the same. At least it helped me remember what the place was called :D). There are lots of senior citizens who live in the complex, and lots of kids.

There must have been around 30 large separate apartment buildings within the complex. Each building was given a number, and there were a certain number of "doors" within each building. (The doors basically divided the building up into sections.) Each door was an entrance to one section of the building, and went up 5 flights of stairs, with two apartments per floor. I'm not exactly sure exactly how many apartments China Care was using, but they were spread out all over the place as opposed to all in one door of one building.

The main office, which we went to immediately when we arrived to YuXiang Garden, was located in building 15, on the first floor of door 1. This is where they had all the administrative things going on. There was a large whiteboard that was split up into the different children's homes that China Care oversees. On the board were laminated cards with the babies' names on them, and these cards helped keep track of where each child was. For example, when the BaoJi kids were moved to Beijing, their names were moved respectively on the white board to reflect where they were at the moment. It's a pretty clever system, though relatively recently organized. The office also took care of donations, which we promptly gave to them when we arrived. Several staff members had their offices in this apartment, and it was interesting to see how a normally residential area was turned into a work environment.

There are four children's homes altogether in Beijing. Everybody there called them B-C-Hs. BCH 2 was right across the hall from the office, and BCH1 was upstairs of that. BCH3 was on the first floor of building 5 of the complex, and BCH4 was upstairs of that. All of the BCHs housed babies except for BCH3, which was home to the toddlers.

We lived in building 27. To get to it, we had to go past an awkward white fence that just sort of cut through part of the complex. Our apartment was number 101 in door 1, and was actually the place where Brent housed his guests that came for his business purposes. Since our plans were changed, we were in search of a nice place to stay for not too much money, and Brent's place worked out perfectly. It was sort of like the style of a dorm, where there were just beds stacked on top of eachother and in the rooms (there must have been around 16 total or so), and there was a kitchen, two bathrooms, and a dining room area. It was right in the complex, so we didn't have to travel to volunteer. It had wireless, which was a huge plus. Overall, a very comfortable place to be - we lucked out, since there were no other interns there at the time, which meant there was space for us to stay. If we were going to be there past June 15th, we would have to find somewhere else to go.

The street that YuXiang Garden was located on was fairly busy, and there were lots of things going on closeby. The North gate had a hotel nearby, along with a restaurant, post office, and a beauty salon. Not too far from the complex were a supermarket (Rainbow: we ended up buying a lot of bananas from them :D), more apartments, a bank, another supermarket and small and older villages and streets where people lived. One of my favorite places was the "village," as the three of us called it. It was a five minute walk from where we lived, and it was like a whole complex of small shops, restaurants, and an outdoor market. It was very busy all throughout the day. There was also a park closeby that had an ampitheater and an exercise arena for senior citizens. The location was great.