Visit to the Long Yan Orphange

Today we visited the Long Yan Orphange where our daughter Mae and her 2 friends Ava and Sara Louise were looked after for the first few months of their lives. This was the primary reason for coming back to China and something we'd be looking forward to for a long time.

We left at around 9am on a two and a half hour bus journey from Xiamen to Long Yan. The Fujian province is sub tropical and is known for its agriculture. Along the way we passed through fields of bananas, pineapple and loquat which is a small orangey fruit that originates in Fujian.

Long Yan is a city of half a million people where Westerners rarely visit. After checking into our hotel we went to visit the orphange. Our three girls were adopted within a week of each other in 1998. Of all the 600 children who have been adopted since 1985, only 12 have come to the UK.

We were welcomed by the directors of the orphange who told us as much as they could about the history of the children - where they were found and who looked after them. They gave us photographs we'd never seen before of when the children were babies. We then met Mae's foster parents who had looked after her for the first 10 months of her life which was an emotional moment for everyone. They gave Mae a gold buddha necklace.

We were then allowed to look around the orphanage. They'd recently had some donations so the classrooms were very nicely equipped. Today only 30 children are staying there, many of whom are children with special needs. We were told that nowadays there are far fewer children who are adopted overseas as recently the government has allowed domestic adoptions to take place.


For the final part of the afternoon we went to visit the site where Mae was found when she was 3 weeks old which was outside the Long Yan Repatriation Welfare Centre. When we adopted Mae we were told that she was left at a railway station which wasn't the case.

The orphanage directors invited us to dinner at a local restaurant where we sampled the local cuisine. The Chinese eat absolutely everything, so you had to be quite picky. Most of it was really nice, but I decided to give the ducks feet a miss. We said goodbye and went back to the hotel.

Quite a day. An experience we'll never forget. So glad we did it. It filled in lots of gaps in our knowledge. For Mae it was an opportunity to really find out about her roots and to picture where she came from. For Karen and I we were able to meet and thank the people who cared for Mae during the first 10 months of her life.