Tonight, while Nick was putting Geri to bed, she was babbling up a storm. I could hear her and I thought "Oh, poor Nick!" When he came out of the room, he told me about it.
Geri was saying "I wan tadi! I wan pay tadi!"
He asked her "Do you mean TJ? Do you want to play with TJ?"
Geri said "uh-huh!"
The girl who spoke not a single word before the age of four now asks for her brother at bedtime in a four-word sentence.
The girl whose speech was so delayed that her pediatrician thought it indicated mental retardation is stringing together four words in English after only 5 months home.
When Nick told me that story, I cried like a baby. I'm still crying with joy over my daughter's amazing development. I am also crying because I'm reminded of what would have happened to her if she had stayed in the orphanage. At 7, she would have been sent to an institution for life. She would probably never have spoken a word. Never walked. Never played. And she would have been aware of it ALL. They would have stolen her entire life if we hadn't taken her out of there.
And there are others. Hundred of thousands of children just like Geri. Kids who are blind or deaf but have normal intelligence and must suffer in darkness or silence going slowly insane and being abused. Kids with CP or hydrocephaly who get no medical care and lose any quality of life and are abused. Kids who have Down's or Trisomy and are left to die. Healthy kids who are abused and then kicked out at 16 and swallowed up by drugs and prostitution and human trafficking and suicide and homelessness and crime and despair. They are still there and it's wrong.
Does it seem like someone else's problem? We don't do that in America, so surely we are better, right? Wrong. "If you know what is right and you do not do it, then you sin." James 4:17 If you know the need, if you are aware of the suffering, if you hear the stories and go right back to your sheltered American life (sorry, but most everyone in the US has it about a billion times better than these kids) then you are wrong.
More than ever I feel compelled to yell at the top of my lungs at everyone around me. "What are you going to do about this? What are YOU going to DO about this?"
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